The Future of Gas: Abstracting Fees Across Every Rollup and L1

Users need native tokens for gas on every chain they touch, creating a liquidity trap and onboarding friction. This kills cross-chain composability and user experience.

• ~$1B+ in idle capital locked for gas across wallets.
• User drop-off increases ~40% per required token swap.
• Developer complexity skyrockets managing multi-chain fee economics.

Let users express a desired outcome (an 'intent') and let a solver network compete to fulfill it, abstracting the gas currency. The user pays in one token, the solver handles the rest.

• Single-token UX: Pay in USDC, ETH, or any major asset.
• Cost optimization: Solvers compete, driving fees toward mempool-level efficiency.
• Chain-agnostic execution: Works across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism seamlessly.

Smart accounts (ERC-4337) enable third-party 'paymasters' to sponsor gas fees, allowing for gasless transactions or payment in ERC-20 tokens. This is the settlement layer for abstracted gas.

• Sponsored transactions: Apps can onboard users with zero crypto.
• Programmable policies: Subsidies, subscriptions, and corporate gas desks.
• Scalable model: Decentralized network of paymasters ensures liveness and censorship resistance.

Abstracted gas creates a meta-market where fee liquidity is pooled and traded. Projects like EigenLayer and Across are building cross-chain verification layers that can settle gas obligations trust-minimally.

• Liquidity aggregation: A single staking position backs gas across many chains.
• Risk diversification: Validators earn fees from a portfolio of rollups.
• Ultimate UX: A single balance secures and pays for the entire multi-chain ecosystem.

Abstracted fee systems that rely on centralized relayers or solvers (like UniswapX or Across) risk creating new, more powerful MEV cartels. These entities could become the de-facto fee markets, extracting value and censoring transactions.

• Centralized Points of Failure: A handful of relayers control the flow of abstracted transactions.
• Opaque Pricing: Users lose visibility into true execution costs, enabling hidden rent extraction.
• Censorship Vector: Relayers can be compelled to filter transactions, undermining neutrality.

If users never directly pay for L1 gas (e.g., on Ethereum), the security budget becomes a hidden, protocol-level liability. Rollups and appchains relying on this subsidy face existential risk if the model fails.

• Unfunded Liabilities: Protocols promise to pay gas they may not be able to afford during congestion.
• Economic Attack Surface: Adversaries can spam the abstracted layer to bankrupt the sponsoring protocol.
• Fragmented Security: Moves value away from the base layer, potentially weakening the overall crypto-economic security model.

Every major wallet (MetaMask, Rainbow) and chain (zkSync, Arbitrum, Optimism) will build its own non-interoperable abstraction standard. This recreates the walled garden problem, killing the promised universal UX.

• Standard Wars: Competing specs (EIP-3074, ERC-4337, native sponsor ops) create developer hell.
• Wallet Lock-in: Your abstracted gas tokens and session keys are not portable across wallets or frontends.
• Liquidity Silos: Paymaster and relayer networks become chain-specific, reducing economies of scale and increasing costs.

Session keys and gas sponsorship require deep, persistent user permissions. This creates massive privacy leaks and security risks, exposing entire transaction graphs to sponsors, relayers, and wallet providers.

• Graph Exposure: Sponsors see all transactions in a session, not just the gas payment.
• Key Management Risk: Users are poorly equipped to manage the security of persistent signing keys.
• Regulatory Snare: Sponsoring entities become regulated financial transmitters due to pervasive visibility.

Abstracting gas turns a clear, auction-based market into a complex, multi-layered derivatives problem. Volatility in underlying L1 gas prices or exchange rates for gas tokens can instantly break abstraction mechanisms.

• Oracle Risk: Paymasters rely on price oracles to convert ERC-20 payments to native gas; latency or manipulation is fatal.
• Liquidity Crunch: Sudden gas spikes can drain sponsor contracts, causing widespread transaction failure.
• Speculative Attacks: Adversaries can front-run paymaster replenishment transactions for profit.

Perfect abstraction creates a commoditized, user-oblivious layer. This removes the market signal of gas fees, which currently drives innovation in data compression (blobs), state management, and new L1 designs. Progress stalls.

• Signal Loss: Developers can't measure real resource costs, leading to inefficient dApp design.
• Complacent Chains: L2s/L1s lose direct user feedback on congestion and pricing, reducing pressure to innovate.
• Central Planning: Fee markets become managed by a few protocols, not emergent from user demand.