This campaign is available only in compliant regions. Users in restricted regions are not eligible. Please refer to the campaign page and Terms of Service for details.

Gold has long been a store of value, valued for its hedging and value-preservation properties. In recent market conditions, these qualities have once again drawn attention.

However, physical gold often comes with practical limitations — hard to carry, costly to store, and limited in liquidity. To make tokenized gold easier to access and experience, imToken and Tether are launching the imToken Gold Giveaway, centered on Tether Gold (XAUt).

Through the all-new imToken Web platform, you’re invited to explore a secure, convenient Web3 gold experience.

Rules

The campaign features three phases, with a total prize pool of $50,000 USD.

Phase 1: Hold to Earn

Experience the value of holding XAUt and earn rewards.

• Duration: February 9, 2026 — February 23, 2026.
• Prize Pool: $18,000 USD.
• How to Participate: Hold USDT in your non-custodial imToken Web wallet.

Reward Rules:

• Tiered APY: Rates adjust dynamically based on the number of participants:

0–199 participants: 10% APY

200–399 participants: 20% APY

400–599 participants: 30% APY

600–799 participants: 40% APY

800+ participants: 50% APY

• Minimum Holding: 0.1 USDT
• Per-User Cap: Rewards are calculated on up to 1,000 USDT per user. Amounts above this cap do not earn rewards.
• Distribution: Equivalent XAUt tokens will be distributed T+3 days after the phase ends.

Phase 2: Swap to Earn

Complete XAUt swap tasks to earn daily rewards and lucky prizes.

• Duration: February 23, 2026 — March 2, 2026.
• Prize Pool: $12,000 USD.
• How to Participate: Complete your first USDT/XAUt swap of the day with a value greater than $50 USD.

Reward Rules:

• Daily Fixed Reward: The first eligible swap receives $3 USD worth of XAUt.
• Lucky Grand Prize (Hash Match):

A set of lucky digits (e.g. “5–2–0”) is pre-defined before the campaign.

Every other day, the lucky digits from the previous day are revealed.

From all eligible users that day, the top 2 users whose transaction hash contains the lucky digits the most times will each receive $150 USD worth of XAUt.

In case of a tie, the transaction with the earliest on-chain timestamp wins.

• Distribution: All rewards will be distributed T+3 days after the phase ends.

Phase 3: Spend to Earn

Use the imToken Card to unlock Mystery Boxes and earn cashback.

• Duration: March 2, 2026 — March 16, 2026.
• Prize Pool: $20,000 USD.
• How to Participate: Apply for and use the imToken Card for purchases.

Reward Rules:

• Early Bird Mystery Box: The first 200 users to activate their card (complete the first Top Up) will receive a Mystery Box. The prize distribution is as follows:

🌟 SSR (Grand Prize): $800 USD × 1 winner

✨ SR (Hidden Edition): $80 USD × 9 winners

⭐ R (Basic Edition): $8 USD × 190 winners

Total Mystery Box value approx. $3,040 USD.

• Spending Cashback: During the campaign, users earn 2% cashback on each purchase, capped at $88 USD worth of XAUt per user.
• Distribution: Mystery Boxes are granted immediately upon qualification. Cashback rewards are distributed T+3 days after the phase ends.

👉 Join Now: https://web.token.im/get-tokenized-gold/XAUt

About XAUt

Tether Gold (XAUt) is a gold-backed token issued by Tether. Each XAUt token represents ownership of one troy ounce of physical gold that meets LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) standards.

Key Advantages

• Physical Backing: 1:1 backed by physical gold stored in Swiss vaults
• High Liquidity: 24/7 on-chain transfers and trading, without physical constraints
• Low Entry Barrier: Highly divisible (up to six decimal places), making gold ownership more flexible

About imToken Web

This campaign takes place on imToken Web, a new non-custodial web application built by imToken. It carries forward nearly a decade of security standards and delivers a smooth, ready-to-use browser experience.

• Built by imToken: Developed by the same professional team behind imToken, with a long-standing security record
• No Seed Phrases: Powered by Passkey and Account Abstraction, enabling one-tap login with fingerprint or Face ID and gas-free transfers
• True Self-Custody: Following the principle “Not your keys, not your coins”. Passkeys are stored only on your device — your assets remain fully under your control

FAQ

Q1: What is imToken Web?

A: imToken Web is a non-custodial web application by imToken. It uses Account Abstraction to let you create and access a wallet with passkey — no app download required.

Q2: Who can participate in the Gold Giveaway?

A: The campaign is available only in compliant regions. Some features (such as imToken Card or swap services) may be unavailable in certain regions. Please refer to the campaign page and product terms.

Q3: Can I withdraw funds during the campaign?

A: Yes. imToken Web is non-custodial, and you have full control of your assets. Note that rewards may be calculated based on snapshots; withdrawing early could affect eligibility.

Q4: When and where will rewards be distributed?

A: Rewards are distributed T+3 days after each phase ends and will be sent directly to the wallet address used to participate.

Q5: How do I apply for the imToken Card?

A: During Phase 3 (March 2–March 16, 2026), you can apply for the imToken Card in the imToken App. Complete KYC using your passport to activate it. Eligible users may enjoy a fee waiver (free card issuance) during the campaign. Reference: imToken Card Application Tutorial.

Q6: Why is my reward showing as 0?

A: Possible reasons include:

• Hold to Earn: USDT balance below 0.1 USDT
• Swap to Earn: No eligible $50+ USDT/XAUt swap completed that day
• Spend to Earn:
• Card not activated or no top-up has been completed.
• Cashback is distributed after the phase ends

You can track progress on the My Rewards page.

Q7: What are the reward caps?

A:

• Hold to Earn: Rewards are calculated on up to 1,000 USDT per user.
• Swap to Earn: $3 daily fixed reward; lucky prize has no per-user cap
• Spend to Earn: 2% cashback, capped at $88 XAUt
• Early Bird Mystery Box: One box per eligible user (first 200 users)

All rewards are paid in XAUt, calculated at 11:00 UTC+8 on the distribution day.

Q8: If I miss one phase, can I still join later phases?

A: Yes. Each phase can be joined independently. You can skip earlier phases and still join later ones. However, the imToken Card fee waiver requires participation in at least one previous phase.

Risk Warning

This campaign is for promotional and feature-experience purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset prices are subject to market volatility. Please participate based on your own risk tolerance. Final rules are subject to the campaign page.

If someone had told you a year ago that gold would quickly rise to $5,000/oz, most people would have dismissed it as wishful thinking.

Yet that’s exactly what happened. In just over two weeks, gold surged past $4,700, $4,800, and $4,900/oz, pushing toward the closely watched $5,000 level with little pullback.

It’s fair to say that as global macro uncertainty keeps being confirmed, gold has returned to its most familiar role: a consensus asset that doesn’t depend on any single country’s promise.

At the same time, a more practical question is emerging: as gold regains consensus, can traditional ways of holding it still meet the needs of a digital era?

I. A Macro Cycle That Feels Inevitable: The “Old King” Returns to the Throne

From a longer macro perspective, this move in gold isn’t short-term hype. It looks more like a structural rebound driven by persistent uncertainty and a weaker U.S. dollar.

Geopolitical risk has spread from the Russia–Ukraine war to key resource and shipping-route regions in the Middle East and Latin America. Trade has repeatedly been disrupted by tariffs, sanctions, and policy standoffs. U.S. deficits continue to expand, and long-term confidence in the dollar is being questioned more often. In this environment, markets naturally look for a value anchor that doesn’t rely on any single country’s credit — or anyone else’s endorsement.

From this angle, gold doesn’t need to prove it can generate yield. It only needs to prove one thing, repeatedly: when trust in credit is uncertain, gold is still there.

This also helps explain why Bitcoin (BTC) — once widely seen as “digital gold” — hasn’t fully played the same consensus role in this cycle, at least as a macro safe-haven. Markets have already made their choice, so we won’t dwell on it here. (Further reading: From Trustless BTC to Tokenized Gold — Who’s the Real “Digital Gold”?)

Still, a return of consensus doesn’t solve everything. For a long time, investors have had to choose between two imperfect ways to hold gold.

Option 1: Physical gold. It’s secure and self-custody — but it’s rarely liquid. Storing bars in a safe brings real costs (storage, security, transport) and makes it hard to use for real-time trading or everyday spending.

Recent reports of bank safe-deposit boxes being hard to secure highlight this tension: more people want direct control of their gold, but the practical setup isn’t always available.

Option 2: Paper gold or gold ETFs. They lower the barrier of physical custody. In essence, paper gold is an IOU from a bank or broker — an account-entry promise to settle, backed by that institution’s ledger.

