TL;DR. One of Base’s key focus areas for 2024 is making smart wallets the default to elevate going onchain. Today, we’re providing an update on our progress and how we’re collaborating with teams across the ecosystem to help more builders create next-gen onchain experiences.

Earlier this year, we shared our 2024 roadmap, with the mission to build a global onchain economy that creates innovation, creativity, and freedom. But to realize this mission, we need onchain to be more accessible and useful for everyday people. Today’s experience, with seed phrases, transaction signing, and gas fees, creates friction and prevents more people from coming onchain.

One of Base’s strategic pillars for 2024 is making smart wallets the default to enable more users to come onchain. Smart wallets will help solve the key challenges in security and usability that are holding back onchain adoption today — bringing more users onchain and letting builders offer simple onboarding and better experiences.

How Base is making smart wallets the default

The onchain world moves fast, and new approaches to wallet usability and security are quickly becoming available. We’re working with builders across the ecosystem to reduce complexity and unlock the next-generation of going onchain, including through smart wallets and account-abstracted experiences.

Building delightful experiences with easier onboarding: Base is collaborating with teams across the ecosystem, including Coinbase, to ensure Base-readiness for new wallet experiences that simplify user onboarding. Coinbase’s new smart wallet just launched on Base Sepolia testnet and is available for devs to test the experience. When on mainnet, it will let users create a wallet instantly for any onchain app using just a passkey – no app downloads, extensions, or seed phrases required. From there, users will be able to easily spend their Coinbase balance, pay gas in their token of choice, and more.

Combined with new embedded wallet solutions, like Privy and Coinbase’s Wallet as a Service embedded wallet (available for early access), we believe that 2024 is the year when wallets will work for users and builders, rather than against them.

Supporting best-in-class paymaster and bundler products: As developers build with account abstraction standards like 4337, they need access to best in class tools for abstracting gas and enabling users to more easily transact.

Builders looking to get started with account-abstracted experiences can use infrastructure from Alchemy, Biconomy, ZeroDev, Stackup,  Pimlico, Safe, or Coinbase Cloud, which recently launched an Account Abstraction Kit on Base. If you’re interested to learn more about building with the Paymaster and Bundler while learning how they work, check out the open-source Build Onchain Apps Toolkit.

Distributing gas credits for builders and account abstraction providers: To support the growth of the onchain economy through enabling more world-class apps, Base is extending gas credits to help builders get started.

• Builders receive 0.25 ETH in gas credits directly to their Coinbase Cloud account upon signup and can apply for additional gas credits of up to 5 ETH.

• Builders can also access gas credits through Safe, Alchemy, Biconomy, Syndicate, Pimlico, ZeroDev, Stackup, Privy, Manifold, and WalletKit. These teams are all helping drive smart wallet adoption on Base.

Driving down the costs of smart account transactions: We believe that lower fees (<$0.01) are critical for growing onchain adoption and innovation, and we’re collaborating with teams across the ecosystems to lower the costs of smart account transactions.

• EIP 7212: Base is working with Optimism and other ecosystem builders to launch EIP-7212 on the OP Stack in the upcoming Fjord hardfork, enabling passkey usage at lower cost. Passkeys enable seamless verification through user devices or biometrics, simplifying and securing onchain recovery. Passkeys are already adopted by leading tech companies like Google, and EIP 7212 will help bring them onchain.

• Bundler overhead subsidies: We’re offering bundler overhead subsidies to infrastructure providers innovating on ways to lower gas costs of bundled transactions.

Let’s build

We believe user-friendly experiences unlock worldwide onchain access, and we’re excited to support builders working on them. Mention @Base on Warpcast and X to share what you’ve built, and we’ll make sure more people see it too. Let’s build!