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Pimlico: How does the infrastructure led by a16z crypto support ERC-4337 developers?

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On November 7, a16z crypto led account abstraction developer Pimlico’s $4.2 million seed round of financing

Author: Luccy, BlockBeats

BlockBeats Message, on November 7th, account abstraction developer Pimlico announced the completion of a $4.2 million seed round of financing, led by a16z crypto.

BlockBeats previously reported that on September 25th, Pimlico announced the completion of a $1.6 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by 1confirmation, with participation from Safe, Consensys, and more than a dozen angel investors. It is reported that Pimlico provides functions including ERC-20 token Gas payment, multi-signature scheme, social recovery, and expenditure limitation.

Despite the market downturn and unfulfilled promises in the cryptocurrency industry, there are still a considerable number of developers who remain passionate and committed. This is why a significant portion of the industry's funds are currently being allocated towards high-tech solutions. Pimlico is one such startup company.

1confirmation and a16z lead investment successively

Pimlico has completed a $1.6 million Pre-Seed round led by 1confirmation and a $4.2 million Seed round led by a16z in less than 3 months.

Just a few weeks after its establishment, Kristof Gazso, the founder and CEO of Pimlico, participated in a16z's Spring 2023 Cryptocurrency Startup School in Los Angeles and completed its accelerator program. Kristof introduced Pimlico's mission in his own blog and listed some investor evaluations and use cases. Sriram Krishnan, a general partner at a16z, also expressed his agreement with Pimlico's concept in his own blog. BlockBeats has selected and compiled excerpts from the blog post as follows:

a16z General Partner Sriram Krishnan:

One of the core promises of cryptocurrency is self-sovereignty over digital goods and assets. Despite this promise, developers of wallets or Web3 applications and experiences have long faced a dilemma of balancing user experience optimization with decentralization. In pursuit of optimizing user experience, developers often choose hosted solutions, sacrificing self-sovereignty. Those who prioritize self-sovereignty and self-custody require users to manage 12 or 24 word mnemonic phrases.

In 2019, the concept of account abstraction emerged as the first step in a series of solutions to achieve flexible and secure self-custody. In 2021, ERC-4337 was proposed and quickly became the first account abstraction standard to gain substantial momentum without the need to change the Ethereum consensus layer. Kristof Gazso is one of the main authors of ERC-4337, and his team includes Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and some core Ethereum researchers.

When we first met Kristof Gazso, discussions around account abstraction were in full swing, and his company was established to support future smart contract wallets. Inspired by his account abstraction talk at ETH Dubai and recognizing his close connections to core Ethereum developers, we quickly realized that Kristof was a world-class developer and we hoped to establish an investment relationship with him.

A few months later, Kristof established Pimlico, which is a product suite that enables wallet developers to easily embed account abstraction functionality. Pimlico is committed to making the crypto user experience simpler and more convenient by providing services such as gas fee sponsorship, ERC-20 token payments, social recovery plans, batch transactions, spending limits, and different account access levels.

Just a few weeks after the establishment of Pimlico, Kristof attended our 2023 Spring Cryptocurrency Entrepreneurship School held in Los Angeles. In just a few short weeks, we were impressed by the speed at which Kristof and his team delivered products and established important early partnerships with Pimlico. At the end of the cryptocurrency entrepreneurship school, we were convinced that no one was more capable than Kristof in building the infrastructure to support account abstraction.

We look forward to working with them because they are committed to fulfilling Web3's self-sovereignty promise through the usability and availability of Web2. We are also excited to collaborate with Kristof and the Pimlico team in our new office in London. Pimlico is headquartered in London, and we are thrilled to work with outstanding entrepreneurs in the UK ecosystem, of which Kristof is a prime example.

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Pimlico Founder and CEO Kristof Gazso:

Since its launch in 2015, the Ethereum protocol has been hard-coded to associate each local account with a private key, which users need to securely store. Storing these keys makes accounts more vulnerable to hacking, phishing attacks, and human error. Pimlico was founded with the aim of making Ethereum usage more convenient by providing infrastructure for the next generation of smart accounts.

These intelligent accounts can solve many of the shortcomings of private key-based accounts by providing customizable logic, Gas sponsorship, Gas payment using ERC-20 tokens, multi-signature schemes, social recovery, and spending limits. We look forward to a user-friendly account system with the features we expect.

Thanks to a proposal called ERC-4337, the innovation speed in the smart account field has been greatly accelerated. The proposal was jointly written by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, and others, providing a comprehensive standard for smart account providers, allowing them to rely on services such as Pimlico instead of building all the underlying logic and infrastructure themselves.

At Pimlico, we have launched a package that includes three products. Our bundlers and validators have been providing reliable and fast relays for on-chain smart account transactions, acting as a Gas sponsorship module, providing developers with a simple way to support users on over 15 chains and our ERC-20 payers. Developers can also offer users the option to pay transaction fees using ERC-20 tokens such as USDC and DAI.

Many wallets have already been using Pimlico in production to speed up delivery and focus on providing a user experience for end users without worrying about building, maintaining, and scaling underlying smart account infrastructure.

Here are some comments from our investors regarding Pimlico:

1confirmation General Partner Richard Chen: "The abstract idea of accounts has existed since the birth of Ethereum, but now EIP-4337 has finally come to fruition. Kristof, the co-author of this specification, is one of the best founders we have ever seen. He has standardized account abstraction as a wallet and improved the user experience of applications."

1confirmation founder and general partner Nick Tomaino: "Kristof is a killer founder who has solved the biggest problem in today's cryptocurrency - improving user experience while retaining user control. When we talk to developers building new wallets and dApps, it is clear that Pimlico is addressing a key pain point that could greatly benefit the adoption of cryptocurrency."

Safe co-founder Lukas Schor: "Safe is honored to be one of the early supporters of Pimlico. The project's technological focus is aligned with our mission and values in accelerating the transition to intelligent accounts. We look forward to exploring further collaboration paths between the Safe and Pimlico teams around ERC-4337."

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Due to the highly modular nature of ERC-4337, since its launch on the mainnet in early 2023, it has paved the way for the Cambrian explosion of new wallets and accounts. Recently, we also released permissionless.js, a library focused on simplifying the developer experience of using smart accounts to develop wallets and applications.

From the beginning of this year until now, we have seen developers adopt our solutions to bundle and sponsor nearly 3 million user operations, covering over 60% of all indexed user operations. We are very excited about some innovative use case projects based on the new paradigm of smart accounts and the Pimlico infrastructure, such as Daimo and Patch Wallet.

Daimo has solved one of the oldest use cases promised by encryption technology: P2P payments. Their dedication to speed and simplicity, combined with the use of smart accounts for complete gas extraction and FaceID signature verification (supported by Pimlico's bundlers and USDC payers), makes the use of payment applications feel better than similar web2 applications.

brings functionality that was previously impossible before the emergence of smart accounts. They allow anyone to send tokens to you through your social account without you having to create a wallet beforehand. In addition to creating social airdrops directly to your Twitter followers or email subscribers, this new model also allows you to join web3 using existing social accounts, providing a simple way to attract a large number of new users to use cryptocurrency.