But that liquidity is never truly “open.” Paper gold and gold ETFs are liquid only within a single financial system: you can buy and sell inside one bank, one exchange, or one clearing framework — but you can’t move the asset freely outside it.

In other words, it’s hard to split, combine, or use alongside other assets across systems — let alone use directly in different contexts. It’s “account-level liquidity” rather than “asset-level liquidity.”

My first gold investment product years ago — Tencent “Micro Gold” — worked the same way. Seen this way, paper gold doesn’t truly solve liquidity; it simply replaces physical frictions with counterparty risk.

Ultimately, security, liquidity, and self-sovereignty have been hard to achieve at the same time. In a highly digital, cross-border world, that trade-off is becoming harder to accept.

That’s why tokenized gold is now drawing broader attention.

II. Tokenized Gold: Giving “Full Liquidity” Back to the Asset

Tokenized gold, such as XAUt (Tether Gold), isn’t just about making gold easier to hold or trade — paper gold can do that too. It targets a more fundamental question:

How can gold stay fully physically backed, while gaining the same cross-system mobility and composability that crypto assets have?

Take XAUt as an example. Its design is conservative: 1 XAUt represents 1 troy ounce of physical gold held in professional London vault storage, with holdings that can be audited and verified. Token holders have a right to claim/redeem the underlying gold under the issuer’s rules.

It doesn’t rely on complex financial engineering, algorithms, or credit expansion to “enhance” gold. Instead, it follows a traditional logic: establish genuine physical backing first, then talk about what digitization enables.

Ultimately, tokenized gold such as XAUt and PAXG isn’t “a new gold story.” It uses blockchain to wrap one of the oldest asset types in a digital form. In that sense, XAUt is more like “Digital Physical Gold” than a speculative crypto derivative.

The more important shift is that gold’s liquidity moves to a different layer. In traditional finance, paper gold and gold ETFs are liquid only within an account system — inside a bank, broker, or clearing network — where trading and settlement stay within fixed boundaries.

With XAUt, liquidity travels with the asset. Once gold is represented as an on-chain token, it can be transferred, split, combined, and used across protocols and applications — without repeatedly asking a centralized institution for permission.

This means gold can, for the first time, circulate globally 24/7 without relying on an “account” to prove liquidity. (Further reading: Peter Schiff vs. CZ: A Trust Battle Between TradFi and Crypto) In an on-chain environment, XAUt is no longer just “a tradable gold token” — it becomes a basic asset unit that other protocols can recognize and compose.

• It can be freely swapped for stablecoins and other assets.
• It can be incorporated into more sophisticated asset allocation and portfolio strategies.
• It can even serve as a store of value for payments and everyday spending.

This is the part of liquidity paper gold can’t provide.

III. From “On-Chain” to “Usable”: The Real Watershed for Digitally Represented Physical Gold

That’s why tokenized gold doesn’t reach the finish line just by being “on-chain.”

The real watershed is whether this digitally represented, fully backed gold is easy for users to hold, manage, and trade — and even use for payments. If it’s ultimately locked inside a centralized platform or a single gateway, then it’s functionally no different from paper gold.

This is where lightweight self-custody solutions like imToken Web matter. For example, imToken Web lets users access via a browser and manage tokenized gold and other crypto assets across devices — quickly and directly.

In a self-custody setup, you control the private key. Your gold isn’t held on a provider’s servers; it’s held by the on-chain address you control.

Thanks to Web3 interoperability, XAUt doesn’t have to sit idle. It can be purchased in smaller amounts, and when needed, tools like imToken Card can bring gold’s purchasing power into everyday spending — globally and in real time.

In a Web3 environment, XAUt isn’t just tradable. It can be exchanged and combined with other assets — and extended into payment use cases.

When gold combines high certainty as a store of value with modern usability, it can finally move from an “old-school safe haven” toward a more future-ready form of money.

After all, gold itself isn’t outdated — what’s outdated is how we hold it.

So when gold comes on-chain as XAUt — and returns to personal control through self-custody options like imToken Web — it isn’t a brand-new story. It’s an enduring principle: in an uncertain world, real value means minimizing reliance on the promises of others.

imToken 2025 Annual Overview

In 2025, the focus of the Ethereum ecosystem evolved from purely scaling to the broader vision of Unified Ethereum. As liquidity fragmentation and fragmented user experiences on Layer 2s became increasingly evident, imToken shaped its annual strategy around addressing these divides through infrastructure enhancements.

Over the past year, through deep integration with Account Abstraction, interoperability protocols, and the exploration of new interaction paradigms, we moved significantly closer to a “single-chain–like” experience — without compromising decentralization.

In the face of the AI wave, we are also exploring a new paradigm for wallets. Our goal is to build a defensive bulwark — using the certainty of code to shield users from the opacity and risks of the AI black box.

1. Trends: From Fragmentation to Unified Ethereum

Over the past two years, while Layer 2 solutions have successfully reduced gas costs and increased throughput, they have also introduced a new challenge — fragmentation. User assets are now distributed across networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Moving funds between chains has become more complex and costly, and developers face higher operational burdens from deploying and maintaining applications across multiple networks.

Against this backdrop, Ethereum established “Unified Ethereum” as its core annual objective. This is not merely a marketing slogan, but a comprehensive reconstruction.

imToken’s 2025 Journey:

We stayed true to our core values of decentralization, trustlessness, and security. We believe better user experience should never come at the cost of self-sovereignty. Throughout 2025, our work focused on closing L2 gaps and enabling equal access and verifiable security — without compromising user autonomy — reshaping how users enter Web3.

2. Infrastructure Reconstruction: imToken’s 2025 Practices & Milestones

To realize the vision of Unified Ethereum, imToken built five technical pillars across the account, transmission, and application layers.

2.1 Account System: Building on Account Abstraction

To bridge the fragmented ecosystem under a Unified Ethereum, reconstructing the account layer is critical. With ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 maturing, Account Abstraction (AA) delivers programmable capabilities that fundamentally transform the user experience:

• Signature Abstraction: Decouples accounts from private keys, enabling diverse verification (e.g., passkey) and facilitating multi-chain operations via a single signature.
• Transaction Batching: Bundles complex workflows like ‘Approve + Bridge + Stake’ into a single, atomic transaction.
• Permission Firewalls: Enforces account-level security rules — such as spending limits and whitelists — acting as programmable armor for assets.
• Gas Abstraction: Allows gas payments in stablecoins or other tokens, eliminating the friction of managing ETH across chains.

These capabilities make AA the essential infrastructure for driving Web3 mass adoption.

imToken’s Strategy: Decoupling Accounts from Keys

To deliver the superior UX promised by Account Abstraction (AA), imToken tackles the challenge of balancing security with convenience. We have transformed AA’s core mechanism — decoupling accounts from keys — into a solution that combines Web2-grade smoothness with Web3-grade sovereign security:

• Seamless Daily Access (Passkey): Leveraging Signature Abstraction, we enable users to sign transactions using biometrics (Face ID/Touch ID). This provides an instant, frictionless experience for daily interactions.
• Security Fallback (Recovery Key): To mitigate the single-point-of-failure risk associated with cloud services, we implemented a decentralized recovery mechanism. Users can bind their keys (private key/mnemonic) as a safety net. This ensures that even if passkeys are lost or services fail, the user retains ultimate authority to reclaim the account — guaranteeing sovereign control and true trustless security, even in extreme scenarios.

2.2 Value Transmission: Send to Anyone

Traditional crypto transfers face a problem: the recipient must first download a wallet, back up a seed phrase, generate an address, and even hold tokens for gas before they can do anything. This drastically hinders new user onboarding

imToken’s Send by Link enables users to effortlessly transfer tokens to anyone.

• Breaking Barriers: The sender simply shares a link (or QR code) to initiate the transfer.
• Seamless Claiming: The recipient clicks the link and uses passkey to quickly create a wallet — skipping complex seed phrase backups — to claim the tokens directly.
• Value Transfer: This solution utilizes Account Abstraction to handle gas fee sponsorship. It delivers on the vision where “anyone can send tokens to anyone without permission,” making value transfer as simple as sending a text.

2.3 Interoperability: Building a Unified Liquidity Network

With the explosion of L2s, liquidity fragmentation became a nightmare. Moving funds across multiple chains via bridges involved cumbersome steps, long wait times, and low capital efficiency.

imToken is aligning closely with the Ethereum Foundation, actively exploring and integrating OIF (Open Intent Framework) and EIL (Ethereum Interoperability Layer).

