Bale: ERC-4337 Bundler Grant Proposal

# Bale: ERC-4337 Bundler Grant Proposal ## Project Abstract We are trying to enable users to easily participate in the Ethereum ecosystem via smart accounts, without the need to ever touch an EOA. By acting as a bundler we will help facilitate gasless payments, payments in any ERC-20 token, secure accounts, and much more. Our existence as a bundler will help decentralize the bundler marketplace and make Ethereum more resilient. ## Objectives Our objective is to build and launch v1 of the Bale bundler. Success would mean a live ERC-4337 bundler that passes all the bundler specification tests and has a robust reputation system to fend off against DoS and other malicious attacks. ## Outcomes Bale will be another player in the bundler market, it will help to decentralize the bundler marketplace and give users a choice when deciding where to submit their UserOperations. It will serve to decentralize the bundler marketplace and gives users a choice when choosing where to submit their UserOperations ## Grant Scope The expected output of this grant is a live ERC-4337 compliant bundler allowing transactions to be submitted on the Ethereum mainnet as well as L2s. ## Project Team Initially, one person will be working on this project. Conner Jensen - Software Engineer - 60 hours per month ## Background I (Conner Jensen) am a software engineer who has worked on real time bidding systems in the advertising space, as well as consumer facing apps in the mortgage industry. I've participated in and won numerous hackathons including the Gitcoin Passport hackathon, Graph Hack, and LUKSO build UP. Particularly relevant is my work on a relayer for the LUKSO build UP hackathon called Baton. Baton allowed for gas less transactions on the LUKSO blockchain by using their concept of account abstraction (KeyManager and UniversalProfile) https://github.com/Rask467/lukso-relayer https://github.com/Rask467/lukso-relayer-frontend I've become increasingly interested in account abstraction and want to help contribute to it's adoption. ## Methodology I will first work to fully understand the ERC-4337 spec and then proceed to build and launch Bale. Bale will be written in Go not only for its performance and maintainability, but because it is well known in the Ethereum ecosystem and used in other popular projects such as Geth. ## Timeline - Research and study ERC-4337 to form a deeper understanding of it's intricacies and better understand existing bundler/builder architecture (~2 weeks) - Build Bale until if fully satisfies the bundler specification test suite (~3 months) - Deploy Bale and start accepting UserOperations (~1 month) - Add non user harming MEV strategies to increase profitability (continual effort) - Work on improving Bale's reputation system (continual effort) - Continue to improve Bale's infrastructure, reliability and security (continual effort) ## Budget - Research & Development Costs: $25,000 - Infrastructure Costs: $10,000 - Software & Misc. Costs: $5,000