If you have read a few technical explainers about Base or Ethereum, you have probably come across a string like EIP 4337, EIP 1559, or EIP 712. These numbers show up in wallet release notes, developer documentation, and even error messages. This article explains what an EIP actually is, how a proposal becomes a standard, and why a handful of these numbers matter to anyone using a self custody wallet.
What EIP Stands For
EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal. It is a formal, written proposal to change or add something to Ethereum. A proposal can be small, such as clarifying wording in an existing specification, or large, such as changing how transaction fees work across the entire network.
The process itself is defined by EIP 1, written in 2015. EIP 1 lays out how proposals should be formatted, submitted, discussed, and eventually accepted or rejected. Every EIP since then has followed that same template, which is part of why the system has stayed consistent for a decade.
Proposals live in public GitHub repositories where anyone can read the full text, follow the discussion, and see the history of changes. Nothing about the process is private or decided behind closed doors. Client teams, independent developers, researchers, and node operators all participate in the same open threads.
The Three Main Categories
EIPs fall into a few categories, and knowing them helps explain why some numbers affect your wallet directly while others are invisible to end users.
Standards Track proposals change something concrete about how Ethereum works, and this track splits further into four types:
- Core: changes to the consensus rules themselves, the kind that require a network wide upgrade (a hard fork) for every node to adopt at the same time. EIP 1559, which changed how transaction fees are calculated, and EIP 4844, which introduced cheaper data storage for rollups like Base, are both Core proposals.
- Networking: changes to how nodes talk to each other over the peer to peer network, such as how they discover and relay data.
- Interface: changes to client level APIs and RPC methods, the standardized calls that wallets and apps use to talk to a node.
- ERC: application level standards that define how contracts and tokens behave, without requiring any change to Ethereum's core rules. ERC 20 (fungible tokens) and ERC 721 (NFTs) are the best known examples, and newer ones like ERC 4337 (account abstraction) and ERC 4626 (yield vaults) fall here too.
Beyond Standards Track, there are Meta EIPs, which describe changes to the EIP process itself, and Informational EIPs, which offer guidance or document design considerations without proposing a strict rule.
Because ERC proposals had grown into such a large share of all activity, the community split them into their own repository in 2024 so that the main EIPs repository could focus on core protocol changes. The content and process are the same either way, only the home repository changed.
How a Proposal Moves Forward
An EIP moves through a defined sequence of statuses before it becomes an accepted standard:
- Idea: an informal concept, not yet written up or tracked in a repository.
- Draft: the proposal has been formatted correctly and merged into the repository by an editor. This is the first stage anyone outside the original author can review in a structured way.
- Review: the author marks the proposal as feature complete and requests focused peer review from the community.
- Last Call: a final review window, typically about two weeks, before the proposal is locked in. If a significant issue turns up during this window, the proposal goes back to Review or Draft instead of moving forward.
- Final: the proposal represents a completed standard, and from this point on it is treated as effectively permanent.
Proposals can also end up Stagnant if they sit without activity for too long, or Withdrawn if the author pulls them. Not every EIP becomes a standard. Most do not, and that is by design. The slow, public process is what lets problems get caught before a change is locked into a network that secures billions of dollars in value.
Why This Matters for Base Wallet Users
Base is built on the OP Stack and inherits Ethereum's standards rather than inventing its own. When a wallet or dapp mentions an EIP number, it is almost always referring to one of these finished, Final standards being put into practice. A few examples you are likely to run into:
- Swap and lending approvals rely on ERC 20's approve and transferFrom functions.
- Signing a message to log into a dapp without a transaction usually relies on EIP 712, which defines readable, structured signature requests.
- Smart wallets and passkey based accounts build on ERC 4337 and the newer EIP 7702, both of which define account abstraction.
- Lower fees for everyday Base transactions are a direct result of EIP 4844's data storage changes on Ethereum mainnet.
You do not need to read the full specification of any of these to use a wallet safely. But recognizing that an EIP number refers to a specific, publicly reviewed standard, rather than marketing language or an arbitrary version number, makes it easier to tell a genuine technical detail apart from something a scam message is trying to dress up with jargon.
The Takeaway
An EIP is simply a documented, peer reviewed proposal for how Ethereum and its ecosystem should work. The process is open, slow on purpose, and the same framework whether the change is a minor clarification or a network wide upgrade. The next time you see an EIP number in a wallet update or a developer's explanation, you now know it points to a specific, public document you could go read yourself.