• Strategic Alignment: While these standards are primarily led by the Ethereum Foundation, imToken views them as a high-priority annual goal, dedicated to translating protocol-layer progress into user-layer value.
• Unified Network Experience: Through these protocols, users will only need to focus on “Intent” (e.g., “I want to swap A on Chain X for B on Chain Y”) without worrying about the underlying cross-chain path. imToken assists users in completing cross-chain interactions with one click, breaking the invisible walls between L2s and enabling the free flow of capital.

2.4 Identity: Introducing Chain-Specific Addresses to Eliminate Ambiguity

The reuse of the mainnet address format (0x…) across L2 and EVM ecosystems has created ambiguity and deposit errors in multi-chain environments — a primary cause of user asset loss.

Addressing this is a key UX priority for imToken. We are actively exploring the adoption of ERC-7930 & ERC-7828 to introduce email-like addresses (e.g., address@chain)

• Error Prevention: When this feature goes live, both users and wallets will explicitly identify the target network. Typing user@optimism will automatically switch the wallet to the Optimism network, rooting out asset loss caused by selecting the wrong chain.
• Enhanced Readability: Transforming obscure hash values into human-readable, semantic labels significantly boosts user confidence and peace of mind during transfers.

2.5 Interaction Experience: Evolving Toward Intent-Based UX

Traditional wallets require users to think like programmers (authorizing, selecting routers, setting slippage), resulting in a high barrier to entry and frequent errors.

Recognizing this shift, imToken is actively exploring intent-based solutions.

• Declarative Interaction: Users simply express “what I want” (e.g., “Exchange 100 USDT for as much ETH as possible”) without worrying about “how to do it.”
• Outcome-Oriented: The system finds the optimal solution via off-chain matching and presents a deterministic result (What You See Is What You Get) before the transaction goes on-chain, reducing slippage and mitigating MEV attacks.

3. Future Outlook: Exploration and Defense in the Age of AI

Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, wallets will undergo a fundamental evolution driven by AI integration. imToken is actively exploring how to reimagine the role of the wallet in this new era.

3.1 Short-Term Outlook: Interoperability Takes Center Stage

imToken predicts that as OIF and EIL matures, 2026 will be the breakout year for Interop.

• Unified Liquidity: Ethereum ecosystem liquidity will no longer be fragmented by L2s but will converge into a massive unified market. Projects will only need to maintain one network interface to reach all L2 users.
• Invisible Interaction: Users won’t even need to know which chain they are using. imToken will continue to invest resources to drive this vision from usable to delightful.

3.2 Unified & Verifiable UI

We are crafting a unified interface to simplify complex multi-chain navigation. However, the UI itself can be a potential attack vector. To advance decentralization, imToken champions Verifiable UI, empowering users to verify the interface’s authenticity. This ensures full control over assets and the interface, even if centralized services go offline.

3.3 Embracing AI without Compromising Security

In the long term, if AI agents become the primary interface for user interaction, imToken believes the wallet’s responsibility is to establish a dynamic balance between “Intelligence” and “Security.” If we liken AI to a radical “Spear,” then Crypto and the wallet are the guarding “Shield.”

• AI is Probabilistic: AI agents interpret ambiguous natural language intents. While intelligent and efficient, they carry risks of hallucinations, errors, and even manipulation.
• The Wallet is Deterministic: In the AI era, the wallet must be more than just a gateway; it must serve as the final line of defense for transaction execution.

Constraining the Probabilistic with the Deterministic: imToken is exploring ways to audit and constrain probabilistic AI behaviors using deterministic code and rules (hard constraints). No matter how intelligent the AI becomes, it cannot bypass the security barrier enforced by the wallet. This ensures that every transaction operates within a framework of verifiability and guaranteed privacy.

Conclusion

In 2025, imToken is undergoing a significant shift: evolving from a simple asset management tool into both a bridge across fragmented Layer 2 ecosystems and a security gatekeeper for the AI era.

By integrating Account Abstraction, delivering the frictionless ‘Send by Link’ experience, and alignment with Ethereum Foundation interoperability standards, imToken is building a foundation for a unified user experience.

As we move into an AI-driven future, imToken remains anchored to the principle of determinism — ensuring that in a world of algorithms and probabilities, users retain ultimate control over their wealth.

Could an Ethereum ETF start to resemble a bond — paying out yield on a regular schedule?

Earlier this month, Grayscale said its Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE) distributed staking income to existing shareholders. The payout reflects rewards earned from Oct 6, 2025 to Dec 31, 2025 — marking the first U.S. spot crypto exchange-traded product to pass staking rewards through to investors.

For Web3-native users, this may feel routine. But historically, it’s a milestone: for the first time, Ethereum’s native yield is being packaged into a standard TradFi wrapper.

More importantly, this isn’t happening in isolation. On-chain data shows the staking ratio rising, the validator exit queue largely clearing, and the entry queue building again.

These seemingly separate signals point to a deeper question:

Is Ethereum shifting from a price-driven portfolio allocation asset to a long-term, yield-generating asset that institutional capital can hold with confidence?

1. ETF Yield Distributions: TradFi Investors’ First Staking Experience

For a long time, Ethereum staking was a niche, highly technical activity largely confined to the on-chain world.

It required crypto basics (wallets and private keys) and an understanding of validator mechanics, consensus rules, withdrawal timelines, and slashing. Liquid staking protocols such as Lido Finance lowered the barrier, but staking income still largely remained within crypto-native instruments like stETH.

For most Web2 investors, it wasn’t intuitive — or easily accessible.

Now ETFs are helping close that gap.

Under Grayscale’s plan, ETHE holders would receive $0.083178 per share, reflecting staking rewards earned during the period and sold by the fund. Payment was set for Jan 6, 2026, for investors holding ETHE as of Jan 5, 2026 (record date).

Put simply, this income doesn’t come from a company’s operations — it comes from network security and consensus participation. For traditional investors (including those investing via 401(k)s or funds), it offers a way to access Ethereum’s staking yield through a familiar ETF wrapper — without managing private keys — and receive payouts in USD.

It’s worth emphasizing that this doesn’t mean staking is fully “regulated” for ETFs, or that regulators have reached a unified position. But in practice, something important has changed: non-crypto-native investors can now receive Ethereum’s native staking yield indirectly — without running nodes, managing private keys, or interacting on-chain.

Seen this way, ETF yield distributions aren’t a one-off — they’re a first step toward bringing Ethereum staking to a broader capital base.

Grayscale won’t be the only one. 21Shares also said its Ethereum ETF would distribute staking income to existing shareholders — $0.010378 per share — and published the ex-date and payment details.

This sets a meaningful precedent. For firms like Grayscale and 21Shares — active across both TradFi and Web3 — the impact goes beyond a single payout: it accelerates institutional adoption of staking and yield pass-through, and signals that Ethereum ETFs may evolve from pure price exposure into products with cash-flow potential.

Over time, if this model proves out, traditional asset-management giants such as BlackRock and Fidelity could follow — potentially bringing long-horizon allocation capital on the order of hundreds of billions into Ethereum.

2. Record-High Staking — and a “Vanishing” Exit Queue

If ETF distributions are the narrative milestone, staking levels and queue dynamics better reflect what capital is actually doing.

The staking ratio has reached a new high. The Block’s data shows that over 36 million ETH is staked — nearly 30% of circulating supply — with a staked value above $118 billion. The prior peak share was 29.54% in July 2025.

From a supply-and-demand perspective, when more ETH is staked, it effectively leaves the liquid market for a time — suggesting part of the supply is shifting from short-term trading to long-term allocation with a network role.

ETH is increasingly more than gas, a transaction medium, or a speculative instrument — it can also act as productive capital: securing the network through staking and generating yield.

Queue dynamics are shifting too. At the time of writing, Ethereum’s PoS exit queue was close to empty, while the entry queue kept growing (over 2.73 million ETH) — suggesting more ETH is choosing to commit to the system for the long term. (Further reading: “Cutting Through the “Ethereum in Decline” Noise: Why Values Are Its Strongest Moat”)

Staking is a low-liquidity, long-duration strategy that targets steadier returns. Capital re-entering the staking queue suggests more participants are willing to accept the opportunity cost of long-term lockups.

Taken together — ETF yield distributions, record-high staking, and shifting queues — Ethereum staking appears to be moving from a crypto-native opportunity into a yield source that TradFi can recognize and long-term capital is starting to price in.

No single signal is decisive on its own, but together they point to a steadily maturing staking economy on Ethereum.

3. What’s Next: A Rapidly Maturing Staking Market

This doesn’t make ETH a “risk-free” asset. As participants change, risks shift: technical risk matters, but structural risk, liquidity risk, and the learning curve around staking mechanics become increasingly important.

