Why Every Layer 2 Needs a Native Paymaster Strategy

Users still think in terms of gas and native tokens, creating massive onboarding friction. Every L2's growth is capped by its native token's liquidity and user familiarity.

• User Drop-off: ~40% of potential users abandon transactions due to gas complexity.
• Competitive Disadvantage: L2s without gas abstraction lose to those with it (see: Base's Onchain Summer powered by Coinbase's Smart Wallet).
• Developer Lock-in: Apps must build custom solutions or rely on third-party paymasters, fragmenting liquidity.

A native paymaster turns gas from a cost center into a profit center and a strategic moat. It captures value that currently leaks to third-party services like Biconomy or Gelato.

• Direct Monetization: Capture fees on every transaction, creating a sustainable protocol revenue stream.
• Sticky Ecosystem: Offer sponsored transactions, gas credits, and subscriptions, locking in developers and users.
• TVL Flywheel: Native paymaster contracts become a core liquidity sink, boosting the L2's own token utility and security (e.g., Starknet's STRK gas payments).

ERC-4337 and native AA implementations (e.g., zkSync, Starknet, Arbitrum Stylus) have moved from R&D to mainnet. The infrastructure for permissionless paymasters is now standardized.

• Standardized Stack: Bundlers, Paymasters, and EntryPoints are now commoditized components.
• Network Effects: Early adopters like Base and Polygon are setting user expectations for gasless UX.
• Window Closing: L2s that delay will face an uphill battle against established AA-enabled chains with mature paymaster economies.

Relying on dApp-specific or third-party paymasters creates a patchwork of inconsistent UX, security models, and points of failure. This undermines the L2's brand promise of seamless scalability.

• Security Dilution: Users must trust multiple external smart contracts for gas sponsorship.
• UX Inconsistency: One dApp is gasless, another requires ETH, breaking mental models.
• Brand Erosion: The L2 cedes control of its core transactional experience to intermediaries.

A native paymaster is the ultimate growth tool. Protocol treasuries can programmatically subsidize transactions for target cohorts (new users, specific dApps, promotional periods) with surgical precision.

• Acquisition Engine: Sponsor gas for users bridging from a competitor (e.g., Optimism's RetroPGF model applied to gas).
• Developer Incentives: Offer grants as gas credits, directly fueling ecosystem activity instead of cash grants.
• Data Advantage: Gain unparalleled insight into onchain user behavior and dApp performance to inform ecosystem investments.

The future is intent-based architectures (UniswapX, CowSwap) and seamless cross-chain UX (LayerZero, Axelar). A native paymaster is the essential settlement layer for these flows.

• Intent Settlement: Paymaster becomes the guarantor and executor for complex, cross-domain transactions.
• Cross-Chain Gas: Users can pay for L2 gas with assets from any chain via the paymaster, abstracting liquidity fragmentation.
• Competitive Necessity: To compete with Solana's single-state UX, L2s must offer a unified, chain-abstracted payment layer.

Requiring users to hold your L2's native token for gas is a massive adoption barrier. It creates a multi-step onboarding funnel that loses >70% of users. Every transaction becomes a liquidity management puzzle.

• Key Benefit 1: Enable gas sponsorship for any token (ERC-20, stablecoins).
• Key Benefit 2: Unlock 1-click onboarding from major wallets and dApps like Rainbow and Uniswap.

Your L2's paymaster should be a first-party service that monetizes gas abstraction. This turns a cost center into a protocol-owned business with predictable yield.

• Key Benefit 1: Capture ~5-15 bps on all sponsored gas, creating a sustainable revenue stream.
• Key Benefit 2: Offer account abstraction bundles (e.g., session keys, batched actions) as premium services, competing with Biconomy and Stackup.

A native paymaster is the execution layer for intents. It can route user operations for optimal cost and fill, becoming the central liquidity router for your chain.

• Key Benefit 1: Direct cross-chain intents from UniswapX or CowSwap to settle on your L2, capturing $10B+ in potential flow.
• Key Benefit 2: Enable complex transaction logic (e.g., "swap this USDC for gas and then bridge") that generic paymasters like Ethereum's 4337 can't optimize.

If you rely on a generic, third-party paymaster (e.g., a multi-chain service), you outsource your core user relationship and economic policy. They control the fees, the token list, and the user data.

• Key Benefit 1: Maintain sovereignty over gas economics and censorship resistance.
• Key Benefit 2: Prevent a single point of failure; a third-party outage (Polygon's recent paymaster downtime) shouldn't halt your chain.

The native paymaster must be architecturally coupled with a high-performance, first-party bundler. This vertical integration is what gives zkSync and Starknet their UX edge.

• Key Benefit 1: Sub-second UserOperation inclusion by eliminating network hops to external bundlers.
• Key Benefit 2: Enable gasless meta-transactions for dApps, a critical feature for mainstream gaming and social apps.

Track the percentage of total L2 transactions that are gas-sponsored. This is your north star metric for paymaster success. A high rate indicates seamless UX and deep dApp integration.

• Key Benefit 1: A >40% sponsorship rate signals your L2 is the easiest place to build and use dApps.
• Key Benefit 2: This metric directly correlates with user retention and developer preference, making it a key VC diligence point.