Boop vs ERC-4337

Here's a short comparison of Boop and ERC-4337 strength and weaknesses.

Note: smart account transactions are called "boops" in the Boop stack, and "user operations" (or "user ops") in ERC-4337, but we use the term "transaction" here.

• Latency
  • Simulation
    • Boop enables really low latency by enabling the submitter to set the fees for transactions it sponsors itself, and for transactions sponsored by paymasters (who need to validate that fees are set adequately). For instance, this means that for signature validation, account owner won't see the fee values.
    • ERC-4337 requires an additional network roundtrip to fetch the fees.
  • Paymaster
    • Boop encourages the use of onchain paymasters to avoid an additional roundtrip to a signing paymaster service, whereas that is the standard for sponsoring paymasters in ERC-4337 — who is still capable of also handling fully onchain paymasters.
• Balance fragmentation
  • Boop does not require users to stake with the EntryPoint to pay for transaction fees for non-sponsored transactions, whereas ERC-4337 does.
• Complexity
  • ERC-4337's contracts are much more complex than the Boop contracts. This is subjective, but form your own opinion: Boop contracts, ERC-4337 contracts
• Extensions
  • Boop has a well-specified and simple extension system.
  • ERC-4337 has two competing extension systems (ERC-7579, ERC-6900) the most popular of which (7579) is poorly specified, and has multiple incompatible vendor implementations.
• Adoption
  • Boop just came out.
  • ERC-4337 is fairly widely adopted.
• Audits
  • ERC-4337 contracts have been audited by OpenZeppelin.
  • Boop has not been audited yet.
• Wallet Support
  • Wallet for support ERC-4337 is relatively spotty — with Ambire being seemingly the only "real" wallet (i.e. not tied to single app) you can install start using today.
  • The Happy Wallet is powered by Boop, but only runs on the HappyChain testnet today.
• Gas Costs
  • Boop is marginally cheaper than most ERC-4337 contract implementations on a 1-1 basis.
  • ERC-4337 supports bundling its transactions, whereas Boop doesn't yet, which makes it then marginally cheaper than Boop.
• Griefing Protection
  • Boop offers less griefing protection than ERC-4337 — this is unavoidable to avoid user balance fragmentation (see above).
  • ERC-4337 outlines a complex set of griefing protection measures in ERC-7562, but not all major bundlers implement them.
• Mempool
  • Boop does not ship mempool logic. It is less well-suited for an open mempool in particular. Setup up a private mempool is not too complicated but not implemented.
  • One of ERC-4337's goal is the establishment of a fully open shared mempool, and this is implement in a number of ERC-4337 bundlers.

TODO extension links