In the last regulatory cycle, the U.S. SEC stepped up enforcement around liquid staking, including unregistered-securities allegations involving MetaMask/Consensys, Lido (stETH), and Rocket Pool (rETH). This added uncertainty to the long-term outlook for Ethereum ETFs.

In practice, whether — and how — an ETF participates in staking is primarily a product-and-compliance design question, not a judgment on Ethereum itself. As institutions test the boundaries, capital is already responding.

For example, BitMine has reportedly staked about 1.032 million ETH (roughly $3.215B) — around one quarter of its total ETH holdings (4.143 million ETH).

In short, Ethereum staking is no longer a niche activity limited to technical insiders.

When ETFs begin distributing yield consistently, when long-term capital is willing to wait 45 days just to enter the consensus layer, and when nearly 30% of ETH serves as a security buffer, we’re seeing Ethereum build a native yield system that global capital markets can increasingly accept.

And understanding this shift may matter just as much as deciding whether to participate.

In earlier articles in this Interop series, we covered OIF (the intent framework) and EIL (the interoperability layer). OIF standardizes cross-chain intents (so the network can understand what you want to do), while EIL provides execution rails (so funds can move in a standardized way).

But to deliver a truly seamless “single-chain” experience, you still have to balance speed and trust. Today, interoperability often means choosing between slow finality (for example, Optimistic Rollups may require a 7-day challenge period) or weaker decentralization (by relying on the trust assumptions of multisig bridges).

To break this trilemma. Ethereum needs a core capability that links the Interop roadmap’s Acceleration track with finality: real-time proofs powered by ZK technology. (Further reading: Ethereum Interop Roadmap: Solving the Last Mile to Mass Adoption)

And in the Fusaka upgrade that just went live, an unassuming proposal — EIP-7825 — clears the biggest engineering obstacle on the road to that endgame.

1. The underrated EIP-7825 in the Fusaka upgrade

On December 4, Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade went live on mainnet. Unlike the Dencun upgrade, it drew less fanfare, and most attention stayed on Blob scaling and PeerDAS, especially the prospect of even lower L2 data costs.

But beyond the spotlight, EIP-7825 removes the biggest obstacle to bringing L1 zkEVM and real-time proofs to Ethereum — quietly paving the way for Interop’s endgame.

In Fusaka, most attention has been on scaling: Blob capacity increases 8×, and with PeerDAS sampling-based verification, the cost of the DA (data availability) layer becomes far less of a bottleneck.

Lower L2 costs are important, but for Ethereum’s long-term ZK roadmap, EIP-7825 is more consequential: it sets a per-transaction gas cap of about 16.78 million gas.

This year, Ethereum’s block gas limit has risen to 60 million. Even so, in theory, someone willing to pay a very high gas price could submit a highly complex mega-transaction that fills the entire block — effectively clogging it.

This was previously allowed, but EIP-7825 adds a new rule:

• no matter how large a block is, a single transaction cannot exceed ~16.78 million gas.

Why the per-transaction cap matters

For most users, this change has no impact on simple transfers. But for ZK provers (proof generators), it’s a make-or-break constraint — because of how ZK proofs are produced.

For example, before EIP-7825, if a block included a 60-million-gas mega-transaction, a ZK prover had to run that transaction end-to-end in sequence — no splitting and no parallelism. It’s like a single-lane highway with a slow, oversized truck up front: every other car (the remaining transactions) gets stuck behind it.

That makes real-time proving effectively impossible, because proving time becomes unpredictable — potentially tens of minutes, or longer.

After EIP-7825, even if blocks expand to 100 million gas, each transaction is capped at ~16.78 million gas. Blocks become predictable, bounded units that can be processed in parallel. In effect, proving shifts from a hard systems constraint to a pure money problem:

With enough parallel compute, we can process these smaller units quickly and generate ZK proofs for large blocks in a short time.

As Brevis co-founder and CEO Michael has noted, EIP-7825 is an underrated upgrade for Ethereum’s ZK path and “100×” scaling. It turns real-time proving from “theoretically impossible” into “engineering-schedulable.” With sufficient parallel compute, even 200 million gas blocks could be proven in seconds — providing the foundation for EIL to achieve second-level cross-chain settlement.

This upgrade may not look like the main event, but it’s a major step forward for Ethereum’s ZK roadmap — and for scaling ahead of 2026.

2. L1 zkEVM: The “trust anchor” for Ethereum interoperability

EIP-7825 makes real-time proving physically feasible by enabling parallelism. But the bigger question is: how will Ethereum mainnet use that capability?

That brings us to one of the most technically ambitious parts of Ethereum’s roadmap: L1 zkEVM.

zkEVM has long been seen as a “holy grail” for scaling — not just because it improves performance, but because it reshapes the trust model by giving Ethereum mainnet the ability to generate and verify ZK proofs.

Put differently, after each block executes, Ethereum could produce a verifiable proof so other nodes — especially light clients and L2s — can confirm correctness without re-executing everything. If this capability is built into L1, proposers can publish blocks with proofs, and validators can verify the small proof instead of replaying all transactions.

What L1 zkEVM unlocks for Interop

In an Interop context, L1 zkEVM matters far beyond scaling. It can serve as a trust anchor for every L2 — unlocking two major changes:

• Eliminate challenge periods: confirmations can shrink from “7 days (optimistic)” to “seconds (ZK).”
• Decentralize connectivity: cross-chain no longer relies on third-party multisig bridges, but on Ethereum mainnet’s verifiable proofs.

This is also the foundational prerequisite for EIL (the interoperability layer) to work as intended: without real-time finality on L1, L2-to-L2 interoperability can’t fully escape latency.

The goal is clear (L1 zkEVM), and the key constraint has been addressed (EIP-7825). The next question is: what’s the practical implementation path?

This leads to a subtle shift in the ZK stack: moving from zkEVM toward zkVM.

3. Fusaka & EIP-7825: The Interop roadmap breaks free

If EIP-7825 creates parallel-friendly conditions for ZK by capping transaction size, then the ZK stack’s evolution is about finding a more efficient software architecture. The distinction matters — and it maps to two stages of ZK development. (Further reading: ZK Dawn: Is Ethereum’s Endgame Accelerating?)

The first stage is zkEVM, which focuses on compatibility.

The goal is to mirror EVM behavior so developers can deploy Solidity with minimal changes — lowering migration cost and friction.

In short, zkEVM’s biggest advantage is compatibility with existing Ethereum apps, allowing teams to reuse much of today’s tooling — clients, explorers, debuggers, and more.

The downside is that the EVM wasn’t designed to be ZK-friendly. To stay compatible, zkEVM proving efficiency often hits a ceiling — proofs are slower, and the design constraints add overhead.

By contrast, zkVM takes a more radical approach: it uses a ZK-friendly VM (for example, RISC-V or WASM) to speed up proving and improve execution performance.

The trade-off is reduced compatibility with some EVM features and less access to certain existing tools (such as low-level debuggers). Even so, a clear trend is emerging:

• more L2s are optimizing proving speed and cost aggressively and exploring zkVM-based designs.

So why is Fusaka a key enabler?

Before EIP-7825, both zkEVM and zkVM could see proving time spike when a block included a mega-transaction — because the work couldn’t be split.

Now, EIP-7825 forces transactions into predictable units and enables parallel processing. That lets efficient architectures like zkVM perform at their best — so even complex blocks, backed by parallel compute, can move toward real-time proving.

What does this mean for interoperability?

As zkVM adoption grows alongside EIP-7825, proof costs can drop sharply. When cross-chain proofs become cheap and fast enough to feel instant, traditional “bridges” may fade into the background — replaced by general-purpose messaging at the protocol layer.

In closing

Interop’s end goal isn’t only moving assets across chains. It goes beyond “asset bridges” to a broader set of system capabilities — covering:

• cross-chain data communication
• cross-chain logic execution
• cross-chain user experience
• cross-chain security and consensus

From this view, Interop is a common language across future Ethereum protocols — about sharing logic, not just transferring value. ZK’s role is to guarantee correct execution and enable real-time state verification, so cross-domain calls are both safe and practical. Without real-time ZK proofs, truly usable Interop UX is hard to achieve.

With EIP-7825 now live in Fusaka — and L1 zkEVM moving closer to reality — we’re approaching that end state: execution, settlement, and proving are fully abstracted in the background, and users barely notice the chain at all.

That’s the Interop end state many of us are working toward.

In the previous article of our Interop series, we introduced the Open Intents Framework (OIF). Think of it as a universal language that lets users express intents like “I want to buy an NFT across chains,” and have network-wide solvers understand them. (Read more: Intents Standardized: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation.)

