What is Account abstraction?
Also called: ERC-4337, smart accounts
Account abstraction turns a user account into a smart contract, so a wallet can add social recovery, spending limits, batched actions, and sponsored gas without changing the underlying chain.
In practice
The ERC-4337 standard delivers this on EVM chains without a protocol fork, using bundlers and paymasters. In practice it removes the two hardest onboarding steps for new users: funding an account before doing anything, and having no recovery path if a seed phrase is lost.