Why smart contracts wallets?

Ethereum wallets may take two different forms, Externally owned accounts (EOAs) or Smart Contract Wallets. The Sequence wallet is implemented as a smart contract, which allows the system to provide additional security and functionality.

Externally owned accounts

Externally owned accounts are the most primitive form of wallet on Ethereum; EOAs are accounts composed of a single ECDSA key pair.

Pros

• Simple to implement
• Cheap to use (in some scenarios)
• Easy to backup

Popular examples

• MetaMask
• Rainbow
• MyEtherWallet
• Trust

Smart contract wallets

Smart contract wallets are wallets that are implemented as smart contracts; it allows the wallets to implement arbitrary logic within the bounds of what's supported by the underlying virtual machine. Because of this, these contracts can implement functionality that's not available for EOAs, and can also be upgraded if they are prepared to do so.

Pros

• Multiple keys
• Key rotation
• Pay fees using ERC20 tokens (e.g. USDC)
• Upgradeability
• Social recovery support
• Meta-transactions
• More flexible design space

Examples

• Sequence
• Gnosis Safe
• Argent

Deployment fees per AA (Account Abstraction) Smart Account

In order for smart contract wallets to be deployed on-chain, a fee is involved which varies across AA providers.

From a list of providers found here, Sequence ranks as the lowest total fee to deploy an account.

As a comparison, the following is a list of the various fees across the ecosystem ranked in comparison to Sequence.