Gasless and Sponsored Transactions Explained

A gasless or sponsored transaction is one a user can send without holding or visibly spending the blockchain's native coin: a third party — a relayer, an ERC-4337 paymaster, or a fee-payer account on chains like Solana — fronts the native gas and is then either repaid in a different token or absorbs the cost itself. Nothing is actually free: the network still meters gas and validators are still paid in ETH, SOL or Toncoin, so "gasless" describes which asset the user pays in and who fronts it, not whether a fee exists. The sponsor’s power is deliberately narrow — it can submit, delay, reorder or decline the exact operation you signed, but it never holds your keys and cannot alter what you authorized. WATS implements the token-denominated version of this pattern: the fully non-custodial WATS Hot Wallet charges every network fee in a single token, ATS, with an ERC-4337 paymaster on EVM chains and an equivalent fee-payer role on Solana and TON settling the native cost underneath.

What "gasless" actually means

Every transaction on a public blockchain consumes computational resources, and those resources are metered as gas. Validators expect to be paid for that work, so gas never disappears — the network still charges it, and it is still settled in the chain’s native coin (ETH on Ethereum, SOL on Solana, Toncoin on TON). "Gasless" is a user-experience claim, not a physics claim: it means you did not have to hold the native coin or approve a visible fee. Someone or something paid the underlying cost on your behalf, or let you pay it in a different asset.

Understanding any gasless design comes down to two questions: who fronts the native coin, and how are they reimbursed? The mechanisms below differ mostly in those two answers. This is also the core idea behind gas abstraction — separating the asset a user pays with from the asset a validator is paid in.

Meta-transactions and relayers

The oldest approach is the meta-transaction. Instead of broadcasting a transaction yourself, you sign a message describing your intended action and hand it to a relayer. The relayer wraps your signed message in a real on-chain transaction, pays the gas from its own native-coin balance, and submits it. A trusted forwarder contract verifies your signature so the target contract still treats you — not the relayer — as the true sender.

Relayers work on essentially any chain and predate account standards, but they are bespoke: each dapp historically wired up its own relayer and forwarder, and reimbursement (if any) happened off-chain or through custom contract logic. Nothing was portable between applications, and that fragmentation is precisely what later standards set out to fix.

ERC-4337 paymasters

ERC-4337, the account-abstraction standard for EVM chains, formalizes sponsorship through a shared EntryPoint contract and a component called a paymaster. Users submit "UserOperations" rather than raw transactions; a bundler collects them and the paymaster agrees to cover the native gas. Crucially, the paymaster can require repayment in an ERC-20 token, deducting it from the user’s balance in the same operation. That is how a wallet can let you pay fees in a stablecoin or a utility token while a validator still receives ETH.

Two clarifications matter. First, ERC-4337 is an EVM-only standard — it does not run on Solana or TON, which solve the same problem with their own primitives. Second, using a paymaster does not by itself make an account custodial: a paymaster sponsors or collects fees, it does not hold your keys and cannot sign for you. For a deeper walk-through, see what is ERC-4337. As of 2026, EIP-7702 complements this by letting an ordinary externally-owned account sign an authorization that points it at smart-account code, so it can use paymaster-style flows without migrating to a new address. That delegation is persistent rather than automatically temporary — it stays until the owner signs a new authorization or clears the pointer.

Dapp-sponsored gas

Sponsorship can also be a straightforward business decision. A dapp, game or exchange can run its own paymaster or relayer and simply eat the gas for certain actions — a first mint, a signup, a loyalty claim. Economically this is a marketing cost, much like free shipping: the sponsor pays validators in the native coin and absorbs it to remove friction at the moment a new user is most likely to give up. Sponsorship is usually conditional — only whitelisted contracts, only capped amounts, only new accounts — so the sponsor bounds its exposure.

Common use cases

Three patterns dominate. Onboarding: a newcomer who owns only a stablecoin can transact immediately without first buying the native coin on an exchange — historically the single biggest drop-off point in crypto UX. Dapp UX: hiding gas prompts makes an app feel like a normal web product, which improves conversion. Token-denominated fees: multi-chain users consolidate spending into one asset instead of juggling a different gas coin per chain, so a balance on one network is never stranded by an empty gas balance on another. Each case trades a little decentralization, or a little sponsor cost, for a large usability gain.

Trust and risk considerations

Gasless flows introduce a new party, so it is worth being precise about what that party can and cannot do. A relayer or paymaster cannot move your funds, alter your intended action, or forge your signature — the target contract still validates that you authorized exactly what was signed. What it can do is decline to submit, censor, reorder or delay your transaction, and it sees your intended operation before it lands on chain. Sponsored systems can also be griefed: a poorly bounded paymaster can be drained by abusive traffic, which is why sponsors apply limits. Signature-replay and deadline protections inside the signed message guard against a relayer resubmitting an old operation. The practical rule is that gasless changes who fronts the fee and whose liveness you depend on — custody and authorization stay with you.

EVM vs non-EVM approaches

The vocabulary is EVM-specific, but the pattern is universal. On Solana, a transaction can carry a separate fee payer account distinct from the accounts being modified, so a service can sign as fee payer and cover the SOL cost while you authorize the rest. On TON, the actor model and message-based execution let a relayer or sponsoring contract forward messages and settle the Toncoin fee underneath. Neither chain runs ERC-4337 — that standard is EVM-only — but each provides an equivalent fee-payer or relayer role that plays the paymaster’s part. As of 2026 the exact fee-payer semantics on these chains continue to evolve, so treat specifics as version-dependent.

How WATS uses this

WATS is a concrete implementation of the token-denominated variant described above. In the WATS Hot Wallet you never need to keep each chain’s native gas token: every action — transfers, swaps, staking — is charged in a single token, ATS, while a paymaster or fee payer settles the native cost underneath. On EVM chains (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon and BNB Chain) this uses an ERC-4337 paymaster that collects the fee in ATS; on Solana and TON an equivalent fee-payer role does the same job, and because ATS is a LayerZero OFT, one balance spans all of them.

Two honest caveats follow from everything above. This is not a discount — ATS changes which token pays, not what the network charges underneath. And it does not change custody: WATS is fully non-custodial, you hold your keys, and WATS never holds one. The ATS collected as fees is burned, taking supply from 100M down toward a 30M floor, and WATS is the first and only wallet to combine an ERC-4337 paymaster, LayerZero OFT omnichain fees paid in one token instead of native gas, and that burn.

So if the friction in this post is your friction — a transfer blocked because you hold USDC on Base but no ETH, or four dust-sized gas floats parked across four chains — the practical step is to use a wallet where the pattern is already wired in rather than waiting for each dapp to sponsor you. Funding a WATS Hot Wallet with ATS does that across all eight supported chains: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana and TON.