How the WATS ATS single fee token works

Gas abstraction means the token you pay a network fee in does not have to be the token that network actually charges; ATS is the single fee token WATS uses to do this, so in the WATS Hot Wallet the fee is paid in ATS whether the transaction settles on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana or TON. Two open standards make that possible — ERC-4337 account abstraction, where a paymaster settles the fee in ATS instead of native gas on EVM chains, and LayerZero OFT, which keeps ATS a single omnichain token rather than a set of wrapped copies. It is not a discount: the network still charges its real cost and still gets paid, so ATS changes which token you settle in, not what the transaction costs. The ATS collected as fees is burned, driving total supply from 100,000,000 toward a 30,000,000 floor. None of it touches custody — WATS is fully non-custodial and never holds a key.

The problem: per-chain gas

Every blockchain wants to be paid in its own native token before it will process your transaction. Ethereum and the EVM family want ETH (or the gas token of whatever rollup or sidechain you happen to be on). Solana wants SOL. TON wants Toncoin. This is gas, and it is the single most persistent source of friction in multi-chain crypto.

The consequence is subtle but constant. To stay operational across several networks you have to keep a small float of each chain’s native token sitting idle in your wallet, purely so you can pay fees. The moment one of those balances runs dry, transactions on that chain simply fail — not because you lack the asset you want to move, but because you lack the unrelated token the network charges for the privilege of moving it. Anyone who has tried to rescue a stranded stablecoin on a chain where they had no native gas knows exactly how absurd this feels: the funds are right there, and you cannot touch them.

For a single chain this is a minor annoyance. Across EVM networks, Solana and TON at once it becomes a real tax on your attention. You are forced to think about a token you never wanted to hold, top it up before it matters, and repeat that chore on every network you use.

Gas abstraction in the WATS Hot Wallet

Gas abstraction is the idea that the token you pay in and the token the underlying network charges in do not have to be the same thing. WATS applies this through a single fee token, ATS. In the WATS Hot Wallet, the fee for a transaction is charged in ATS regardless of whether that transaction settles on an EVM chain, on Solana or on TON. You hold one fee token, and that one token covers every network WATS supports: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana and TON.

The practical effect is that the chain you are working on stops being something you have to provision for. You do not keep ETH aside for an Ethereum action, SOL aside for a Solana action and Toncoin aside for a TON action. You keep ATS, and WATS handles the translation between that single balance and whatever each network expects underneath. The native gas tokens still exist and the networks still get paid — that part never goes away — but it stops being your problem to juggle.

How a fee is handled, step by step

It helps to see the sequence end to end. Nothing here involves a magic discount or a hidden formula; it is a clean ordering of who does what, and at no point are you asked to think about the native gas token of the chain you are on.

1. You initiate a transaction. You start a transfer or a swap in the WATS Hot Wallet, exactly as you would in any wallet. You choose the asset and the destination; you do not choose a gas token.
2. WATS estimates the underlying network cost. Behind the scenes, WATS works out what the transaction will actually cost on the relevant network — the real on-chain gas that the chain will demand to include and confirm it.
3. The fee is denominated and charged in ATS. Instead of asking you for that chain’s native token, the fee is expressed and taken in a single token, ATS. This is the step where gas abstraction happens: the network’s requirement is satisfied in the token it demands, but you settled it in one consistent currency.
4. The transaction is confirmed on-chain. It is submitted and confirmed on its network like any other. The chain sees a normal, valid transaction; you only ever managed one fee token to make it happen.

Read the four steps again and notice what is absent: you were never told to go and acquire the chain’s gas token first, and you never had to switch your mental model when the transaction happened to live on a different network. That absence is the entire point.

The mechanism: ERC-4337 and LayerZero OFT

Two open standards make the single fee real, and they solve two different halves of the problem.

• ERC-4337 account abstraction handles the pay-in-ATS step on EVM chains. Under ERC-4337 your account is a smart contract account rather than a plain EOA, and your intent travels as a UserOperation rather than a conventional transaction. That indirection is what allows a third party — a paymaster — to sponsor the native gas on your behalf and be reimbursed in a different token. In WATS, that different token is ATS. The chain is still paid in ETH, or in whatever its own gas token is; you simply were not the one holding it.
• LayerZero OFT handles the one-token-everywhere half. ATS is an OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token), which means it exists as a single token with a unified supply across chains rather than as a family of independently wrapped, bridged copies that have to be reconciled. Without that, “one fee token” would quietly become “one fee token per chain,” and you would be back where you started.