But understanding an intent isn’t enough — something still has to make it happen.

After you broadcast your intent, how does your funds move safely from Base to Arbitrum? How does the destination chain verify your signature? And who pays gas on the target chain?

This brings us to the core of the “Initialization” phase in Ethereum’s interoperability roadmap: the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL). At the recent Devconnect, the Ethereum Foundation’s account abstraction team officially pushed EIL into the spotlight.

Put simply, EIL has an ambitious goal: without a hard fork and without changing Ethereum’s base-layer consensus, make using any L2 feel just like using a single chain.

1. What exactly is EIL?

To understand EIL, don’t let the word “Layer” mislead you. EIL is not a new blockchain, and it’s not a traditional cross-chain bridge.

At its core, EIL is a suite of standards and frameworks. By combining account abstraction (ERC-4337) with cross-chain messaging, it aims to create a virtual, unified execution environment.

In today’s Ethereum ecosystem, each L2 is effectively an island. For example, your EOA on Optimism and your EOA on Arbitrum may share the same address, but their states are completely isolated:

• A signature on Chain A can’t be directly verified on Chain B.
• Assets on Chain A are invisible to Chain B.

EIL attempts to break this isolation through two key components:

1) ERC-4337-based smart accounts — account abstraction decouples account logic from keys. With EIL-style extensions:

• Paymasters sponsor gas on the destination chain, solving the “no gas where I’m going” problem.
• Key Managers help keep account state in sync across multiple chains.

2) A trust-minimized messaging layer — a standard way to package and transmit UserOps across chains via official rollup bridges or light-client proofs, so messages can move safely without relying on new centralized relayers.

Here’s a simple analogy:

Cross-chain today is like traveling abroad: you exchange currency (move assets), apply for a visa (re-authorize), and follow local traffic rules (buy destination-chain gas).

Cross-chain in an EIL world is more like paying with a Visa card: you sign once, and the underlying banking network — the EIL infrastructure — automatically handles FX, settlement, and verification. You don’t feel the border at all.

That’s the future the Ethereum Foundation’s account abstraction team is describing: with a single signature, you can complete a cross-chain transaction directly from your wallet, seamlessly settling across L2s, without relying on centralized relayers or adding new trust assumptions.

In many ways, this is closer to the “final form” of account abstraction. Compared with today’s high-friction, fragmented workflows, this model helps automate account creation, private key management, and complex cross-chain execution behind the scenes.

And with native account abstraction (AA) maturing, every account could become a smart account. Users would no longer need to worry about gas — perhaps not even know it exists — and could focus purely on on-chain experiences and asset management.

2. From “Cross-Chain” to “Chain Abstraction”

If EIL lands as envisioned, it could unlock the “last mile” of mass Web3 adoption. It marks a shift from multi-chain competition to chain-abstracted convergence, tackling the pain points that trouble both users and developers most.

For users: a true “single-chain experience”

For users, EIL enables a true “single-chain experience.” Under the EIL framework, you no longer need to switch networks manually.

For example, your funds are on Base, but you want to play a game on Arbitrum: you just click “Start,” sign once when your wallet pops up, and you’re in.

Behind the scenes, EIL packages your UserOp on Base, sends it through the messaging layer to Arbitrum, and a Paymaster covers gas and entry fees — so it feels as smooth as playing directly on Base.

For security: beyond multisig bridge single points of failure

From a security perspective, EIL moves beyond the single-point-of-failure risk of multisig bridges. Traditional bridges rely on external validator sets (multisigs): if they’re compromised, billions in assets are at risk.

EIL instead emphasizes trust minimization, leaning on L2-native security — for example, storage-proof-based verification — to validate cross-chain messages rather than third-party trust. In short, as long as Ethereum L1 remains secure, cross-chain interactions are comparatively safe.

For developers: one account standard across chains

For developers, EIL offers a unified account standard. Today, a DApp that wants to go multi-chain often has to maintain several code paths.

With EIL, you can assume users effectively have a cross-network account: as long as you build against the ERC-4337 standard, your app can naturally serve users across L2s without worrying which chain actually holds their funds.

But there’s still a major engineering problem: how do we let hundreds of millions of existing EOA users enjoy this experience? (See also: From EOA to AA: Will Web3’s Next Leap Happen at the Account Layer?)

Migrating from an EOA to an AA account usually means moving assets to a new address — far too much friction for most users. This is where Vitalik Buterin’s EIP-7702 comes in. It neatly resolves the long-standing compatibility debates among EIP-4337, EIP-3074, and EIP-5003 by doing something clever: it lets an existing EOA temporarily “transform” into a smart contract account during a transaction.

This means you don’t need to register a new wallet or move assets from your current imToken address into a new AA account. Instead, with EIP-7702 your existing account can temporarily gain smart-account capabilities — like batch approvals, gas sponsorship, and cross-chain atomic operations — and then revert to a fully compatible EOA once the transaction is done.

3. EIL’s Path to Reality — and What Comes Next

Compared with OIF’s more community-driven, bottom-up approach, EIL carries a much stronger “official” imprint. It’s a pragmatic infrastructure effort led by the Ethereum Foundation’s account abstraction team — the same group behind ERC-4337.

Current progress mainly shows up along three key tracks:

1. Multi-chain expansion of ERC-4337 — extending the UserOp structure with cross-chain parameters such as destination chain IDs, the first step toward giving smart accounts real “cross-chain visibility.”
2. Coordination with ERC-7702 — as EIP-7702 rolls out, everyday EOA users can plug into the EIL network seamlessly, sharply lowering adoption barriers.
3. Standardized messaging interfaces — similar to how OIF standardizes intents, EIL is standardizing message transport at the infrastructure layer. Optimism’s Superchain, Polygon’s AggLayer, and ZKsync’s Elastic Chain are all exploring interoperability within their own ecosystems; EIL’s goal is to connect these heterogeneous worlds into a shared, network-wide messaging layer.

Even more interesting, EIL’s vision goes beyond just “connecting” chains — it’s also filling in another key base-layer capability: privacy.

If EIP-7702 and AA solve accessibility, then the Kohaku privacy framework that Vitalik unveiled at Devconnect may be the next puzzle piece, echoing another core idea from the Trustless Manifesto: censorship resistance.

At Devconnect, Vitalik was blunt: “privacy is freedom.” He noted that Ethereum is already on a privacy-upgrade path aimed at delivering real-world levels of privacy and security. To that end, the Ethereum Foundation has set up a dedicated privacy team of 47 researchers, engineers, and cryptographers, working to make privacy a true “first-class” property of Ethereum.

This means privacy will no longer be an optional add-on, but a basic capability as natural as sending a transfer. As a concrete step toward that vision, the Kohaku framework uses your public key to create temporary stealth addresses, allowing you to perform private actions without revealing links back to your main wallet.

Under this design, future AA accounts will be more than asset management tools — they’ll also act as privacy shields. By integrating protocols like Railgun and Privacy Pools, AA accounts can help users protect transaction privacy while still providing compliant “proofs of innocence”: you can show that your funds are not illicit without exposing your full spending path.

The Roadmap

Taken together, Ethereum’s interoperability roadmap becomes clear:

• OIF (Intent Framework): helps the application layer understand what users want.
• EIL (Interoperability Layer): lays the infrastructure to execute those intents seamlessly.

This is likely the signal the Ethereum Foundation wants to send: Ethereum shouldn’t be a loose collection of L2s, but a single, unified supercomputer.

When EIL truly lands, we may no longer need to explain what an L2 or a cross-chain bridge is to new users — they’ll simply see their assets, not the borders between chains.

In earlier articles in this Interop series, we covered OIF (the intent framework) and EIL (the interoperability layer). OIF standardizes cross-chain intents (so the network can understand what you want to do), while EIL provides execution rails (so funds can move in a standardized way).

But to deliver a truly seamless “single-chain” experience, you still have to balance speed and trust. Today, interoperability often means choosing between slow finality (for example, Optimistic Rollups may require a 7-day challenge period) or weaker decentralization (by relying on the trust assumptions of multisig bridges).

To break this trilemma. Ethereum needs a core capability that links the Interop roadmap’s Acceleration track with finality: real-time proofs powered by ZK technology. (Further reading: Ethereum Interop Roadmap: Solving the Last Mile to Mass Adoption)

And in the Fusaka upgrade that just went live, an unassuming proposal — EIP-7825 — clears the biggest engineering obstacle on the road to that endgame.

1. The underrated EIP-7825 in the Fusaka upgrade

On December 4, Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade went live on mainnet. Unlike the Dencun upgrade, it drew less fanfare, and most attention stayed on Blob scaling and PeerDAS, especially the prospect of even lower L2 data costs.

