Pimlico, the infrastructure platform powering Ethereum’s transition to ERC-4337 smart accounts, has raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed round led by 1confirmation, with further backing from Safe, Consensys, and 10+ other angel investors. Along with the support of its backers from the Ethereum community, Pimlico will use the funding to build the next generation of smart account infrastructure.
Ethereum is at a pivotal point. Since its launch in 2015, the Ethereum protocol has hardcoded that each native account is linked to a single private key, which the user must securely store. Storing these keys makes accounts more vulnerable to hacking, phishing attacks, and human errors. Pimlico, which recently completed a16z crypto's Crypto Startup School 2023 accelerator program, was founded to make using Ethereum easier by providing the infrastructure for the new generation of smart accounts.
These smart accounts can address many of the shortcomings of private key-based accounts by offering customisable logic, enabling features like gas sponsorship, gas payments with ERC-20 tokens, multi-signature schemes, social recovery, spending limits, and many of the other features expected from a user-friendly account system.
The speed of innovation in the smart account space has massively accelerated following the deployment of the ERC-4337 proposal, co-authored by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, and Kristof Gazso, founder of Pimlico. This proposal provides a comprehensive standard that smart account providers can build on top of, removing the requirement to build all the underlying logic and infrastructure themselves, instead of being able to rely on services such as Pimlico.
Pimlico has previously launched a suite of three products. Pimlico’s bundlers have been allowing the reliable and fast relaying of smart account transactions on-chain, verifying paymasters have been acting as gas sponsorship modules, giving developers an easy way to sponsor fees for their users on more than 15 chains, and Pimlico’s ERC-20 paymasters have given developers the power to provide users the option of paying with ERC-20 tokens such as USDC and DAI for transaction fees.
A wide range of wallets are already using Pimlico in production to ship faster and can focus on the user experience they provide to their end users instead of worrying about how to build, maintain, and scale the underlying smart account infrastructure.
Richard Chen, general partner at 1confirmation, said: “The idea of account abstraction has been around since Ethereum's beginning, but now the timing is finally right with EIP-4337. Kristof, having co-authored the spec, is the best founder we've seen to make account abstraction the standard for wallets and improve the user experience of apps.”
Lukas Schor, co-founder of Safe, added: “Safe is proud to be one of the early backers of Pimlico, a project with a technical focus that we believe is aligned with Safe's mission and values of accelerating transition to smart accounts. We look forward to exploring further collaboration paths between the Safe and Pimlico team around ERC-4337.”
Nick Tomaino, founder and general partner at 1confirmation, said: “Kristof is a killer founder solving the biggest problem that exists in crypto today - improving user experience while preserving user control. When we talked to devs building new wallets and dApps, it was clear that Pimlico was solving a critical pain point that could greatly benefit crypto adoption.”
