All terms
A wallet that is a programmable contract instead of a plain key pair.
A traditional account is a key pair with fixed rules: one signature, always required, no exceptions. A smart account is a contract, so it can enforce whatever rules you choose.
That unlocks spending limits, social recovery, automatic payments, batching several actions into one transaction, and letting an application pay your gas so you never need the native token to start.
A smart account could allow small daily payments with one signature while requiring a hardware wallet for anything above a threshold.
That a smart account is strictly better than a key pair. It adds recovery, limits and batching, and it also adds contract code that can have bugs, a deployment cost, and patchy support across chains. It is a tradeoff, not an upgrade.
Common questions
What can a smart account do that a normal wallet cannot?
What is the catch?
Where this comes up on the site
The guides that actually use this word, rather than a list of everything we have written.
Where to go next
More web3 terms
Want this explained out loud?
Some of these land faster in conversation than in writing. Sessions are one to one and you can ask anything, including the things that feel too obvious to ask.