What Pectra let a wallet do
Before Pectra, Ethereum’s two kinds of account from lesson 2 were strictly separate. A wallet had a key and no code; a contract had code and no key. Features that need code, such as paying for several actions at once or letting someone else pay your fee, were only available if you moved your money into a smart-contract wallet.
EIP-7702 changed that. It adds “a new EIP-2718 transaction type that allows Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) to set the code in their account.” Your ordinary wallet address can now point at a piece of contract code and behave like it, while keeping its key and its history.
What that gives you, in ethereum.org’s list: batching, so “approve+transferFrom” can happen in one transaction instead of two; “paying gas in tokens via sponsored transactions,” so an app can cover your fee or let you pay it in a stablecoin; and, through add-on modules, “session keys and account recovery.” A session key is a temporary key with limited powers, so an app can act for you within set limits.
Fusaka followed up with a cheap way for contracts to check the signature type that passkeys use, so a wallet built this way can be opened with a fingerprint or a face instead of a recovery phrase.
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