Powering Smart Accounts with a16z crypto Seed Backing

We founded Pimlico (opens in a new tab) earlier this year to make using Ethereum easier by providing the infrastructure for the new generation of smart accounts leveraging the ERC-4337 standard (opens in a new tab), co-authored by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, and myself, among others. Owing to the high degree of modularity the standard provides, it has paved the way for a Cambrian Explosion of new wallets and accounts since its mainnet launch at the start of 2023, powered behind the scenes to a large extent by providers like Pimlico.

Smart accounts tackle many limitations the Ethereum protocol has hardcoded, namely that each native account is linked to a single private key. Smart accounts introduce completely customizable logic, unlocking capabilities such as gas sponsorship, gas payments with ERC-20 tokens, better account recovery, spending thresholds, FaceID or passkey verification, among many other use-cases we expect from our accounts.

To further this vision, we have also recently launched permissionless.js (opens in a new tab), our library that is dedicated to streamlining the developer experience of building wallets and applications using smart accounts. We feel Pimlico has already made significant steps toward achieving our ambitious goals of making web3 accounts just as simple if not simpler to use than the current system of web2 accounts that we have today.

Since the beginning of the year we have seen developers take to our solution with nearly 3 million user operations bundled and sponsored, encompassing over 60% of all indexed user operations.¹

While we’re extremely excited about the core infrastructure we’ve built, we’re even more excited about some of the amazing projects that have emerged to build inventive use cases on top of this new paradigm of smart accounts and on top of Pimlico’s infrastructure.

Two creative examples I’d highlight are Daimo and Patch Wallet. Daimo (opens in a new tab) tackles one of the oldest use cases promised by crypto: P2P payments. Their obsessive focus on speed and simplicity combined with their use of smart accounts for complete gas abstraction and FaceID signature verification (powered by Pimlico’s bundlers and USDC paymasters) has resulted in a payments app that feels better to use than the similar web2 apps.

Patch Wallet (opens in a new tab) brings to the scene something that was also not feasible before the advent of smart accounts. They allow anyone to send you tokens via your social handle, without you having to have created a wallet beforehand. In addition to creating social airdrops directly to your Twitter followers or email newsletter readers, this new paradigm lets you use your already existing social accounts to onboard to web3, providing a simple way to onboard a massive number of new users to crypto.

While these two wallets are amazing, they are just two of many fantastic projects who have been able to quickly spin up and get going in weeks rather than years thanks to the ERC-4337 standard as well as Pimlico’s battle-tested infrastructure.

But more than what we’ve accomplished is why we’re so excited for the future.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Pimlico has closed a $4.20 million seed round led by a16z crypto (opens in a new tab). This comes on the heels of our recent pre-seed round and marks another crucial milestone in our journey to redefine smart accounts, and the way people transact onchain at large.

We’re proud to be working with a16z — they have established themselves as one of the most long-term oriented investors in the web3 space and we have thoroughly enjoyed working with them both during their Crypto Startup School and after.

This investment is going to further accelerate our plans of building the most world-class team to make web3 more usable.

We can’t wait for what’s next, and if you share this ambition, explore our job openings on our jobs page.