Intro to Account Kit

Account Kit is your all-in-one toolkit for building zero-friction sign-up and transaction flows. But what’s really happening under the hood?

Account Kit abstracts away the complexity of smart accounts, but as a builder it’s useful to have a foundational understanding of how it works. This way, you can make informed decisions and unlock the full potential of account abstraction.

Unlike other embedded wallet providers that only solve sign-up and key management, Account Kit goes further by streamlining the transaction flow with features like gas sponsorship. How? Through Account Abstraction and smart accounts 🚀 Let’s break it down.

Smart accounts: programmable wallets, not EOAs

With Account Kit, you’ll deploy a Smart Contract Account (SCA) for each user instead of an Externally Owned Account (EOA). This smart account will securely store the user's assets, such as tokens or NFTs.

What is a smart account?

Unlike EOAs, SCAs are programmable and can include logic. When we refer to SCAs, or smart accounts, we are typically talking about ERC-4337 smart accounts.

Account Kit comes with two enterprise-grade, audited smart account implementations, Modular Account and Light Account. You can choose the smart account that best fits your needs or bring your own smart account.

Why smart accounts?

Smart accounts unlock powerful Account Abstraction features like gas sponsorship and transaction batching enabling you to create seamless transaction experiences (more on this later).

Smart accounts provide flexibility, security, and additional functionality over EOAs. Features like social recovery, two-factor authentication, multi-owner support, and ownership transfer become possible with smart accounts.

In Account Kit, this concept will manifest as a Smart Contract Account.

Signer: web2 login and key management

A Signer is a service (e.g., Turnkey or Magic) or application (e.g., MetaMask) that manages a private key and signs transactions. The signature is only valid if the signer is an owner of the smart account.

Using Account Kit, you can secure a user’s Smart Account with email, social login, or passkeys, using our non-custodial Signer infrastructure. Smart accounts support advanced use cases, such as multiple owners and ownership transfer, offering more utility than EOAs.

With this setup, users can sign-up, log in, and sign transactions using familiar web2 user experiences.

In Account Kit, this concept will manifest as a Smart Account Signer.

Bundler: transactions → user operations

With Account Kit, sending transactions is as simple as sending “normal” EOA transactions. However, under the hood, you’re actually sending User Operations (UOs) — a standardized pseudo-transaction object — to a Bundler.

A User Operation (UO) is an ABI-encoded struct that describes a transaction to be sent on behalf of a user. Since SCAs cannot initiate transactions on chains without native account abstraction support, they send UOs instead. The Bundler will gather UOs from multiple smart accounts (senders) and bundle them into a single on-chain transaction.

A huge benefit of smart accounts is the ability to batch transactions in one UO creating simpler user experiences. For example, you can now approve and swap in one click, rather than signing, waiting, and sending multiple transactions.

In Account Kit, this concept will manifest as a Bundler Client, but for simplicity you may only need a Smart Account Client.

Gas Manager: sponsor gas

With gas sponsorship, your users won’t need to worry about having assets in their accounts to pay for gas. Using Account Kit, simply configure a gas manager policy, insert your policy ID into the SDK, and let our Gas Manager handle the rest.

Conclusion

Account Kit makes it easy to build a web2 user experience from sign-up to transaction. It includes everything you need to bring users onchain:

• Non-custodial Signer to authenticate with web2 login
• Secure and flexible smart accounts to store assets
• Gas Manager to sponsor gas
• Reliable and scalable Bundler to land user operations

Account Abstraction might seem complex, but Account Kit abstracts away the intricacies, allowing you to focus on building great user experiences.

Want to learn more? Explore our Account Abstraction education hub