Account Abstraction as a Privacy Primitive | Akash Balasubramani | ETHMumbai 2026

Okay, thank you so much uh for being present here for the talk. Uh I'm going to be talking about account abstraction as a privacy primitive. Uh that clicker just a small fumble. Okay, before I jump into the topic, uh let me just give you a quick glimpse of who am I. I am Akash.

I work at Starkware as an ecosystem and uh growth lead at Starkware. Um, so I handle things at Starkware and Starknet. So that's what I do and uh that's that's the reason I'm here to talk more about account abstraction and what we've been doing at starket specifically as well. And so what is account abstraction? So in traditional blockchains you might have seen these externally owned accounts uh which primarily are on MetaMask and Rabby wallets and all those sort of stuff which used to be about like probably say like a year ago where the way that it goes is externally owned accounts usually have one private key which controls everything and you must hold native token to pay for the gas.

So for example, if you bridge from one chain to a third chain the you need to have that particular chain's uh uh you know like token for the gas fee and that's a huge fumble all around itself. uh and EOA accounts generally they do not allow you for customization and they do not allow for programmability. What do I mean by that? Let me just jump straight in into what smart account account uh enables over here. So account abstraction is basically a way for you to program your smart your accounts through smart contracts.

So every smart contract is an account itself. So that's what it allows and what does this bring into the table is basically all of these uh accounts are programmable authentication. So you can verify bitcoin uh bitcoin signatures, ethereum signatures, stark signatures all around. You can just program your own uh you know like you know your expectations into your code and create your own uh accounts. So that's how it goes.

And uh if just before I go on to the next point has anyone outside anyone app? Okay. So we got one. Uh so that's that was a showcase of account abstraction itself where you didn't need to pay any gas fee for the account uh for the game itself and all of that was batched transactions and the way that you had to sign in was also you you could just do pass keys or sign in with Google. And this is what it brings to the table in terms of like just the account abstraction.

It brings social recovery 3FA 2FA security batch call multi call. You can just about batch about thousand to to 10,000 transactions within a single call as a single transaction. And that's what batch call brings in and brings in gas list transactions and oneclick onboarding. So this is what account abstraction generally brings onto the table itself. Now before I go into the whole primitives, let me also talk about what privacy is and why do we need privacy itself.

So privacy is privacy isn't about hiding your wrongdoings uh whenever we ask about privacy people generally say okay it's a way for crimes uh you know crime transactions to be offiscated. Uh but that's not the general idea. The general idea is where now when we go about onboarding huge institutions enterprises generally are not able to uh they can't actually expose data for exampas to the compet competitors and the other one is also I can't really pay onchain to my own u you know uh you know like salary payrolls because I wouldn't want others to know about my salary payrolls and all those sort of stuff. So having all of these onchain stuff uh currently is it's it's just transparent. It's on blockchain and anyone can just see it and even in terms of like trading strategies and all those sort of stuff is just it's just available and anyone can just copy trade and they can just you know redo the same transaction or like same strategy that everyone's been using.

But that's where we jump into privacy. So a quick quick uh you know statement is basically arguing that you don't care about privacy is basically saying that because you have nothing to hide is like arguing that you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. So that's how privacy matters I I would put put privacy matters in a way and next up just moving on to the next one is basically gas payment. So every time you involve when you want to do something private when you want to do a private transaction uh there's always a way where it is always linked back to your transaction uh linked back to your main wallet itself. So why or how giving you running through a quick example is basically Alice over here Alice general example Alice creates a private wallet and Alice sends ETH to the fun ETH to the other wallet to fund it and this funding transaction basically links Alice to this new wallet.

So every privacy tool on top is now becoming useless because you're able to easily link a particular transaction because that particular account might have sent a particular gas uh you know like a gas token to pay for that transaction and hence you know gas payment itself becomes a whole snitch in this particular use case. Uh so what happens what is the p what's the primitive over here and how can this be solved is basically through yeah so basically through running you through the first primitive is basically through privacy enabled pay masters. So generally right now just like I ran through uh without the pay master the way that it goes is basically the user pays the gas from their own wallet and this is being able to linkable to their own uh first main wallet itself. This is without the pay master but with the pay master how the flow would look like is basically the user would now be able to pay the gas through the pay master uh which the pay master handles the gas fees totally and there will be no links to the user because the pay master handles the whole uh transaction for the gas and now in order for the user to reimburse the pay master the the pay master takes this particular value from the privacy pool that the user might have already paid before. So this is how uh you know like pay masters work in general and this is like a private pay master uh functionality that can also be developed and that's actually a new narrative that a lot of people a lot of chains are looking to build on.

