imToken 2025 Annual Overview

In 2025, the focus of the Ethereum ecosystem evolved from purely scaling to the broader vision of Unified Ethereum. As liquidity fragmentation and fragmented user experiences on Layer 2s became increasingly evident, imToken shaped its annual strategy around addressing these divides through infrastructure enhancements.

Over the past year, through deep integration with Account Abstraction, interoperability protocols, and the exploration of new interaction paradigms, we moved significantly closer to a “single-chain–like” experience—without compromising decentralization.

In the face of the AI wave, we are also exploring a new paradigm for wallets. Our goal is to build a defensive bulwark—using the certainty of code to shield users from the opacity and risks of the AI black box.

1. Trends: From Fragmentation to Unified Ethereum

Over the past two years, while Layer 2 solutions have successfully reduced gas costs and increased throughput, they have also introduced a new challenge—fragmentation. User assets are now distributed across networks such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Moving funds between chains has become more complex and costly, and developers face higher operational burdens from deploying and maintaining applications across multiple networks.

Against this backdrop, Ethereum established "Unified Ethereum" as its core annual objective. This is not merely a marketing slogan, but a comprehensive reconstruction.

imToken’s 2025 Journey: 

We stayed true to our core values of decentralization, trustlessness, and security. We believe better user experience should never come at the cost of self-sovereignty. Throughout 2025, our work focused on closing L2 gaps and enabling equal access and verifiable security—without compromising user autonomy—reshaping how users enter Web3.

2. Infrastructure Reconstruction: imToken’s 2025 Practices & Milestones

To realize the vision of Unified Ethereum, imToken built five technical pillars across the account, transmission, and application layers.

2.1 Account System: Building on Account Abstraction

To bridge the fragmented ecosystem under a Unified Ethereum, reconstructing the account layer is critical. With ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 maturing, Account Abstraction (AA) delivers programmable capabilities that fundamentally transform the user experience:

• Signature Abstraction: Decouples accounts from private keys, enabling diverse verification (e.g., passkey) and facilitating multi-chain operations via a single signature.
• Transaction Batching: Bundles complex workflows like 'Approve + Bridge + Stake' into a single, atomic transaction.
• Permission Firewalls: Enforces account-level security rules—such as spending limits and whitelists—acting as programmable armor for assets.
• Gas Abstraction: Allows gas payments in stablecoins or other tokens, eliminating the friction of managing ETH across chains.

These capabilities make AA the essential infrastructure for driving Web3 mass adoption.

imToken’s Strategy: Decoupling Accounts from Keys

To deliver the superior UX promised by Account Abstraction (AA), imToken tackles the challenge of balancing security with convenience. We have transformed AA's core mechanism—decoupling accounts from keys—into a solution that combines Web2-grade smoothness with Web3-grade sovereign security:

• Seamless Daily Access (Passkey): Leveraging Signature Abstraction, we enable users to sign transactions using biometrics (Face ID/Touch ID). This provides an instant, frictionless experience for daily interactions.
• Security Fallback (Recovery Key): To mitigate the single-point-of-failure risk associated with cloud services, we implemented a decentralized recovery mechanism. Users can bind their keys (private key/mnemonic) as a safety net. This ensures that even if passkeys are lost or services fail, the user retains ultimate authority to reclaim the account—guaranteeing sovereign control and true trustless security, even in extreme scenarios.

2.2 Value Transmission: Send to Anyone

Traditional crypto transfers face a problem: the recipient must first download a wallet, back up a seed phrase, generate an address, and even hold tokens for gas before they can do anything. This drastically hinders new user onboarding

imToken’s Send by Link enables users to effortlessly transfer tokens to anyone.

• Breaking Barriers: The sender simply shares a link (or QR code) to initiate the transfer.
• Seamless Claiming: The recipient clicks the link and uses passkey to quickly create a wallet—skipping complex seed phrase backups—to claim the tokens directly.
• Value Transfer: This solution utilizes Account Abstraction to handle gas fee sponsorship. It delivers on the vision where "anyone can send tokens to anyone without permission," making value transfer as simple as sending a text.

2.3 Interoperability: Building a Unified Liquidity Network

With the explosion of L2s, liquidity fragmentation became a nightmare. Moving funds across multiple chains via bridges involved cumbersome steps, long wait times, and low capital efficiency.

imToken is aligning closely with the Ethereum Foundation, actively exploring and integrating OIF (Open Intent Framework) and EIL (Ethereum Interoperability Layer).

