Smart wallet adoption surges with over 11,000 EIP-7702 authorizations on Ethereum within a week of Pectra upgrade

Within a week of Pectra’s launch, over 11,000 EIP-7702 authorizations occurred, which indicates healthy uptake by wallets and dapps.

EIP-7702, part of Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, went live on the mainnet around May 6. It introduced a mechanism that allows standard Ethereum addresses controlled by private keys to delegate functionality to smart contract accounts temporarily.

This lets EOAs access advanced features without the need for users to migrate to a new smart contract-based wallet fully.

After Pectra, regular EOA wallets can authorize a smart contract to act on their behalf with a “delegation indicator” that points to the authorized contract. When a transaction reaches the EOA, the network executes the code of the delegated smart contract instead of the standard EOA behavior. The delegation can be reversed, which allows users to retain control over their EOA and revoke the smart contract’s authority if needed.

Smart accounts can have programmed features like batched transactions, which means users can perform multiple actions at once — such as approval and swap on a DEX — combined into a single transaction. Smart accounts can also implement advanced features such as multi-signature authentication, limits on expenditure, or automated transaction schedules. Users can transact without the need to pay gas fees using ether.

Following the implementation of this feature, Dune data from Entropy Advisors shows that WhiteBIT, a crypto platform, had a delegate contract that received 5,300 authorizations, nearly half of the total.

WhiteBIT likely uses this delegate contract to manage user interactions on-chain, possibly for features like batch transactions, gas sponsorship or streamlined user onboarding.

OKX's wallet leads among wallets with over 3,100 authorizations, significantly outpacing competitors. MetaMask, the most popular crypto wallet, has recorded about 1,300 delegations but holds more ETH in its delegate contracts than OKX, suggesting higher-value transactions or larger user balances.

Pectra includes multiple Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), with EIP-7702 being a standout for its focus on user-facing improvements. Beyond EIP-7702, Pectra included upgrades to Ethereum validator operations and Layer 2 blob scaling.