Global payment brand, Visa, has suggested a new automatic payment system built on Ethereum’s layer 2 chain, Starknet. The multibillion company shared the proposal in a thought leadership post on its website.
According to Visa, the auto payment system will allow a smart contract to connect and initiate periodic payment between a user account and a contract account.
The result is that a self-custodial will be created through which automatic payments can be made within a stipulated time without the direct involvement of the owner of the account.
EOAs, CAs, and Account Abstraction
The report from the blog post states that because existing blockchain networks cannot be used to initiate recurring payments, there is a need to implement Account Abstraction on the Starknet network.
How?
On the Ethereum blockchain, there are two kinds of accounts – Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) or User Account and Contract Accounts (CA). The former is an account that is controlled by a private key or by anyone that’s in possession of the private key.
However, Contract Accounts (CAs) or smart contracts are accounts deployed via a smart contract on the network and are controlled by a code. In essence, CAs don’t have private keys.
Thus, using Account Abstraction (AA), which is a proposal that will combine EOAs (user accounts) and CAs (smart contracts) to create a single type of account on the Ethereum blockchain, is a unique feature that will make auto payment safer and easier on Ethereum.
Although Visa said that the idea behind AA is an EIP-86 that was created in 2017 but was not implemented due to the complexity of initiating it to work at that time.
Delegable Accounts that use Account Abstraction (AA)
Visa further explained that a Delegable Account is an example of how Account Abstraction can work. While a user can pay for services to a merchant using a custodial wallet, the safety of the user’s private key is of concern because it is managed by a third party, Visa added.
However, with a Delegable Account, a user can use a self-custodial wallet and initiate auto payment to several services the user has signed up for. Those payments will be made at their specific times with or without the user’s presence.
In addition, Visa said that because the current state of Ethereum does not support AA, the Delegable Account they created was initiated on a layer 2 network, StarkNet, built on Ethereum.
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