By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 29th, 2024
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 proposal would be part of the upcoming Pectra upgrade and will feature a social recovery tool to retrieve the lost private keys.
The Ethereum blockchain developers have continued to push ahead with technological advancements bringing new innovative features to the mainnet. Reportedly, the Ethereum team is working on an interesting new feature wherein users don’t need to worry anymore about losing their private keys. The upcoming Pectra hard fork for Ethereum will have a “social recovery” feature which would be a part of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 upgrade. In a post on Thursday, April 11, Ethereum’s lead developer Tim Beiko confirmed the addition of EIP-3074 to the Pectra hard fork.
This upgrade would basically involve the “supercharging” of ordinary Ethereum wallets featuring new smart contract capabilities. This would mean the ability to recover assets as explained by Ethereum Foundation researcher “Domothy” in a blog post last month.
However, for users to leverage this social recovery tool, they must first transfer the ownership of the assets to an invoker contract through a digital signature. This contract will perform future transactions and function calls on behalf of the user.
Once the user delegates the ownership, the message in the digital signature will allow him/her to retrieve the assets, in the case of losing or forgetting the seed phrase. The introduction of the feature will rely on the incorporation of the “AUTH” and “AUTHCALL” opcodes, as detailed by cryptocurrency commentator Cygaar in an April 11 post on X.
The “AUTH” opcode is designed to validate a user’s signature and intended action, ensuring it was signed correctly. Following this verification, the “AUTHCALL” opcode will initiate the transaction by invoking the target contract. However, it will designate the user as the caller instead of the invoker contract.
Ethereum Users Need to Be Careful
Domothy has warned that if the users delegate their assets to a malicious invoker address, they could be at a potential risk of losing all their funds. He also stated that with the Pectra upgrade, there would be a few formally verified and fully audited invoker contracts available.
Over the last several years, users have lost billions of dollars worth of digital assets by losing their private keys. “This has the potential to significantly drive mass retail adoption,” remarked Cygaar. Additionally, it will facilitate the execution of multiple actions within a single transaction.
“At present, to swap tokens on Uniswap, users must first authorize Uniswap to access their tokens and then proceed with the swap itself, which is not an ideal process,” Cygaar explained. “[However], with 3074, these two actions can be combined into a single transaction.”
EIP-3074 was just approved to go live in the next Ethereum hard fork.
This EIP will forever change how users interact on EVM chains, making wallet UX simpler, cheaper, and more powerful.
Here's a high level overview of EIP-3074 and how it'll change the game 🧵: pic.twitter.com/AUX7WM4LjN
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) April 11, 2024
As per the market expectations, the Pectra hard fork shall come by late 2024 or early 2025.