The private keys are confidential stings of text to access a cryptocurrency wallet. Until now, losing private keys meant losing access to one’s Ethereum account and its funds. A new tool called “Account Abstraction” has been launched by Ethereum that will allow an owner to recover their ETH in the absence of private keys.

Referred to as the ERC-4337 upgrade, the feature has been implemented on the Mainnet. The abstraction tool relies on “higher-layer infrastructure”, as per the draft recommendation for improvement that was published in 2021.

For those who understand smart contracts and blockchain tech, the aim of the feature is to “allow users to use smart contract wallets containing arbitrary verification logic instead of EOAs as their primary account. Completely remove any need at all for users to also have EOAs (as status quo SC wallets and EIP-3074 both require).”

The feature, which avoids reliance on the underlying consensus layer of the blockchain, implies that it will depend on infrastructure providers for deploying the upgrade feature.

The software and coding related details can be seen here: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337

Ethereum recently underwent transition to POS to cut down on energy consumption, and thus ETH can no longer be “mined”. The stake-based reward system currently does not allow the staked ETH to be withdrawn, but the upcoming Shanghai upgrade will allow for stake withdrawals.