Ethereum Proposal Would Let Users Pay Gas Without Holding ETH

In brief

• EIP-8141's Frame transactions would split a transaction into validation, payment and execution steps, each an ordinary contract call.
• Existing wallets would gain sponsored gas, token-paid fees and batched actions without migrating to a smart account.
• The proposal is still a draft and has not been scheduled for any network upgrade.

A proposal that would let Ethereum users pay transaction fees in tokens, or have someone else pay them entirely, has been quietly advancing for months, Vitalik Buterin said on Sunday.

EIP-8141 replaces the fixed shape of an Ethereum transaction with a sequence of up to 64 "frames," each an ordinary contract call. One frame validates the transaction, another approves who covers the gas, and the rest carry out whatever the user actually wanted to do.

Splitting payment approval into its own step breaks the link between the account that signs a transaction and the account that funds it, so a wallet that only holds stablecoins could transact by paying fees in ERC-20 tokens, or an application could sponsor its users outright.

No new wallet required

That has been possible since 2023 through ERC-4337, but only by routing transactions through a separate mempool and paying third-party bundlers. Frames runs in Ethereum's public mempool, with rules written into the protocol that let nodes reason about a transaction's validation steps before accepting it.