Ethereum and Coinbase-backed layer-2 network Base have abandoned their effort to agree on a unified next-generation wallet standard, leaving the two chains on divergent native account-abstraction paths for the first time.

Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang confirmed the breakdown on Sept. 14. Collaboration between developers of Ethereum's EIP-8141 Frame Transactions and Base's EIP-8130 collapsed the week prior, after attempts to reconcile the chains' differing requirements for a shared account-abstraction standard failed.

"Ethereum wanted to be the best version of Ethereum, and Base wanted to be the best version of Base," Chiang said in a post on X.

What does the split change?

The immediate consequence is architectural. Ethereum moves forward with Frames, while Base — authored by Coinbase engineer Chris Hunter — pursues its own structured design for native account abstraction. Wallet builders may now need to support different transaction architectures across networks that historically shared nearly identical account and transaction experiences.

Both proposals target the same feature set: programmable wallets with gas sponsorship, passkeys, and flexible authentication. The disagreement centered on a more fundamental question — how much freedom the protocol grants accounts versus how much structure chains impose on transactions before execution.

EIP-8141 breaks a transaction into programmable calls handling validation, execution, and gas payment. It detaches accounts from the elliptic-curve keys dominant on Ethereum today, enables key rotation, and lays a path toward post-quantum authentication. Its stated goal is an account as an address whose behavior is defined entirely by code.

EIP-8130 is more prescriptive. It requires transactions to identify their authenticator upfront, letting nodes determine validation requirements before executing arbitrary wallet code and reject unknown authenticators before execution. Its draft also includes separate adoption profiles: an L1 profile permitting authenticators outside a canonical set within defined limits, and a layer-2 profile allowing high-throughput chains to restrict the native transaction path to approved canonical authenticators.

Why did collaboration fail?

The collapse came only weeks after both projects were still negotiating. Ethlabs said in late August that developers had held dedicated discussions on Frames and EIP-8130 ideas — even after Ethereum core developers gave EIP-8141 a strong signal toward inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade.

Ethereum core developer Matt Garnett argued the divergence was structural, not accidental. "Market pressure forces them to ship features at a pace that L1 cannot match, so incompatibilities accumulate. Time will tell whether that is a strength or weakness," he said.

Chiang framed the priorities in similar terms. Ethereum mainnet optimizes for what he calls "CROPS" — censorship and capture resistance, open-source software, privacy, and security — favoring account models developers can extend without chain permission. High-throughput L2s like Base need account-abstraction systems that scale while remaining legible enough for chains to control which authentication methods they permit.

What happens to cross-chain compatibility?

Compatibility does not disappear, but it shifts. EIP-8130 retains a common authenticator set and positions ERC-4337 as an alternative transport on networks that do not support the 8130 transaction type, preserving a measure of account portability across EVM chains. The cost is that more of the work of maintaining interoperability moves away from the protocol layer itself and onto wallets and infrastructure providers.

The dispute has also reignited the broader debate over whether L2 growth automatically strengthens Ethereum. Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro said the split weakens the case for layer-2s as an inherently beneficial strategy for the L1.

"L2s are great — for the crypto industry and for people who own the sequencer. For Ethereum, they are just kinda like 'less bad' than competing L1s," Shapiro said. He argued Ethereum may need to rely less on the "halo effects" of businesses like Base and Robinhood and articulate more clearly what the base layer uniquely provides — a shift he linked to Vitalik Buterin's renewed emphasis on censorship resistance, privacy, and security.

Layer-2 networks still generate settlement demand, consume Ethereum data availability, and keep applications within the Ethereum ecosystem rather than losing them to rival blockchains. EIP-8130's portability mechanisms show Base is not designing for isolation.

With EIP-8141 signaling toward the Hegotá upgrade and EIP-8130 proceeding independently, wallet developers now face a concrete build decision: support two native account-abstraction architectures, or standardize on the ERC-4337 fallback — a choice that will shape the cross-chain user experience as both standards move toward mainnet deployment.