Ethereum and Base abandon joint wallet standard, exposing L2 fragmentation
In brief
- Ethereum and Base halted joint work on EIP-8141 and EIP-8130 wallet standards after failing to agree on shared design
- Ethereum prioritizes censorship resistance and security, while Base optimizes for high-throughput scaling and transaction legibility
- L2 network split signals inevitable divergence driven by market competition and differing technical constraints
The Split and Its Origins
The breakdown occurred only weeks after the projects were still trying to bridge their differences. Ethlabs said in late August that developers had held dedicated discussions around Frames and ideas from EIP-8130, suggesting alignment was within reach. But the technical requirements proved irreconcilable.
The split leaves Ethereum advancing Frames while Base pursues a separate design for native account abstraction. Both proposals seek to make wallets more programmable, supporting features like gas sponsorship, passkeys, and flexible authentication. The core tension: how much freedom should protocols give accounts, and how much structure should chains impose on transactions before execution?
Why the Approaches Diverged
For Ethereum mainnet, Chiang identified the priority as CROPS: censorship and capture resistance, open-source software, privacy, and security. EIP-8141 introduces Frame Transactions, which break a transaction into programmable calls that can handle validation, execution, and gas payment. The proposal is designed to detach accounts from the elliptic-curve keys that dominate Ethereum today, enable key rotation, and provide a path toward post-quantum authentication.
Base faces different constraints. High-throughput layer-2 networks like Base need account-abstraction systems that can scale while remaining sufficiently legible for chains to determine which authentication methods and transactions they will permit. EIP-8130, written by Coinbase engineer Chris Hunter, takes a more structured approach. It requires transactions to identify their authenticator so nodes can determine the validation work required before executing arbitrary wallet code.
The Larger L2 Story
This split isn't a failure—it's a feature of how layer-2s operate. Ethereum core developer Matt Garnett said divergence among L2s was inevitable because market competition forces them to introduce features more rapidly than Ethereum L1 can. The uncomfortable truth: scalability and decentralization pull in opposite directions. Base needs speed. Ethereum needs resilience. Neither can have both without compromise.
The disagreement exposes a structural reality. The disagreement emerged over how much freedom the protocol should give accounts and how much structure chains should impose on transactions before they execute. Each design reflects its network's constraints. Whether fragmentation strengthens or weakens the ecosystem remains an open question.
