Recently, I’ve been exploring signatures in Ethereum. In the Ethereum ecosystem, there is a distinction between different types of wallets.

Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs)#

Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) are the standard wallets controlled by asymmetric encryption, where a user has a private key and a public key. The private key is used to sign transactions.

EOAs has these limitations:

• They cannot execute custom logic, such as time-locked transactions, spending limits, or auto-recurring payments.
• The private key is a single point of failure—if lost, the wallet is compromised.
• EOAs do not support multi-signature approvals, meaning they cannot collect multiple signatures for transactions.

Smart Wallets and ERC-1271#

Due to these limitations, smart wallets (also known as smart contract wallets) were introduced. These wallets are essentially smart contracts with custom logic acting as a wallet.

EIP-1271: Enabling Smart Wallet Signatures#

Before EIP-1271, only EOAs could sign messages, while smart contracts could not. This was a major limitation for systems that rely on signature verification.

ERC-1271 standardizes contract-based signature validation, allowing any smart contract (e.g., multi-signature wallets, DAOs) to define its own rules for verifying signatures.

While smart contracts cannot generate cryptographic signatures (since they lack private keys), ERC-1271 enables them to validate signatures based on predefined rules.