By Christopher Louis Tsu, CEO, Venom Foundation
In the industry, this term is now used more often than “DeFi” was back in 2020. It refers to a real shift in how blockchains are built and explains why some networks are quietly winning the race for usable payments while others aren’t.
Anyone who has sent crypto knows the routine. You write a seed phrase on a scrap of paper, buy a small amount of the native coin for “gas,” approve the transaction manually, double-check the fee, wait for a confirmation, and hope you didn’t mistype the address halfway through. I’ve spent years watching that experience push ordinary people away faster than any regulator could.
Account Abstraction (AA) is the fix. The point of it is to get rid of the transaction steps a normal person was never supposed to deal with in the first place. The fee no longer has to be paid in a dedicated gas coin; it can come straight out of the same stablecoin you’re already sending.
A lost seed phrase stops being fatal once recovery can run through social guardians or biometrics. Routine actions can be handled by session keys instead of a fresh signature every time, and the account itself can enforce limits, multisig and whitelisted addresses without the user ever opening a settings menu.
Most of this has been standard in banking apps for a decade. So the question worth asking isn’t whether to do it. It’s where in the stack it needs to occur, because that single decision quietly sets your cost per transaction and your ceiling for scale.
The fork in the road
On Ethereum and most EVM chains, AA is added on top of the network through the ERC-4337 standard, finalized in 2023. Credit where it’s due: it brought smart accounts, gas sponsorship and custom signatures to Ethereum without altering the consensus mechanism. The catch is that it runs as a parallel system.
Users sign “UserOperations” that move through a separate mempool, get collected by specialized nodes called bundlers, and execute through a single EntryPoint contract. All of that demands its own plumbing, and every added validation step costs gas that the base transaction never needed.
The 2025 Pectra upgrade and its EIP-7702 softened the edges, and deeper in-protocol proposals are being debated now, but on the EVM today, abstraction still mostly sits above the chain rather than inside it.
A newer set of networks went the other way. TON, Aptos, Sui and Venom handle account abstraction natively, in the protocol itself, with no bundlers and no second mempool. Aptos Labs said the quiet part aloud when they shipped theirs: on Aptos you just submit a transaction with a different authenticator, while ERC-4337 usually makes you route through a bundler that wraps the operation first.
We went a step further with Venom. On Venom, the whole notion of a key-controlled “externally owned account” doesn’t exist. Our documentation puts it simply: every account on Venom is a smart contract, so authentication, spending rules and recovery are written into the account from the start. There’s nothing to enable. Abstraction is just how the chain works.
If you build financial products, the contrast is a bit like running software you installed from an app store versus software baked into the BIOS. Both work. What differs is the cost, and across millions of transactions, even the tiniest fees add up to significant sums.
The gate to the next billion
“The next billion users” gets repeated loosely, but the mechanics behind it are concrete. The thing that actually stops people isn’t price or regulation. It’s the friction of getting started, the seed phrases and gas tokens and failed transactions that lose newcomers in the first half-minute.
You can already see what removing that friction does, and it’s happening on a natively abstracted chain. TON, built into Telegram, passed 100 million on-chain wallets faster than any blockchain before it and now points to near-zero fees and native reach into more than a billion users. Its smart wallet lets people cover gas in the same stablecoin they’re sending. Most of those users couldn’t tell you they’re using a blockchain, which is precisely the outcome they’re after.
A mass-market payments product can be built on non-native AA, and it will function. But it inherits the overlay’s per-transaction cost and its reliance on bundler infrastructure, and at real volume those numbers compound.
For fintechs and payment operators going after mobile-first markets in MENA and Southeast Asia, where the app has to stay cheap and dependable on a low-end phone, the base layer stops being a matter of developer taste and shows up directly in the margins.
That math is what brings serious payment teams to a chain like Venom, where the abstraction is already built into the floor, and the overhead just isn’t there.
The next billion people won’t know this term and won’t care about it. They’ll judge crypto on whether moving money feels as quotidian as sending a text. Reaching that point means building abstraction into the foundation instead of bolting it on later. That’s the bet we made with Venom, and watching how the rest of the market is moving, it’s the one I’d make again.
Read also: Palmpay on addressing educational barriers with strategic social impact
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