A smart account is a crypto wallet powered by a smart contract. Unlike traditional wallets (also called Externally Owned Accounts or EOAs), smart accounts are programmable — meaning they can follow rules, bundle complex actions, and offer a dramatically better user experience.
Account Setup and Deployment
At a technical level, your smart account is a smart contract deployed to the blockchain that holds your funds and executes your transactions. This contract can be customized with logic that defines how and when it approves actions.
However, smart accounts aren't always deployed immediately. Instead, they are often deployed at the moment you need to use them — to save on upfront gas costs. Even before deployment, the address of the smart account is known thanks to Ethereum's CREATE2 opcode.
📘 What is CREATE2?
CREATE2 is an Ethereum opcode that allows contracts to be deployed at predictable addresses.
This allows you to send ETH or tokens to the smart account address before it has been deployed. Once the smart account is finally deployed, it has immediate access to any funds sent to it beforehand.
This flexibility is a big part of what makes smart accounts so powerful.
With Newton, the deployment happens when you first need to sign a transaction, such as setting up a Recurring Buy Agent with permissions to make purchases for you.
Once deployed, the smart account becomes a fully operational contract wallet, able to sign and execute transactions based on your rules and logic.
Why Smart Accounts Matter
Smart accounts offer powerful features that go far beyond what EOAs can do. Here are some of the key benefits:
Smarter User Experience
No more network switching: You can sign and send transactions without needing to switch networks manually.
Batched transactions: Group multiple actions (like approve + swap + send) into a single transaction and sign only once.
Social recovery: Lose your device? Recover access without a seed phrase, using trusted people or other wallets.
Pay gas with any token: Use USDC, DAI, or any ERC-20 token instead of ETH to cover fees.
Sponsored transactions: Apps can pay gas fees for you — especially useful for onboarding new users.
Cross-Chain Capabilities
Same address across chains: Some smart accounts use deterministic deployment so your wallet address is the same on Ethereum, Base, Optimism, and others.
Unified balance: See your balances across chains in one place.
Recover funds sent to undeployed smart account: If someone sends ETH to your smart account on a chain where it hasn’t been deployed yet, you can deploy it later and claim the funds.
A Brief Technical Dive
Smart accounts are typically deployed using CREATE2 , which allows their address to be known in advance. The address depends on:
the deployer (a factory contract),
a
salt(usually derived from your EOA), andthe contract’s initialization code.
Transactions sent from a smart account don't go directly to the blockchain. Instead, they're packaged as UserOperations and sent to an EntryPoint contract, which verifies and executes them.
📘 What is a UserOperation?
A UserOperation (or UserOp) is a data structure introduced by ERC-4337. It represents a user’s intended action and replaces the need to send traditional Ethereum transactions directly from an EOA.
This architecture is formalized in standards like ERC-4337 and extended in newer systems like ERC-7579.
These details are abstracted away by most apps and wallets — but they unlock powerful new behaviors like gasless transactions, plugin-based features, and automatic transaction flows.
Smart Accounts Are the Future
Smart accounts make it easier, safer, and more flexible to interact with Web3 — especially for newcomers who are just getting started.
Newton smart accounts are modular and can be extended with new features over time. Adding spending limits, enabling session keys, or delegating access to an agent are behaviors that can be configured after the wallet is already live.
This modularity means smart accounts are not just smart — they are future-proof and customizable.