The Future of Smart Contracts Is Gasless

Users must acquire and manage native gas tokens, creating a massive onboarding and usability barrier. This fragments liquidity and caps TAM.

• Friction: Requires pre-funding, chain switches, and constant balance management.
• Fragmentation: Each chain's native token acts as a separate, non-productive asset.
• CapEx vs OpEx: Users treat gas as a capital expense, not a marginal operating cost.

Decouples transaction validation from fee payment, enabling sponsored transactions, batched ops, and social recovery.

• Sponsorship: DApps or paymasters can subsidize user gas fees.
• Batching: Multiple actions in one UserOp, paying gas once.
• Flexible Auth: Use social logins or session keys, not just EOAs.
• Key Entities: Stackup, Biconomy, Alchemy, Candide.

Users declare what they want, not how to do it. Solvers compete to fulfill the intent, abstracting all execution complexity, including gas.

• User State: "Swap X for Y at best rate."
• Solver State: Handles routing, liquidity, and pays all cross-chain gas.
• Key Protocols: UniswapX, CowSwap, Across, Anoma.
• Result: True gasless, cross-chain UX.

Protocols grant temporary signing authority for specific actions, while a centralized relayer network handles and pays for gas.

• Model: User signs a meta-transaction; relayer pays gas and submits.
• Use Case: Perfect for gaming, social, and high-frequency DeFi.
• Key Entities: Gelato Network, OpenZeppelin Defender, Pimlico.
• Trade-off: Introduces relayer centralization and censorship risk.

Separates execution gas from data availability (DA) fees, enabling L2s to create custom, stable fee models for users.

• Blobs: Cheap, ephemeral data packets for L2 settlement.
• Stable Fees: L2s can subsidize blob costs, offering predictable user pricing.
• Future: Dedicated fee token ecosystems (e.g., pay gas in stablecoins).
• Impact: Enables sustainable app-chain gas sponsorship models.

Gas becomes a backend concern, akin to AWS data transfer fees. The stack winner will be the one that makes it disappear completely.

• Bundlers & Paymasters: Become critical, commoditized middleware.
• New Biz Models: Subscription, take-rate, and premium service tiers.
• Risk: Centralization of fee payment creates new choke points.
• Verdict: Gasless isn't free; it's a redistribution of cost and control.

Gasless execution relies on a third-party sequencer to pay fees, creating a single point of failure and censorship. This reintroduces the trusted intermediary that decentralization aimed to eliminate.

• Risk: A malicious or compromised sequencer can censor, reorder, or front-run transactions.
• Dependency: Systems like EIP-4337 account abstraction and Layer 2 rollups (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism) are vulnerable until decentralized sequencer sets are live.

Paymasters (fee sponsors) must have sustainable business models. If subsidizing transactions becomes unprofitable, the gasless model collapses.

• Risk: Volatile gas prices or spam attacks can bankrupt paymaster contracts, halting user sessions.
• Challenge: Requires sophisticated MEV capture (like UniswapX), subscription models, or opaque data monetization that users may reject.

Gas fees act as a spam and Sybil attack deterrent. Removing them shifts the security burden entirely to off-chain reputation or stake, which are easier to game.

• Risk: DDoS attacks become trivial, forcing protocols to implement complex rate-limiting or proof-of-humanity gates.
• Consequence: Increases reliance on centralized identity providers or zero-knowledge proofs, adding friction and new trust assumptions.

Gasless standards are not universal. A contract on Ethereum with ERC-4337 won't work natively on Solana, Cosmos, or Bitcoin L2s, fracturing the user experience.

• Risk: Developers must implement multiple gasless schemes, increasing complexity and audit surface.
• Reality: Cross-chain intent systems like LayerZero and Axelar must bridge both state and fee payment logic, a largely unsolved problem.

Who is the regulated entity when a dApp pays your fees? Regulators may view fee sponsorship as a securities-like subsidy or payment for order flow, triggering compliance overhead.

• Risk: SEC or MiCA could classify active paymasters as money transmitters or brokers, forcing KYC on all sponsored users.
• Result: Kills permissionless access, the core value proposition of gasless UX.

Hiding complexity is good until it breaks. Gasless transactions obfuscate critical chain interactions, making it harder for users to audit what they're signing.

• Risk: Increases susceptibility to phishing via malicious user operations (UserOps) that appear 'free'.
• Trade-off: The convenience of account abstraction could lead to a decrease in user sovereignty and security vigilance.

Every new user is a churn risk at the first transaction prompt. Gas creates unpredictable costs, breaking composability and capping application complexity.

• User Churn: >60% of potential users abandon transactions at the gas fee screen.
• Economic Drag: Projects lose 10-30% of potential revenue to meta-transaction overhead and subsidization programs.
• Innovation Ceiling: Complex multi-step DeFi operations become economically unviable.

Shift from transaction execution to outcome declaration. Users sign what they want, not how to do it. Solvers compete to fulfill the intent, paying gas and taking MEV as profit.

• User Pays in Output: Fees are deducted from the final received asset, eliminating the need for a native token balance.
• Solvers Optimize: Results in better prices and guaranteed execution via batch auctions and MEV capture.
• Chain-Agnostic: Intents can be fulfilled across any liquidity source (EVM, Solana, Cosmos) without user bridging.

Smart contract wallets with sponsored transactions. A third-party (dApp, wallet, protocol) can pay gas fees on behalf of the user, enabling subscription models and seamless onboarding.

• Sponsored Sessions: Users can interact for a set period without ever seeing a gas prompt.
• Flexible Payment: Fees can be paid in any ERC-20 token, not just the native chain token.
• Bundler Market: A new infrastructure layer emerges, with bundlers competing on inclusion and efficiency.

Gasless isn't free—it's a shifted cost center. The winning protocols will monetize the abstraction layer itself.

• Relayer Networks: Services like Gelato, Biconomy, and LayerZero's DVN charge for guaranteed, fast execution.
• Subscription SaaS: DApps offer premium 'gas-free' tiers, baking the cost into a flat monthly fee.
• Intent Monetization: Solvers and fillers (Across, UniswapX) capture value from flow routing and MEV.

Gasless architectures move trust from chain validators to intent solvers and state verifiers. Security models must evolve.

• Solver Reputation: Systems require robust slashing and bonding to prevent malicious fulfillment (e.g., CowSwap's CoW AMM).
• Verification Complexity: Users must trust the fulfillment path is optimal, not just valid. This requires new transparency tools.
• Centralization Risk: Efficient solving favors large, capital-rich entities, creating potential new points of failure.

The final state is where users never think about chains or gas. Applications are judged purely on utility, not underlying blockchain mechanics.

• Mass Adoption On-Ramp: Web2 users can onboard with social logins and credit cards, completely unaware of gas.
• True Composability: Applications can seamlessly integrate services across any chain, as cost and complexity are abstracted.
• Developer Freedom: Builders can design complex state transitions without worrying about gas economics for their users.