If I don't understand code at all and can't judge myself what counts as a "standard specification" versus "self-developed," what should I do?
You don't need to read code yourself — the ability genuinely needed in these five steps is checking and asking, not technical interpretation. A standard specification usually has a fixed, directly searchable name (a technical specification named with a number, for example) — you just need to search this kind of name-format keyword in the product's technical documentation. If found, it usually means an industry standard is adopted; if you can't find any specific specification name at all, only vague text description, that itself is a signal worth pressing on.
If you can't find any clue at all, take this question exactly as-is directly to support or the community: "Is your account abstraction implementation based on an industry standard specification, or fully self-developed?" This sentence requires no technical knowledge on your part — just a willingness to ask.
If the team tells me they use a self-developed scheme rather than an industry standard specification, does that necessarily mean it's unsafe?
Not necessarily — this requires more nuanced judgment rather than directly equating self-developed with unsafe. Some self-developed schemes might exist because an industry standard specification couldn't meet this team's specific needs, requiring them to design their own — in this case, what matters isn't whether it's self-developed, but whether this self-developed scheme has undergone equally rigorous independent third-party audit verification.
In practice, you can directly ask the team: what specific audit process did this self-developed scheme undergo, who was the auditing firm, and can the audit report be publicly reviewed? If the team can provide a concrete, verifiable audit record, even a self-developed scheme could reach a trustworthiness level close to an industry standard specification; if the team can't produce any concrete audit proof at all, the risk in this scenario is genuinely higher than adopting an extensively validated standard specification.
If a product's core account abstraction standard has been audited, but the team's custom verification logic isn't explicitly covered in the audit scope, how large is the overall risk?
This means you're facing a partially verified, partially unverified hybrid state, with the risk level depending on how important a function this unaudited custom logic actually carries. If the custom logic just does some relatively simple, low-risk checks (simply confirming a transaction amount's format is correct, say), the unaudited risk is relatively limited; if the custom logic handles core authorization judgment (deciding who has authority to sign, or how much an amount can auto-execute up to, say), this code's risk is directly tied to the entire account's fund safety, and the unaudited concern becomes far more severe.
Facing this scenario, it's worth directly asking the team what specific judgment this custom logic handles and how complex it is, letting you assess the risk's actual scale yourself, rather than concluding the overall risk is high or low purely from the binary label of "audited or not."
These five steps sound thorough, but if the team doesn't respond to these specific questions at all, what else can I do?
If the team doesn't respond at all, this non-response itself is a concrete assessment result — meaning you currently can't confirm whether this product's account abstraction implementation went through sufficiently rigorous design and verification. In this scenario, the more practical approach is treating this information gap as a conservative factor in your position planning, using a smaller committed amount to address this currently unresolvable uncertainty.
You can also try obtaining information through other indirect channels — checking whether this product has a public code repository (even if you can't read the code yourself, you could ask a friend with technical background to help do a preliminary check on whether it references a specific standard specification library, say), or checking whether other users in a community forum have discussed this technical detail — both are alternative verification avenues worth trying when the team itself doesn't respond.
This series earlier discussed account abstraction — the underlying technical possibility that makes a smart account possible, but "whether this technology is used" alone can't directly answer "whether this product's authorization design is well-built." This article provides a practical breakdown method to help you see through what concrete detail worth asking about actually hides behind the sentence "we use account abstraction."
First check this product's technical documentation to confirm whether its account abstraction implementation is based on a widely-adopted, long-term publicly-reviewed industry standard specification, or a fully self-developed, from-scratch custom scheme. If the documentation mentions a specific standard specification's name, that's a concrete, verifiable positive signal.
If you've confirmed a specific industry standard specification is adopted, further search whether this standard has ever had a major vulnerability discovered in the past, and how quickly and thoroughly it was patched once found. A standard battle-tested extensively, with a transparent vulnerability-patching record, is generally more trustworthy than a scheme never publicly examined at all.
Don't just ask "do you use account abstraction" — directly ask "which specific custom verification rules have you implemented using this technology" — multisig, time-limited authorization, a spending cap, that kind of concrete mechanism, for example. This question directly reveals the depth of how this team actually applies this technology.
Even if the underlying account abstraction standard itself has been widely reviewed, the team's own custom verification logic is still a brand-new piece of code that needs independent audit verification. Check whether this custom logic is included in the third-party audit report's scope, or whether the audit report only covers the standard specification's underlying part.
Put the information found here alongside the allowlist-versus-denylist verification and least-privilege scoping assessment discussed earlier in this series — these verification methods are independent yet complementary, and combined they give you a far more complete authorization architecture picture than any single question alone.
"Whether account abstraction is used" is a surface question easily reduced to by marketing copy — these five steps remind you that what genuinely matters is how this technology is actually applied, not whether this technical term appears in the product's introduction.