So how does this look from like a blockchain perspective uh from the blockchain perspective in uh on the usual flow it would be aware way where this links back to your own wallet the main wallet but from the blockchain perspective with the pay master uh the pay master is now the transaction sender and not the user. So it's totally unlinkable and this is also possible just because of account abstraction because you can add your own uh functionalities on top of your smart contracts which then acts as your account and hence you're able to uh have private pay masters on top of a particular chain. So that's the first primitive and moving on to the second primitive which is basically uh signature abstraction. Uh signature abstraction is a pretty huge thing. For example, imagine that you're looking to do something on top of Bitcoin or if you're looking to do something on top of another chain with another transaction uh another signature.

This is quite impossible. U but like in the traditional privacy system, you have two separate keys. Uh one separate key for like the privacy part and the other separate key for your wallet. So you need two identities to manage uh which is pretty easy to leak. uh but with a signature abstraction uh basically proof calls your account contracts which has a functionality called is valid signature inside and this basically you know verifies the proof uh verifies the signature and is able to actually accommodate the whole privacy uh programs within the particular wallet.

So your existing so in the current flow your existing wallet authorizes private transactions multi-IG social recovery hardware wallet and all work. Uh with the u you know uh you know with the abstraction you you'll have a separate key for viewing key which anyone can see uh but they can't really spend the token uh and you have this thing called signing key which has the spend authority uh and this is your actual account contract and this particular separation is only possible because of account abstraction itself. Um and all throughout the whole privacy primitives that I've tal uh talked you through it's something that's already native on a chain and uh this is something that's always programmable and uh and can be adjustable as per your use cases. But this is this these are like few primitives that I wanted to talk about with respect to privacy itself. Moving on to why this needs native account abstraction.

So currently you might be seeing the uh whole EIP is being spun up with respect to account abstraction itself. Um so a bolt-on A is basically this particular EIP that brings in the account abstraction functionality which uh right now not every account has a custom uh signature logic and it also needs like a separate bundler network and hence has a huge chance of metadata leak point which again breaks the whole point. uh with NATO account abstraction on starknet every account is a smart contract all uh and you can have custom signatures on top of your logic u and you can just figure you configure based on your particular application and there's no bundle layer like on top of the one that we have on EUAS uh we have a sequencer that handles everything and the proof system and the contract language is pretty much same it's skyro and hence makes it much much efficient and this is something that's been there since 2021 uh while everyone's now interested talking about a native account abstraction for the past 2 years or a year. So finally I just want to end up by saying privacy isn't a feature you add. It's an architecture you actually build uh from and uh but yeah I think that's that's pretty much it from my end.

Let me just go to the yeah so that's pretty much it from my end. Uh I'd love to have your questions answered uh if you guys have any questions. Yeah, sorry. Hello. Yeah.

Uh so uh how do you account for like a correlation attack that happens on uh your transaction pool like uh even if you send funds to the pay master and that kind of acts like a proxy? uh the like in the longer time scale isn't there like a way to define patterns for uh like you know siloing people into an identity. Uh so the way that the privacy pool would work is basically you can have any accounts in the privacy pool itself. Uh you don't necessarily need to have ETH or you don't necessarily need to have USDC privacy pool. It could be any privacy pool and that privacy pool can be then directly funded for the pay master itself and then the pay master pays uh the you know like the gas fee for that particular account that you delegate to and uh with the account abstraction feature there's another one where you can pay gas in any token you can just literally pay it even with the memecoin as well uh like that that's what account abstraction enables so all of these are programmable and that's that's how it solves all around

okay thank you

sure welcome any other questions Maybe a quick countdown. Three, two, one. Okay. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you for your time.

Uh, have a nice day. Yeah.