EOAs, Contract Accounts & Why Account Abstraction Exists

Let’s start with the elemental creatures of Ethereum:

EOAs (Externally Owned Accounts) and CAs (Contract Accounts).

A blockchain account looks like it has four fields—like a tiny backpack carrying:

• an address
• a nonce (counter of how many txs you sent)
• a balance
• a storage root + code hash

But here’s the split:

EOA = private-key-controlled bag of ETH

EOAs are lonely, code-less creatures.

Storage hash = empty.

Code hash = empty.

Everything depends on your private key. Lose it → the universe shrugs.

Every MetaMask account is an EOA. And because they rely on ECDSA signatures, you get:

• one signing algorithm
• one recovery model (none)
• one failure mode (catastrophic)