But beyond the spotlight, EIP-7825 removes the biggest obstacle to bringing L1 zkEVM and real-time proofs to Ethereum — quietly paving the way for Interop’s endgame.

In Fusaka, most attention has been on scaling: Blob capacity increases 8×, and with PeerDAS sampling-based verification, the cost of the DA (data availability) layer becomes far less of a bottleneck.

Lower L2 costs are important, but for Ethereum’s long-term ZK roadmap, EIP-7825 is more consequential: it sets a per-transaction gas cap of about 16.78 million gas.

This year, Ethereum’s block gas limit has risen to 60 million. Even so, in theory, someone willing to pay a very high gas price could submit a highly complex mega-transaction that fills the entire block — effectively clogging it.

This was previously allowed, but EIP-7825 adds a new rule:

• no matter how large a block is, a single transaction cannot exceed ~16.78 million gas.

Why the per-transaction cap matters

For most users, this change has no impact on simple transfers. But for ZK provers (proof generators), it’s a make-or-break constraint — because of how ZK proofs are produced.

For example, before EIP-7825, if a block included a 60-million-gas mega-transaction, a ZK prover had to run that transaction end-to-end in sequence — no splitting and no parallelism. It’s like a single-lane highway with a slow, oversized truck up front: every other car (the remaining transactions) gets stuck behind it.

That makes real-time proving effectively impossible, because proving time becomes unpredictable — potentially tens of minutes, or longer.

After EIP-7825, even if blocks expand to 100 million gas, each transaction is capped at ~16.78 million gas. Blocks become predictable, bounded units that can be processed in parallel. In effect, proving shifts from a hard systems constraint to a pure money problem:

With enough parallel compute, we can process these smaller units quickly and generate ZK proofs for large blocks in a short time.

As Brevis co-founder and CEO Michael has noted, EIP-7825 is an underrated upgrade for Ethereum’s ZK path and “100×” scaling. It turns real-time proving from “theoretically impossible” into “engineering-schedulable.” With sufficient parallel compute, even 200 million gas blocks could be proven in seconds — providing the foundation for EIL to achieve second-level cross-chain settlement.

This upgrade may not look like the main event, but it’s a major step forward for Ethereum’s ZK roadmap — and for scaling ahead of 2026.

2. L1 zkEVM: The “trust anchor” for Ethereum interoperability

EIP-7825 makes real-time proving physically feasible by enabling parallelism. But the bigger question is: how will Ethereum mainnet use that capability?

That brings us to one of the most technically ambitious parts of Ethereum’s roadmap: L1 zkEVM.

zkEVM has long been seen as a “holy grail” for scaling — not just because it improves performance, but because it reshapes the trust model by giving Ethereum mainnet the ability to generate and verify ZK proofs.

Put differently, after each block executes, Ethereum could produce a verifiable proof so other nodes — especially light clients and L2s — can confirm correctness without re-executing everything. If this capability is built into L1, proposers can publish blocks with proofs, and validators can verify the small proof instead of replaying all transactions.

What L1 zkEVM unlocks for Interop

In an Interop context, L1 zkEVM matters far beyond scaling. It can serve as a trust anchor for every L2 — unlocking two major changes:

• Eliminate challenge periods: confirmations can shrink from “7 days (optimistic)” to “seconds (ZK).”
• Decentralize connectivity: cross-chain no longer relies on third-party multisig bridges, but on Ethereum mainnet’s verifiable proofs.

This is also the foundational prerequisite for EIL (the interoperability layer) to work as intended: without real-time finality on L1, L2-to-L2 interoperability can’t fully escape latency.

The goal is clear (L1 zkEVM), and the key constraint has been addressed (EIP-7825). The next question is: what’s the practical implementation path?

This leads to a subtle shift in the ZK stack: moving from zkEVM toward zkVM.

3. Fusaka & EIP-7825: The Interop roadmap breaks free

If EIP-7825 creates parallel-friendly conditions for ZK by capping transaction size, then the ZK stack’s evolution is about finding a more efficient software architecture. The distinction matters — and it maps to two stages of ZK development. (Further reading: ZK Dawn: Is Ethereum’s Endgame Accelerating?)

The first stage is zkEVM, which focuses on compatibility.

The goal is to mirror EVM behavior so developers can deploy Solidity with minimal changes — lowering migration cost and friction.

In short, zkEVM’s biggest advantage is compatibility with existing Ethereum apps, allowing teams to reuse much of today’s tooling — clients, explorers, debuggers, and more.

The downside is that the EVM wasn’t designed to be ZK-friendly. To stay compatible, zkEVM proving efficiency often hits a ceiling — proofs are slower, and the design constraints add overhead.

By contrast, zkVM takes a more radical approach: it uses a ZK-friendly VM (for example, RISC-V or WASM) to speed up proving and improve execution performance.

The trade-off is reduced compatibility with some EVM features and less access to certain existing tools (such as low-level debuggers). Even so, a clear trend is emerging:

• more L2s are optimizing proving speed and cost aggressively and exploring zkVM-based designs.

So why is Fusaka a key enabler?

Before EIP-7825, both zkEVM and zkVM could see proving time spike when a block included a mega-transaction — because the work couldn’t be split.

Now, EIP-7825 forces transactions into predictable units and enables parallel processing. That lets efficient architectures like zkVM perform at their best — so even complex blocks, backed by parallel compute, can move toward real-time proving.

What does this mean for interoperability?

As zkVM adoption grows alongside EIP-7825, proof costs can drop sharply. When cross-chain proofs become cheap and fast enough to feel instant, traditional “bridges” may fade into the background — replaced by general-purpose messaging at the protocol layer.

In closing

Interop’s end goal isn’t only moving assets across chains. It goes beyond “asset bridges” to a broader set of system capabilities — covering:

• cross-chain data communication
• cross-chain logic execution
• cross-chain user experience
• cross-chain security and consensus

From this view, Interop is a common language across future Ethereum protocols — about sharing logic, not just transferring value. ZK’s role is to guarantee correct execution and enable real-time state verification, so cross-domain calls are both safe and practical. Without real-time ZK proofs, truly usable Interop UX is hard to achieve.

With EIP-7825 now live in Fusaka — and L1 zkEVM moving closer to reality — we’re approaching that end state: execution, settlement, and proving are fully abstracted in the background, and users barely notice the chain at all.

That’s the Interop end state many of us are working toward.

Introduction: Beyond mnemonic phrases — how else can we manage our assets?

For a long time, mnemonic phrases have been both the “key” to Web3 and a major source of stress. You have to write it down, verify it, and store it carefully — because in the traditional account model, losing your mnemonic phrases (private key) can mean losing access to your assets permanently.

That strict rule underpins decentralized security — but it also raises the bar for everyday users. Can we keep decentralization’s core benefits while making accounts as easy to manage and recover as Web2 apps?

The answer is Account Abstraction (AA).

AA is redefining how we manage digital assets. imToken Web is a next-generation wallet built on AA, designed to show that a safer experience doesn’t require you to be a cryptography expert. In this article, we’ll break down AA in plain English — and how it can reshape your digital life.

The trilemma of traditional accounts

To see why AA matters, let’s start with the most common account type today: an Externally Owned Account (EOA) — the kind you create in wallets such as imToken App.

EOAs are low-level and rigid by design: whoever controls the private key controls the account. Your private key is mathematically bound to your address. That creates a tough tradeoff — stronger security (offline storage, cold wallets) often means less convenience, while more convenience can increase the risk of key exposure. And unlike Web2 accounts, there’s no “forgot password” option — there’s very little room for error.

EOAs also come with UX constraints. For example, you usually need a chain’s native token (like ETH) to pay gas fees. If you hold USDT but don’t have ETH, you may not be able to send even a simple transaction.

With Layer 2 networks reducing on-chain costs, and with standards like ERC-4337 maturing (and EIP-7702 coming into effect), AA is reaching a point where broader adoption is possible. AA aims to break this deadlock by making account control more flexible than a single, rigid private-key rule.

Key concept: from a “key” to a smart assistant

In one sentence: AA turns an account from a “key” into a “smart assistant.”

In the EOA world, the protocol enforces the rules: if the signature matches the private key, the transaction goes through. In AA, the account itself is an on-chain smart contract.

That means the account’s rules are no longer fixed — they’re programmable. For example, you could set rules like: “Only allow transfers when conditions A and B are met,” “Cap daily transfers at 1,000 USDT,” or “If I lose access, let my guardians help reset control.”

This shift separates ownership from signing authority. You still own the account, but you can control it in more flexible ways — without being limited to a single private key.

