Ethereum and Base developers have officially ended efforts to align EIP 8141 and EIP 8130 after failing to reach agreement on a common account abstraction design. According to reports from crypto.news, Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang confirmed the split in a series of posts on X dated September 14, stating that the collaborative effort between Ethereum Improvement Proposal 8141, known as Frame Transactions, and Base's EIP-8130 broke down the previous week. As reported by BigGo Finance, Chiang wrote "I'm sad to report that the AA collab between 8130 and 8141 (Frames) broke down last week, and Base and Ethereum are now going separate ways to implement different AA standards." Both proposals seek to simplify crypto wallet interactions, including transactions without users needing ETH for gas and supporting authentication methods like phone passkeys. The effort to unify how Ethereum handles account abstraction just hit a wall, with differing priorities between Layer 1 and Layer 2 developers ending reconciliation talks.
The fundamental split stems from different network priorities, with Ethereum prioritizing censorship resistance, privacy and security for the settlement layer, while Base focuses on scalability, configurability and programmable compliance controls for commercial and enterprise use. According to BigGo Finance, Ethereum's Layer 1 developers emphasized censorship resistance, privacy, and long-term security for the settlement layer, with their proposals centering on transaction formats that support post-quantum signature aggregation, underpinning standards like ERC-4337, EIP-7701, and the recently drafted EIP-8141. Base, developed by Coinbase, requires a technical architecture that scales efficiently and supports programmable compliance controls for commercial and enterprise use, with its approach embodied in the Tempo Transactions standard and EIP-8130. As reported by crypto.news, Chiang explained that while technical solutions were identified, they all required one network to compromise on core goals, with engineers from both teams spending months evaluating technical options. The two proposals agreed on the core use cases, including gasless transactions, passkey-based wallets, and transaction batching, but diverged on the values underlying the architecture.
EIP 8141 has been designated a must-ship proposal for Ethereum's planned Hegotá upgrade, with the Ethereum Foundation Protocol cluster placing it in the 'must-ship' category earlier this month. According to crypto.news, Frame Transactions divide transactions into programmable frames, allowing different accounts to initiate and pay for actions separately. The model removes the common wallet requirement where users holding stablecoins still need ETH before transactions, and frames can be used for transaction batching with related actions grouped together. As reported by BigGo Finance, Ethereum's account abstraction work is part of the broader Hegotá upgrade, currently scheduled for 2027, which aims to make AA a native feature of the protocol, with Chiang among the proposal's authors. EIP-8141 reflects Ethereum's ethos, focusing on flexible transaction primitives designed for broad extensibility and post-quantum readiness, remaining in draft form and expected to ship as part of Ethereum's upcoming Hegotá upgrade. Ethlabs has described the central tradeoff: permissionless, EVM-based validation gives Frame Transactions flexibility for privacy and future signature systems, but dynamic validation costs can create challenges for high-throughput Layer 2s.
Base will continue developing EIP 8130 separately from Ethereum's Frame Transactions proposal, with the network requiring a technical architecture that scales efficiently and supports programmable compliance controls for commercial and enterprise use. According to BigGo Finance, Base's design combines a new transaction type with an onchain 'Keystore' that records approved signers and authenticators for accounts. The proposal supports custom authentication, call batching and gas sponsorship, with transactions identifying authentication methods for network validation processes. EIP-8130 is already being tested on Base's vibenet devnet and is designed for adoption across the OP Stack, the modular framework that powers Optimism, Base, and a growing number of rollups. The proposal claims up to a 63% reduction in gas costs for certain transfer types compared to the existing ERC-4337 approach. The 8130 draft defines an L1 profile with permissive authenticator acceptance and an L2 profile that limits its native transaction path to a canonical authenticator set, intended to give high-throughput chains predictive validation costs while preserving a common baseline for wallets. This approach gives each network different levels of control over transaction authentication and processing, with the split not precluding all future coordination as Ethereum L1 and Base may still collaborate in areas that do not require either side to compromise on core priorities.
Despite the technical split, Ethereum continues to demonstrate strong network fundamentals with Q2 2026 transactions reaching 203.9 million, representing a 68.4% year-over-year increase and all-time high throughput. According to Token Terminal, the network achieved an average TPS of 25.9, also a record high, while staking ratio climbed to 32% and holder addresses reached 312.1 million, both all-time highs. However, the split exposes a structural problem as market competition forces L2 networks to introduce features more rapidly than Ethereum L1 can match, according to Ethereum core developer Matt Garnett. As reported by crypto.news, the breakdown came only weeks after the projects were still trying to bridge differences, with Ethereum core developers giving EIP-8141 a strong signal toward inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade. Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro argued that the split could make the case for layer-2 networks as inherently beneficial for Ethereum harder to sustain, stating that "L2s are great — for the crypto industry and for people who own the sequencer. For Ethereum, they are just kinda like 'less bad' than competing L1s." The decision leaves wallet developers facing potential support for two native transaction formats if both proposals reach production, with the immediate practical consequence being that developers building smart account infrastructure now need to think about which standard they're targeting.
