Why Paymaster Aggregators Are the Next Big Infrastructure Play

Every dApp, wallet, and chain runs its own paymaster, creating siloed liquidity pools and inefficient capital allocation. This leads to higher costs and failed transactions for users.

• Capital Inefficiency: Billions in TVL sit idle across isolated contracts.
• User Friction: Apps can't guarantee sponsorship across chains or for complex intents.
• Operational Overhead: Teams must manage gas pricing and replenishment across multiple networks.

Aggregators like Biconomy and Stackup act as intelligent routers, sourcing the cheapest and most reliable sponsorship from a network of paymasters. This creates a competitive gas market.

• Optimal Execution: Routes user ops to the paymaster with the best rates and highest success probability.
• Unified Liquidity: Aggregates capital, improving utilization and reducing costs by ~20-40%.
• Abstraction Layer: Developers integrate one SDK for sponsorship across all supported chains and token types.

The rise of intent-centric design (e.g., UniswapX, CowSwap) demands a paymaster that can sponsor complex, cross-chain transactions. Native paymasters can't keep up.

• Cross-Chain Intents: Aggregators can batch and route user ops through the most efficient path via LayerZero or Axelar.
• Conditional Sponsorship: Enables "sponsor this swap only if price > X" logic, unlocking new UX paradigms.
• MEV Integration: Aggregators can partner with searchers to subsidize fees via backrunning profits, pushing costs toward zero.

Users are forced to hold native tokens for gas, fragmenting capital and creating onboarding friction. This is a primary vector for MEV and failed transactions.

• Capital Inefficiency: Users must pre-fund wallets with ETH, MATIC, etc., locking $10B+ in non-productive assets.
• UX Friction: Every new chain requires a new gas token, a major barrier for applications like UniswapX or LayerZero omnichain flows.
• MEV Surface: Public mempools expose sponsored transactions to front-running, negating the benefit.

Paymaster aggregators don't just sponsor fees; they create a competitive market for execution. Users submit a signed intent ("swap X for Y"), and aggregators bid to fulfill it, abstracting gas entirely.

• Optimal Routing: Aggregators like Biconomy and Stackup evaluate paymaster contracts across chains (EIP-4337) and L2s for the best conversion rate.
• Cost Absorption: Fees can be paid in any ERC-20, with the aggregator optimizing for slippage and gas price, reducing total cost by -20-50%.
• MEV Resistance: The bidding process occurs off-chain, shielding transaction logic from public mempools.

The logical endpoint is not per-transaction sponsorship, but continuous access. This is the domain of session keys and gas subscriptions, turning gas into a SaaS-like utility.

• User Retention: Apps can offer "gasless sessions" for a flat fee, a model being pioneered by gaming and social dApps on Starknet and zkSync.
• Predictable Cash Flows: Aggregators can hedge gas price volatility and sell subscriptions, creating a recurring revenue model from infrastructure.
• Wallet Integration: This requires deep integration with smart wallets (Safe, Argent), making aggregators a critical middleware layer.

Fragmentation across paymaster implementations is the next challenge. Early movers like Pimlico are pushing for standardization (ERC-7579) to become the modular backend for all smart accounts.

• Modular Dominance: By providing the default paymaster, bundler, and account factory stack, they position as the Particle or LayerZero of account abstraction.
• Developer Capture: Simplifying integration for dApp devs creates powerful network effects and stickiness.
• Data Advantage: Aggregating gas sponsorship data across chains provides unparalleled insight into on-chain user behavior.

Every paymaster (e.g., Stackup, Biconomy, Pimlico) creates its own siloed liquidity pool. This forces dApps into vendor lock-in and exposes users to sponsorship downtime and spike pricing.

• Problem: Your app fails because a single paymaster's USDC pool is drained.
• Solution: Aggregators like ZeroDev Kernel and Coinbase's Smart Wallet route transactions across multiple liquidity sources, ensuring >99.9% uptime and stable gas prices.

Delegating transaction validation to a third-party paymaster introduces a new attack surface. A malicious or compromised paymaster can censor, front-run, or drain user funds from sponsored sessions.

• Problem: You inherit the security floor of your weakest paymaster vendor.
• Solution: Aggregators implement intent-based routing with on-chain verification, similar to UniswapX or Across. They provide a unified security audit surface and enable policy-based routing (e.g., only use audited, non-custodial paymasters).

Managing direct integrations with multiple paymasters creates O(n²) operational overhead. Negotiating rates, managing prepaid balances, and reconciling transactions across vendors kills profit margins at scale.

• Problem: Your engineering team spends 30%+ of cycles on gas infrastructure, not core product.
• Solution: A single aggregator API abstracts away vendor complexity. It provides unified billing, analytics dashboards, and bulk discount optimization across the entire paymaster market, turning a cost center into a competitive moat.

Users don't care about your paymaster. They care about one-click onboarding and gasless transactions. A poorly chosen paymaster layer results in failed txs, confusing error messages, and >40% drop-off at sign-up.

• Problem: Your sleek AA wallet is hamstrung by unreliable gas sponsorship.
• Solution: Aggregators guarantee optimal routing by simulating tx success and cost across all providers in ~200ms. This delivers the Seamless Web2 UX promised by AA, directly impacting user acquisition cost and retention.

Every major L2 and app chain has its own paymaster system (e.g., Starknet, zkSync, Polygon). Building and maintaining integrations for each is a $500k+ annual dev tax. This creates vendor lock-in and a terrible user experience.

• Fragmented Liquidity: Users need native tokens for every chain.
• Operational Overhead: Managing multiple deposit/withdrawal flows.
• Lost Users: ~40% of DApp sessions fail at the gas payment step.

Aggregators like Biconomy, ZeroDev, and Pimlico create a single API that routes gas sponsorship requests to the optimal paymaster. They leverage ERC-4337 Account Abstraction to enable fee payment in any ERC-20 token, stablecoins, or via subscription models.

• Best Price Execution: Routes to paymasters with the deepest liquidity and lowest fees.
• One Integration: Connect to 10+ chains with a single SDK.
• Flexible Models: Sponsor, subsidize, or bill users directly.

This isn't just an API layer. The winning aggregator will control the gas price oracle for sponsored transactions. They accumulate priceless data on user payment preferences and chain-specific demand.

• Liquidity Network: Largest deposit pools attract the best rates, creating a flywheel.
• Intent-Based Routing: Future systems will predict and pre-fund user sessions, similar to UniswapX or Across.
• Revenue Stream: Fees on $10B+ of annual sponsored gas volume.

The final evolution is a generalized intent solver for fees. Users express a goal ("swap $100 USDC for ETH, pay fees from my USDC"), and the aggregator's solver finds the optimal path across paymasters, DEXs, and bridges.

• Composability: Bundles fee payment with the core transaction logic.
• Capital Efficiency: Dynamic use of staked collateral across chains.
• Protocol Capture: Becomes the default economic layer for all user-initiated actions.