How does AA improve your experience?

We’ll look at AA from four angles: verification (how you sign in), execution (how you transact), fees (how you pay), and evolution (how your wallet grows).

1. Verification: from mnemonic phrases to safer, frictionless sign-in

AA’s most visible change is support for modern authentication, so users aren’t forced to rely on mnemonic phrases.

Hardware-level security

With AA accounts (such as imToken Web), you can manage assets using a Passkey. Passkey is based on the WebAuthn standard and uses the secure chip on your phone (iPhone/Android) or computer to generate and store cryptographic keys.

Day to day, you can sign with Face ID or your fingerprint. It’s more convenient than managing mnemonic phrases — and often safer — because the private key stays in the device’s secure chip and never goes online. Passkey is also phishing-resistant: it’s bound to a site’s domain, so a spoofed website can’t trick you into creating a valid signature.

Account recovery

With AA, losing a device doesn’t have to mean losing your assets. Because the account is a smart contract, you can set recovery rules in advance — similar to changing a lock. For example, you can assign an EOA wallet, a social account, or trusted friends and family as guardians. If you can’t access the account, you can start a recovery process and, once guardians confirm, reset control and regain access.

2. Execution: from manual steps to intent-driven actions

On-chain interactions often take multiple steps. For example, to swap tokens, you usually submit an Approve transaction (and wait), then submit a Swap transaction (and wait again). That costs extra gas and makes the experience feel fragmented.

AA supports atomic batching, which bundles multiple actions (like Approve + Swap) into a single operation. You tap Swap once, and the wallet handles the rest. On-chain, everything either succeeds together or fails together — so you don’t end up with “approved, but didn’t swap.”

This points to an intent-centric future for Web3: you state what you want — “swap A for B” — without worrying about routes or steps. AA accounts, together with backend solver networks, can find and execute the best path automatically.

3. Fees: pay without holding the native token

For many newcomers, the most confusing experience is:

“I have 1,000 USDT, but I can’t send anything because I don’t have ETH for gas.”

AA introduces Paymaster (a gas-sponsoring contract), which changes how fees are paid. Apps can deploy on-chain rules for exchange rates or subsidies, such as:

• Pay gas with tokens: You can pay gas using tokens in your account (for example, USDC). In the background, Paymaster can convert at a set rate and pay the required ETH to the Bundler. This makes payments feel more natural — without requiring you to hold the native token first.
• Gasless: In some cases (such as onboarding or campaigns), the project can sponsor gas fees, so users can interact without worrying about gas at all.

4. Evolution: a wallet that grows with your needs

Traditional wallets tend to be fixed. Because AA accounts are smart contracts, they can be modular — like a smart assistant that keeps learning new skills and evolves with your needs.

• Tailored experience: beginners can start with a simple interface for transfers and payments that’s easy to learn.
• Expandable features: as you gain experience — or manage larger amounts — you can add modules, such as multisig protection or daily spending limits.

This modular design makes an AA account more than a static tool — it’s a flexible platform that can be combined and upgraded to support users from first steps to advanced use.

The future of EOAs: can existing accounts be upgraded?

Most of the improvements above are built on ERC-4337, the most mature AA approach today. In many cases, it requires creating a new AA account.

You might ask: “What if I don’t want to give up an address I’ve used for years — or go through the hassle of migrating assets?”

EIP-7702 answers this by enabling existing EOAs to upgrade in place.

The core mechanism is code delegation. Traditionally, an EOA can only execute actions authorized by a private-key signature. With EIP-7702, you can sign a special message to temporarily attach smart contract code to your EOA during a transaction.

This means you keep the same private key and address, but when you transact, your account can temporarily behave like a programmable smart contract. It removes the “EOAs aren’t programmable” limitation — so you can use AA-style features without changing addresses, while still keeping control of your assets.

Conclusion: making the wallet “invisible”

The best technology often feels like it isn’t there.

In the EOA era, users are forced to learn concepts like private keys, nonce, and gas price — much like asking every internet user to understand TCP/IP. AA’s goal is to make wallets both powerful and “invisible.”

With Passkey, you no longer have to manage unfamiliar mnemonic phrases. With Paymaster, you’re no longer blocked by the need to hold tokens for gas. And with a modular design, your wallet can grow with you.

AA isn’t just a technical upgrade — it’s a key step toward making Web3 usable for everyone.

If you’ve been in Web3 for a while, you’ve probably seen posts like this in community groups:

“I never took a screenshot or shared my mnemonic. I just used my wallet normally — so why are my funds gone?”

The most frustrating part is that victims often don’t know how they were compromised:

• Someone unknowingly installed a tampered browser extension.
• Someone stored their mnemonic in Notes, and it was synced to an unknown server.
• Someone’s phone was infected, and clipboard data was quietly uploaded.
• Someone entered their mnemonic on a spoofed site — and their wallet was drained within seconds.

This isn’t an exaggeration. In many phishing and scam cases, the same weak point shows up again and again: the mnemonic.

In this article, we explain why mnemonics have become a major risk in self-custody — and how Account Abstraction (AA) plus Passkey can reshape what digital ownership looks like.

1. The limits of EOAs: when a mnemonic becomes a liability

The EOA model isn’t “unsafe by default” — it simply puts too much responsibility on a single secret.

In a traditional EOA wallet, the mnemonic (typically 12 or 24 words) is the foundation of crypto ownership. It represents full control over your on-chain assets, and it shapes a core rule many newcomers quickly learn: your private key (or mnemonic) is your wallet.

As long as you hold that key, no exchange, validator, or institution can freeze your funds, confiscate them, or act on your behalf. But that level of decentralization is a double-edged sword: it gives you total control — and also creates an unavoidable single point of failure.

No reset

Once a mnemonic is exposed — even from an old screenshot that later gets copied or synced — you can’t “reset” it the way you would reset a password in a banking app.

The only option is to abandon the wallet and move assets to a new one. And if an attacker acts first, there’s nothing to reverse — and no way to recover what’s been taken.

A high-value target for attackers

A mnemonic grants full control. That’s why many attack paths — malware, fake wallets, spoofed extensions, phishing sites, and fake “support agents” — all aim for the same outcome: get you to reveal those 12/24 words.

Attackers don’t need to break cryptography. They just need you to let your guard down.

A major barrier for mainstream users

For users used to Face ID and fingerprint payments, safely storing a mnemonic (often on paper) is a major barrier. It doesn’t just slow adoption — it adds constant anxiety to everyday use:

What if I lose it? What if I stored it wrong? What if it leaks?

It’s like relying on a single key that’s exposed to routine actions and device-level risks.

That’s why, since 2022, the industry has explored “no-recovery-phrase” approaches — from MPC to smart contract wallets — in search of a better balance: self-custody with a simpler, safer user experience.

Now, with AA + Passkey, we may finally have a practical way to move beyond mnemonics over the next decade.

2. Passkey: making identity-based login work for Web3

AA moves accounts beyond a single private key — enabling recovery, upgrades, and customization. (Further reading: From EOA to AA: Will Web3’s Next Leap Happen at the Account Layer?) Passkey is the user-experience unlock that makes this practical for everyday users.

Passkey is a passwordless sign-in method based on the FIDO/WebAuthn standards, widely adopted by platforms like Apple and Google. In crypto, its impact is especially meaningful.

What Passkey is (in plain terms)

A Passkey is stored in your device’s secure hardware (on your phone or computer). You don’t need to remember, store, or type a mnemonic — Face ID, fingerprint, or a device PIN can complete sign-in and signing.

You may already be using Passkey today: when you sign in to an app or website with Face ID, fingerprint, or a PIN — without typing a password.

So if a Web3 wallet supports Passkey, users don’t have to handle private keys directly. And with AA, even gas steps can be abstracted — making transactions feel far more seamless.

Why Passkey is naturally more phishing-resistant

Passkey is more phishing-resistant for two reasons:

1. Keys stay on-device

The private key never leaves your device, so it can’t be “handed over” to a phishing site or a malicious extension.

2. Domain verification is built in

WebAuthn/FIDO2 binds authentication to the correct domain. Even if you open a lookalike site (including spoofed imToken scam sites circulated via SMS), your device detects the mismatch and refuses biometric approval. This is system-level protection — it doesn’t rely on you manually judging whether a site is real.

On top of that, Passkey is simply easier day to day: no copying, screenshots, or manual backups — just a touch or a glance to approve access and signing.

That’s why AA + Passkey isn’t an extra layer that forces users to learn more security habits. It’s a design shift where security and user experience improve together.

3. A next-generation model for security and UX

When AA meets Passkey, we can build an account model that feels more intuitive, more secure, and more future-proof.

