Why Gas Abstraction is the Real Account Abstraction

Demanding native tokens for fees is a UX dead-end. It's a regressive tax that blocks new users, fragments liquidity, and makes cross-chain actions untenable.\n- Onboarding Friction: Users must first buy ETH/AVAX/SOL before using any dApp.\n- Liquidity Silos: Billions in assets are stranded on chains where the user holds no gas token.\n- Failed Transactions: Common on L2s where users don't bridge gas first.

Shift from transaction execution to outcome declaration. Users sign an intent ("I want this token"), and a network of solvers competes to fulfill it optimally, paying gas on the user's behalf.\n- Gasless Signing: User pays only in the input token; solver bundles and abstracts gas.\n- MEV Protection: Solvers internalize MEV, often returning value to users.\n- Cross-Chain Native: Solvers handle bridging as part of fulfillment, a natural fit for layerzero and CCIP.

Smart contracts that sponsor gas fees, enabling sponsored transactions, subscriptions, and gas payments in any ERC-20. This is the programmable backend for gas abstraction.\n- dApp Pays: Protocols can subsidize fees for users (see Pimlico, Stackup).\n- Enterprise Logic: Pay for users in USDC, set monthly gas budgets, implement fraud detection.\n- Session Keys: Grant limited signing power for seamless gaming/DeFi sessions without constant pop-ups.

Intent architectures and paymasters introduce new centralization vectors. The system's security now depends on solver honesty and paymaster solvency.\n- Solver Cartels: A small set of actors could dominate intent flow, extracting value.\n- Paymaster Risk: If a paymaster's sponsored transaction reverts, the user still pays.\n- Censorship: Relayers can filter or reorder transactions based on policy.

Mitigate trust through cryptographic verification and protocol-level guarantees. Make the relay layer credibly neutral.\n- ZK Proofs: Solvers provide proofs of correct fulfillment (e.g., Succinct, Risc Zero).\n- Force Inclusion Pools: User transactions can bypass censoring relays via a decentralized pool.\n- Solver Bonding & Slashing: Economic security to penalize malicious or lazy solvers.

Gas becomes a backend concern, traded in efficient wholesale markets. Users interact with assets, not networks.\n- Gas Futures: Protocols hedge gas costs across chains and time.\n- Universal Accounts: A single identity/balance works seamlessly across any chain or L2.\n- New Business Models: Subscription SaaS, transaction bundling, and intent-based advertising emerge.

ERC-4337's paymaster model introduces a single point of failure and censorship. The entity sponsoring your gas holds immense power.

• Who pays, controls the flow. A malicious or faulty paymaster can censor, frontrun, or block your transactions.
• Reliance on off-chain data. Most useful paymasters (e.g., gasless, fee subsidization) depend on external price feeds, creating oracle risk.
• Economic capture. Dominant paymasters like Pimlico, Stackup, or Alchemy could become rent-seeking gatekeepers.

Every new smart account implementation creates a new, incompatible wallet standard. We are trading EOA fragmentation for smart wallet fragmentation.

• Interoperability hell. A Safe{Wallet} account cannot natively execute a Zerodev kernel session key. Users get locked into silos.
• Security model divergence. Each wallet (Safe, Biconomy, Rhinestone) has its own upgrade logic and admin key structure, fracturing audit surface.
• User experience cliff. The promise of a unified 'account' shatters when moving between chains or dApps that only support specific account vendors.

Bundlers are the new miners/validators. They decide transaction ordering and inclusion, recreating MEV and centralization risks from L1.

• MEV extraction, reloaded. A bundler can reorder, drop, or insert transactions within a UserOperation bundle. Projects like Ethereum.org and Flashbots are already working on mitigations.
• Staking economics. To be trusted, bundlers may need to stake, leading to centralization around a few large node providers (e.g., Alchemy, Infura).
• Latency arbitrage. The 'fastest' bundler wins, incentivizing centralized, high-performance infrastructure over a permissionless network.

The endgame isn't smarter wallets, but no wallets at all. Users express what they want, not how to do it.

• Declarative, not imperative. Like UniswapX or CowSwap, the user signs an intent ("swap X for Y"). A decentralized solver network competes to fulfill it optimally.
• Abstracts gas and execution. The solver handles all complexity, including cross-chain via Across or LayerZero. Gas is a backend detail.
• Eliminates wallet-specific risk. The user's asset custody and the transaction mechanics are decoupled, reducing surface area for wallet-based exploits.

Users must hold the native token (e.g., ETH on Ethereum, MATIC on Polygon) just to transact, creating a massive onboarding friction. This locks out billions in non-crypto capital and adds cognitive overhead.

• Blocks mainstream adoption: Requires a separate purchase before first use.
• Fragments liquidity: Users must manage gas tokens across multiple chains.
• Kills session-based apps: Can't enable 'freemium' or subscription models.

Protocols (dApps) or third-party paymasters can pay gas fees on behalf of users, accepting payment in any ERC-20 token or even off-chain fiat. This is the core innovation of ERC-4337 and EIP-7702.

• User Pays in USDC: Execute swaps or trades without ever holding ETH.
• DApp Subsidizes Fees: Absorb costs as a customer acquisition expense.
• Gasless Onboarding: Enable true 'first transaction' with just an email.

Gas abstraction enables intent-centric protocols like UniswapX and CowSwap to thrive. Users sign a declaration of outcome (e.g., 'I want 1000 USDC for 0.5 ETH'), and sophisticated solvers compete to fulfill it, bundling and sponsoring the complex cross-chain execution.

• Abstracts Complexity: User never sees bridges or liquidity pools.
• Optimizes Execution: Solvers batch transactions for ~20-40% better rates.
• Shifts Competition: From UI to execution quality and fee sponsorship.

Decoupling payment unlocks subscription SaaS, sponsored governance, and ad-supported transactions. Projects like Biconomy and Stackup operate paymaster networks, while layer-2s like Base use it for developer gas credits.

• Recurring Revenue: Charge a monthly fee in stablecoins for unlimited gas.
• VC-Style Subsidies: Protocols can fund user growth directly.
• Meta-Transactions: Legacy apps can upgrade without changing core contracts.

Shifting gas liability from users to paymasters creates new attack vectors. Paymasters must manage DoS attacks, gas price volatility, and bad debt from failed transactions—a fundamental change in security assumptions.

• Centralization Pressure: Only well-capitalized entities can be paymasters.
• Oracle Dependency: Requires accurate ETH/USD feeds for stablecoin pricing.
• Regulatory Grey Area: Is sponsoring a user's transaction a money transmitter act?

Gas abstraction turns blockchain capacity into a wholesale commodity market. Aggregators will buy blockspace in bulk from validators/sequencers and resell it to dApps and users, abstracting the chain itself. This is the logical conclusion of EIP-1559 and rollup economics.

• Price Competition: Gas becomes a fungible resource across chains.
• Execution as a Service: The 'AWS moment' for blockchain infrastructure.
• True User Abstraction: The chain you use becomes an implementation detail.