ERC-4337 is an EVM standard by construction, so it does not apply to Solana or TON — neither chain has UserOperations or paymaster contracts. Solana does allow a transaction to name a fee payer other than the signer, and TON has its own fee mechanics, so on those networks the sponsoring role is filled by each chain’s own equivalent rather than by ERC-4337. OFT is what keeps the ATS balance itself unified across all of them, so the user-facing behaviour is the same everywhere and only the plumbing differs per chain.

Why this is not a gas discount

This is the most commonly misread part of the model, so it is worth stating flatly: the ATS fee model is not a discount. It does not make blocks cheaper, it does not negotiate with validators, and it does not remove on-chain costs. The network charges what the network charges.

What changes is which token pays. The underlying cost is estimated in native gas, that native gas is still delivered to the chain, and you settle the equivalent in ATS. Treating a single fee token as a price cut sets up the wrong expectation; the honest claim is narrower and more durable — WATS removes the requirement to keep a native gas token funded on every chain you use, not the cost of using those chains.

The ATS burn

There is one more piece the fee flow implies but does not state outright: the ATS collected as fees is burned. Every fee permanently removes ATS from circulation, driving total supply from 100,000,000 toward a 30,000,000 floor. Fee demand and supply reduction are therefore the same event rather than two separate mechanisms bolted together.

That combination is what makes WATS the first and only wallet to pair ERC-4337 and LayerZero OFT single-token fees — charged instead of native gas on every transfer — with a burn that reduces supply to 30M. None of it changes custody: your keys stay with you, and WATS never holds a key.

How self-custody relates

It is worth being precise here, because two distinct WATS ideas are easy to blur together. The fee model is about which token pays. Custody is about who controls the keys. They operate on different layers and one does not change the other.

The WATS Hot Wallet is fully non-custodial: your keys stay with you, and WATS never holds a key. Only you can authorise a movement of funds; control is never handed to anyone else. That is a security property of the wallet itself, and it is entirely independent of how fees are denominated.

Paying a fee in ATS does not hand any custody to WATS, and it does not weaken self-custody. When you confirm a transaction, your own keys are what authorise it; charging the fee in ATS rather than in native gas is simply how that authorised transaction gets paid for. The two systems are designed to coexist: one keeps your keys in your hands, the other keeps the fee experience simple. Conflating them — assuming that a single fee token implies a single point of control — gets the model exactly backwards.

Why one token simplifies multi-chain

The benefits of a single fee token are not abstract; they fall out directly from removing the per-chain gas chore.

• One balance to manage. You watch a single fee token instead of tracking native-gas balances on every network you touch. Topping up is one decision, not one decision per chain.
• Fewer blocked transactions. A transaction can be rejected before it is ever broadcast because the account cannot cover the fee — strictly an insufficient funds for gas problem, which is not the same as the “out of gas” error you get when execution exceeds its gas limit. It has nothing to do with the asset you are moving; it is an empty native-gas balance on a chain you forgot to fund. Collapsing fees into one token removes that whole class of avoidable failure.
• Less cognitive load. You stop context-switching between chains just to reason about fees. The mental overhead of “do I have gas here?” disappears, which is the kind of friction that quietly makes multi-chain feel harder than it should.

None of this makes the underlying networks cheaper or removes on-chain costs — gas still exists and still has to be paid. What changes is where the complexity lives. With one fee token, it lives inside the wallet instead of inside your head.

Where to go next

If you want the canonical reference for the fee model itself — the terminology and the exact framing of how a charge is handled — start with the ATS fee page. To understand the wallet that the model runs inside, including the self-custody design described above, see the WATS Hot Wallet overview.

And if your interest is less about WATS specifically and more about the category — how single fee-token wallets work in general and how to evaluate them honestly against other approaches — read the best single fee-token wallets.

The concrete next step follows from the problem this post opened with. If you are tired of stranding funds on a chain because you forgot to fund its gas token, set up the WATS Hot Wallet and fund one ATS balance instead: the same balance pays fees on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana and TON, your keys never leave your hands, and every fee you pay burns ATS on the way to the 30M floor.