Our fundamental goal today is the same, but advancements in Ethereum and the greater ecosystem have changed our approach. We started as an account abstraction wallet - account abstraction, frequently referred to as “smart accounts” makes accounts programmable, which aligns greatly with our goals of making self-custody easier, as it enables chain abstraction, easier payment of transaction fees, account recovery and improved security.
However, account abstraction adoption has stalled and it was clear something was wrong. We, as a first mover in the space, realized very quickly what the bottlenecks were. Amongst them:users were unwilling to leave their old accounts behind, due to a combination of uncertainty with the new system, fear of getting locked out of web3 apps (many of them are still not compatible with Smart Accounts), and the sheer difficulty (or even impossibility) to migrate to a new account.
It did not help that account abstraction had significant drawbacks. E.g, there weren’t any standalone full-featured smart wallets that you can easily connect to your favorite apps, and the ones that did exist either lacked in critical features or had some regressions. Some of if the issues were more expensive transactions, different address on every network, poor network support, needing to pay to deploy an account, etc.
While we were busy building the extension wallet to solve all these problems, the Ethereum core devs were locked in on the same challenges, and wisely came up with the decision to solve this. Long story short, Vitalik helped too, and EIP-7702 was born. EIP-7702 makes existing accounts programmable, and is set to arrive in the upcoming Pectra Ethereum upgrade.
Luckily the Ethereum ecosystem was now getting an upgrade that strongly resonated with our vision of how to build the perfect wallet: get the best from this new technology (account abstraction), without making steps back, unlocking the next generation of wallet UX.
So the Pectra upgrade has given us the opportunity to make a new kind of wallet, and we took it: now the Ambire Extension is out of private beta, with full EIP-7702 support from day one. Ambire works with your existing accounts but still retains the benefits you love it so much for - accounts are now portable, cheap, and self-reliant.
After nearly a year in private testing, the time has come to open up Ambire to the general public - the extension will no longer require an invite code.This means that starting today, anyone can go to ambire.com, install the Ambire Extension and get started in minutes!
Following Pectra, we’ve reduced the reliance on sophisticated account abstraction infrastructure as much as possible, and we use native approaches such as EIP-7702.
This is done without compromising functionality compared to previous versions, in fact the very opposite: now you can get the same benefits for your existing accounts rather than having to create new Smart Accounts.
So is Ambire a smart wallet? It is, but without the compromises normally associated with those: thanks to the Pectra upgrade, Ambire takes a native approach to account abstraction.
To define Ambire as an “extension wallet” wouldn’t do it any justice. Еxtension wallets are the glue between self-custody and the future of the internet, in which you can interact with finance in an open and permissionless way, enabling proven use cases like DeFi (Aave, Uniswap), stablecoins RWAs (Circle, Tether, Maker), prediction markets (Polymarket), or even just trading memecoins (Uniswap, pump.fun).
Thanks to technological advancements like Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade (in particular EIP-7702), this paradigm can be extended to enable higher adoption rates. And while many apps will create accounts automatically for users using an embedded wallet, the true strength of Web3 is the unified digital ID, which enables composability.