Here’s the new philosophy:

• You are the key: Face ID/fingerprint becomes your signing flow.
• Hardware isolation: keys are stored in secure chips and can’t be exported.
• Multi-device sync: accounts can be used across devices via system sync (e.g., iCloud).
• System-level defense: risks are blocked automatically instead of relying on users to spot every fake site.

This is a new paradigm: don’t make users work harder — make the system smarter.

What this looks like in practice: imToken Web

Take imToken Web as an example. It’s a non-custodial web app designed to help users create or sign in to an account quickly — without setting up or backing up a private key or mnemonic — so they can access token features anytime, anywhere.

With imToken Web, you get a smoother “low-friction” experience:

• Fast setup: connect and approve with Face ID/fingerprint — no writing down 12 words.
• Stronger anti-phishing: Passkey sign-in enforces domain checks, so lookalike sites can’t trigger signing.
• Less gas friction: pay gas with USDT/USDC (no need to keep ETH just to transact).
• Easy device recovery: your Passkey can sync across Apple/Google devices; if you lose your phone, you can restore on a new device after system sign-in and biometric verification.

And once the barrier is lower, new interaction patterns become possible.

For example, you can share tokens like a red packet in imToken Web: choose “Send by link,” set the amount and expiry, generate a link, and share it via WeChat, X (Twitter), Telegram, or any other channel — even with someone who doesn’t have a wallet yet.

The recipient doesn’t need any setup. They can open the link, create an account with Passkey, and claim the assets securely.

Closing thoughts

Web3 should be usable for everyone — not just power users.

In a space full of uncertainty, products that package strong security foundations (AA + Passkey) into a simple experience can reduce both friction and risk. That’s exactly what wallets — as the gateway to self-custody — should be building for the next decade.

If you’re tired of recovery-phrase anxiety, worried about phishing, or want a wallet you can recommend with confidence, it may be time to look forward to — or try — a future without mnemonics.

On November 13, Vitalik Buterin announced he had signed The Trustless Manifesto, a document reflecting on Web3’s trust model and proposing three rules for judging whether a system is truly trustless: no critical secrets, no indispensable intermediaries, no unverifiable outcomes.

Just a few days later, on November 18, the Ethereum Foundation’s account abstraction team introduced the Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL) — a design built on ERC-4337 and The Trustless Manifesto.

Many people feel that Ethereum’s core decision-makers spend too much time on abstract theory. But in reality, this goes far beyond philosophy. If we want Web3 to reach billions of people, we have to ask: Is today’s account model truly accessible? If users can permanently lose all their assets just by losing a private key, have we really achieved self-sovereignty?

In this article, we’ll use The Trustless Manifesto as a starting point to look at why Ethereum needs Account Abstraction (AA), where EOAs fall short, and what kind of next-generation account experience AA can unlock for users.

1. What’s wrong with traditional EOA accounts?

Most accounts on Ethereum today are still Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs). Each EOA is controlled by a public–private key pair, usually turned into a 12- or 24-word mnemonic phrase. For many newcomers, this becomes the core “crypto security rule”:

Your private key / mnemonic = your assets.

As long as you control the private key or mnemonic for an address, the assets are fully under your control. Neither exchanges nor validators — no one — can freeze, confiscate, or move them for you.

But this pure form of decentralization is also a double-edged sword: it sets a very high bar for mainstream adoption of crypto assets.

• Learning curve: users need to understand basics like addresses, private keys/mnemonics, and gas fees.
• Storage risk: in the EOA model, ownership is fragile — because “private key = account” If your key is lost or stolen, your ownership disappears instantly and irreversibly. There’s no “forgot password” and no support team to restore it.

In short, with EOAs you are solely responsible for the security of your assets, which is why new users are constantly told not to screenshot or upload their mnemonics and to keep multiple offline backups instead.

Another typical trait of EOAs: to send any token, your account must hold ETH to pay gas fees. This leads to a common frustration for new users:

“My wallet has 1,000 USDT, but I can’t move a cent because I don’t have any ETH.”

Objectively, this “you must buy another coin just to spend your coin” experience is a major barrier to Web3 adoption.

Finally, interacting with EOAs can feel like signing the same paperwork again and again. Because EOA behavior is hard-coded on-chain, it’s very limited in what it can do.

For example, when you trade on a DEX, one simple action is split into multiple on-chain steps: first Approve (sign + pay gas), then Swap (sign + pay gas again). The process is both tedious and costly.

In The Trustless Manifesto, there is a key idea called “Accessibility.” A system might be trustless from a technical perspective, but if it’s so complex that only power users can operate it, it can’t really serve the public — and it’s hard to call it trustless public infrastructure.

Because of these structural limitations of EOAs, the ecosystem began exploring solutions like Account Abstraction (AA).

2. What is Account Abstraction (AA)?

Here’s a simple analogy: a traditional EOA account is like an old-school Nokia — simple and single-purpose. An AA account (a smart contract account) is like a smartphone — programmable and flexible.

From a technical perspective, AA has gone through several iterations — such as ERC-4337, EIP-7702, EIP-3074 and others. But as a user, the key idea is simple:

AA decouples the account from a single private key and turns the account into code — a smart contract.

Once an account becomes code, its behavior is no longer fixed — it’s programmable. You can embed rules directly into the account itself, such as:

• Who is allowed to use it
• How much can be transferred per day
• Who pays the gas fees

None of this was possible with EOAs alone; you had to rely on extra contracts and complicated setups.

That’s why AA accounts enable many more ways to manage security. With a traditional EOA, if you lose your mnemonic, there’s no way back. With an AA account, you can enable social recovery by setting up several guardians (another device of yours, trusted friends, or even third-party services). If you lose your key, your guardians can jointly help you generate a new one and regain control of the same account.

AA accounts also support a feature called Paymaster (gas sponsor). Apps can choose to pay gas on your behalf, which is great for onboarding new users. Or, you can pay gas directly with tokens like USDT in your account, with the Paymaster handling conversions in the background. In some setups, the whole experience can feel almost “gasless” to you.

So if EOAs are single-purpose Nokias, AA accounts are smartphones: by decoupling the account from a single key and letting code control it, we can add both richer features and stronger protections. And if Web3 is ever going to reach billions of people, we need more everyday actions on-chain — but with far lower mental and operational costs for users.

3. What can AA accounts bring to everyday users?

As a regular user, you don’t need to understand the code behind AA. What matters is that, once you upgrade to an AA account, your Web3 experience can improve in a few key ways:

1) Say goodbye to mnemonic anxiety (social recovery)

Because the account is no longer tied to a single private key, you can define more human-friendly security rules. For example, you can set 3–5 guardians (another wallet or device of yours, trusted friends, or a service).

If you lose your current phone or key, your guardians can help you generate a new key and regain control of the same account. In other words, your account and assets stay where they are — you just change the key, much like resetting access in modern banking.

2) No more “you must hold ETH” requirement (Paymaster)

AA accounts support Paymaster (gas sponsor). Projects that want to attract users can simply pay gas for them, so interactions feel as smooth as using a Web2 app.

And if your wallet only holds USDC, you can pay gas directly in USDC, with the system swapping behind the scenes — no need to go buy a tiny amount of ETH just to send a transaction.

3) One-click, atomic operations instead of many steps

Because AA accounts are smart contracts, they can bundle multiple on-chain steps into a single atomic transaction. Using the earlier DEX example: where you used to do “Approve → Sign → Swap → Sign”, an AA account can handle everything with one action.

Atomicity means either all steps succeed together, or they all fail — so you don’t waste gas on partial failures. It’s safer and saves both time and gas.

4) Fine-grained permissions and risk controls

Because AA accounts are programmable, they can manage permissions much like a modern bank account. You can set different security levels and daily limits — for example:

• Require multisig for payments over 1,000 USDT
• Allow smaller payments to go through with fewer checks

You can also keep whitelists and blacklists so the account only talks to trusted contracts.

Even if a key is compromised, spending limits and whitelists make it hard for an attacker to drain all of your funds quickly.

Conclusion

As The Trustless Manifesto emphasizes, a truly trustless system shouldn’t be reserved for cryptographers and power users. It should be accessible to everyone.

Account Abstraction (AA) is not here to replace or overthrow Ethereum. It’s a return to a more human-centric design. By using flexible code instead of fragile key management alone, AA helps compensate for how humans actually handle secrets — and removes one of the last big barriers to large-scale Web3 adoption.

As wallets like imToken gradually roll out AA features, it’s reasonable to expect a future Web3 that combines the smooth, familiar experience of Web2 with the self-sovereignty and openness that define Web3.

And you? You just get to enjoy the change.