Gasless and Sponsored Transactions Explained

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 the 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, TON 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 gasless designs is really about answering two questions: who fronts the native coin, and how are they reimbursed? The mechanisms below differ mostly in those two answers. This is 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. That fragmentation is part of 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 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. Second, using a paymaster does not by itself make an account custodial; a paymaster only sponsors or collects fees, it does not hold your keys. For a deeper walk-through, see what is ERC-4337. As of 2026, EIP-7702 complements this by letting ordinary externally-owned accounts temporarily adopt smart-account behavior, widening where paymaster-style flows can apply.

Dapp-sponsored gas

Sponsorship can also be a 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, like free shipping: the sponsor pays validators in the native coin and absorbs it to remove friction. Sponsorship can be conditional (only whitelisted contracts, only capped amounts, only new users) 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, improving conversion. Token-denominated fees: power users consolidate spending into one asset — a stablecoin or a utility token — instead of juggling a different gas coin per chain. 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. 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 in the signed message guard against a relayer resubmitting an old operation. The practical rule: gasless improves convenience and liveness depends on the relayer, but custody and authorization remain 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 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, exact fee-payer semantics on these chains continue to evolve, so treat specifics as version-dependent.

How WATS uses this

In the WATS Hot Wallet you never hold each chain's native gas: 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 this uses an ERC-4337 paymaster to collect the fee in ATS; on Solana and TON an equivalent fee-payer plays the same role, and because ATS is a LayerZero OFT one balance spans all three. WATS stays non-custodial — you hold your keys and WATS never holds one — and the ATS collected as fees is burned, reducing supply from 100M toward a 30M floor. It is the first and only wallet to combine ERC-4337 plus OFT single-token fees charged instead of native gas with that burn.