• Strategic Alignment: While these standards are primarily led by the Ethereum Foundation, imToken views them as a high-priority annual goal, dedicated to translating protocol-layer progress into user-layer value.
• Unified Network Experience: Through these protocols, users will only need to focus on "Intent" (e.g., "I want to swap A on Chain X for B on Chain Y") without worrying about the underlying cross-chain path. imToken assists users in completing cross-chain interactions with one click, breaking the invisible walls between L2s and enabling the free flow of capital.

2.4 Identity: Introducing Chain-Specific Addresses to Eliminate Ambiguity

The reuse of the mainnet address format (0x...) across L2 and EVM ecosystems has created ambiguity and deposit errors in multi-chain environments—a primary cause of user asset loss.

Addressing this is a key UX priority for imToken. We are actively exploring the adoption of ERC-7930 & ERC-7828 to introduce email-like addresses (e.g., address@chain)

• Error Prevention: When this feature goes live, both users and wallets will explicitly identify the target network. Typing user@optimism will automatically switch the wallet to the Optimism network, rooting out asset loss caused by selecting the wrong chain.
• Enhanced Readability: Transforming obscure hash values into human-readable, semantic labels significantly boosts user confidence and peace of mind during transfers.

2.5 Interaction Experience: Evolving Toward Intent-Based UX

Traditional wallets require users to think like programmers (authorizing, selecting routers, setting slippage), resulting in a high barrier to entry and frequent errors.

Recognizing this shift, imToken is actively exploring intent-based solutions.

• Declarative Interaction: Users simply express "what I want" (e.g., "Exchange 100 USDT for as much ETH as possible") without worrying about "how to do it."
• Outcome-Oriented: The system finds the optimal solution via off-chain matching and presents a deterministic result (What You See Is What You Get) before the transaction goes on-chain, reducing slippage and mitigating MEV attacks.

3. Future Outlook: Exploration and Defense in the Age of AI

Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, wallets will undergo a fundamental evolution driven by AI integration. imToken is actively exploring how to reimagine the role of the wallet in this new era.

3.1 Short-Term Outlook: Interoperability Takes Center Stage

imToken predicts that as OIF and EIL matures, 2026 will be the breakout year for Interop.

• Unified Liquidity: Ethereum ecosystem liquidity will no longer be fragmented by L2s but will converge into a massive unified market. Projects will only need to maintain one network interface to reach all L2 users.
• Invisible Interaction: Users won't even need to know which chain they are using. imToken will continue to invest resources to drive this vision from usable to delightful.

3.2 Unified & Verifiable UI

We are crafting a unified interface to simplify complex multi-chain navigation. However, the UI itself can be a potential attack vector. To advance decentralization, imToken champions Verifiable UI, empowering users to verify the interface's authenticity. This ensures full control over assets and the interface, even if centralized services go offline.

3.3 Embracing AI without Compromising Security

In the long term, if AI agents become the primary interface for user interaction, imToken believes the wallet's responsibility is to establish a dynamic balance between "Intelligence" and "Security." If we liken AI to a radical "Spear," then Crypto and the wallet are the guarding "Shield."

• AI is Probabilistic: AI agents interpret ambiguous natural language intents. While intelligent and efficient, they carry risks of hallucinations, errors, and even manipulation.
• The Wallet is Deterministic: In the AI era, the wallet must be more than just a gateway; it must serve as the final line of defense for transaction execution.

Constraining the Probabilistic with the Deterministic: imToken is exploring ways to audit and constrain probabilistic AI behaviors using deterministic code and rules (hard constraints). No matter how intelligent the AI becomes, it cannot bypass the security barrier enforced by the wallet. This ensures that every transaction operates within a framework of verifiability and guaranteed privacy.

Conclusion

In 2025, imToken is undergoing a significant shift: evolving from a simple asset management tool into both a bridge across fragmented Layer 2 ecosystems and a security gatekeeper for the AI era.

By integrating Account Abstraction, delivering the frictionless 'Send by Link' experience, and alignment with Ethereum Foundation interoperability standards, imToken is building a foundation for a unified user experience.

As we move into an AI-driven future, imToken remains anchored to the principle of determinism — ensuring that in a world of algorithms and probabilities, users retain ultimate control over their wealth.