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What is an EOA?
An EOA (externally owned account) is the ordinary kind of Ethereum account, controlled by whoever holds its private key. It costs nothing to create, has no code of its own by default, and is the only kind of account that can start a transaction.
What it means for you
Everything in an EOA rests on one key or seed phrase: lose it and nothing can recover the funds, leak it and anyone can drain them. The account itself has no reset, freeze or second factor; any such protection has to come from a smart contract account or from how the key is stored.
How it works
Every Ethereum account has four fields: a nonce, a balance in wei, a code hash and a storage root. For an EOA the nonce counts transactions sent and blocks replays, and there is normally no code. Each transaction on Ethereum starts with an EOA's signature; contract accounts act only when called. Since EIP-7702 an EOA can sign an authorization that points its code to a contract, gaining batching and fee sponsorship at the same address. The EIP warns that a poorly written delegate can give an attacker near-complete control of the account.
Sources: ethereum.org: Ethereum accounts, ethereum.org: Account abstraction, EIP-7702: Set code for EOAs · checked 4 October 2026
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