Tech

Ethereum and Base Split Over Wallet Standards, and the Split Serves Both

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 16, 2026

Ethereum and Base just walked away from the negotiating table on wallet standards, and the breakup might be the healthiest thing to happen to crypto wallets this year. Developers from both camps ended talks last week on aligning their account abstraction proposals, choosing to ship separate standards instead of one compromised design.

The two proposals share a goal: making wallets dramatically easier to use, including paying fees while holding zero ETH and signing with a phone passkey. Ethereum is advancing Frame Transactions under EIP-8141 as a headliner for its Hegota upgrade, treating each transaction as a sequence of programmable frames that separately validate the sender, approve who pays gas and execute the user's actions. Base is developing native account abstraction through EIP-8130, built around an onchain Keystore that holds each account's approved signers and authenticators, already live on devnet.

The split came down to priorities. Ethereum's side is emphasizing censorship resistance, privacy and security, the values that define a base layer meant to resist capture. Base is optimizing for scale, customization and compliance, the values that define a high throughput layer meant to onboard the next hundred million users. Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang, a coauthor of the Ethereum proposal, put it plainly: every technical compromise they found asked one side to give up a little of its core goals, so they went their separate ways and left wallets to handle the resulting fragmentation.

Here is the contrarian read: this is specialization in action. Ethereum's EIP-8141 just earned a must ship label from the Ethereum Foundation's protocol cluster, with Vitalik Buterin calling it an omnibus that wraps up nearly every remaining problem account abstraction was meant to solve and adding that recent progress gets it close to optimal. Base gets to push its keystore design to the maximum on its own timeline. Both networks are now free to innovate on wallets to the fullest extent of their own visions, in Chiang's words, and the wallet community gets two excellent designs to bridge instead of one watered down compromise.

The cost lands on wallet developers, who may need to support two native transaction formats to keep the experience consistent across networks. That is real work. But the history of open protocols suggests the market sorts these things out: the better abstractions get copied, the clunky ones get abstracted away, and users end up with passkeys and sponsored gas either way.

For anyone building or holding in this ecosystem, the lesson is bigger than wallets. Ethereum's roadmap is maturing into distinct layers with distinct values, and the days of one design serving every chain are ending. Watch Hegota's Frame Transactions as the flagship: native account abstraction with a path toward post quantum authentication is the kind of upgrade that quietly rewires what a wallet can be.

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