Who Really Pays? The Economics of Gas Abstraction

This post discusses the hidden economics of gas abstraction, compares L2 relayer models, and explores why sustainable incentives are the real challenge.

Our UX Dream

There’s a shared dream across crypto UX circles:

• wallets with no seed phrases

• dapps with no recurring popups

• …and blockchains with no gas fees

We’re getting close. Gas abstraction is utilised on many dapps and chains today. Relayers and Paymasters are doing a decent job at sponsoring. And wallet users can sign a transaction and it generally gets executed (sometimes).

But the question remains: who actually pays for the gas?

Someone is always still paying for gas. The hard part isn’t abstracting cost from users - it’s making sure that cost doesn’t destroy the economics of the network itself.

This post is about that part. The economics. Or more precisely: the lacking economics seen today in web3 user experiences that are “gas free”.

Gas abstraction ain’t free, it’s deferred economics.

Gas is easy to roast on (excuse the pun). It’s one of the reasons most user onboarding funnels break. It’s the main thing we abstract away with account abstraction. However, gas also does something else: it creates a price on execution and a spam deterrent. Remove it without replacing its functions, and you don’t just get "better UX" - you get more spam, exploits and a system no one can afford to keep running in the future. In web2, usually transaction fees don’t exist for many use cases such as social media, email, chat. They don’t exist, because users pay with their data. We don’t want that in Web3, but we still need to take fees somewhere.

So the real design question isn't “can we abstract gas and make our transactions free?” - it’s “can we abstract gas from the user without breaking the economics that make our system sustainable?”

You Gotta Pay the Relayer

Relayers (or bundlers/paymasters) are the infrastructure layer that sponsors and forwards transactions on behalf of users. In an abstracted flow, they:

• Receive a signed meta-transaction from the user

• Pay gas on L1/L2 to submit it

• Get compensated - either by an app, a protocol, a token subsidy, or (sometimes) not at all

According to Bundlebear, ~426M (~87%) of the total ~488M UserOps have gone through the major paymaster providers like Pimlico, Alchemy, Biconomy, and StackUp. In other words, most transactions today are being relayed by neutral, market-driven relayers. This supports the view that relaying today is becoming a horizontal market, and pushing towards a competitive open market. However, what lacks in the industry, is concrete data attributed to relayer profitability. The fact there is so little data published on this hints that most relayers are operating at a loss.

Comparing L2s and their Relayer Incentives

Here’s a look at how different Ethereum L2s are approaching the relayer incentive problem. It’s worth noting that these are some of the more “mature*”* models:

The takeaway from the table above is that we’re still in the early days of gasless UX’s and economics. But we, as an industry, need to be thinking about how we sustain these models once the subsidies dry up.

Here’s the subtlety: a blockchain is only as sustainable as the ecosystem of dapps it supports. Just as the Visa network relies on cafés to absorb the card processing fees in exchange for UX-friendly access to customers, a chain relies on its dapps to sponsor gas. If dapps are unsustainable, or if they pivot away from the network, the chain itself must either foot the bill indefinitely or shift the cost onto users, a less-than-ideal UX outcome.

Furthermore, it’s not just the cafés that absorb costs. Issuing banks (the cardholder’s bank) maintain infrastructure and manage settlement risk - similar to how the chain keeps the network secure and operational. Acquiring banks (the merchant’s bank) process payments and handle settlements, analogous to how the relayers/bundlers in the blockchain forward transactions and manage operational overhead.

In essence, each actor (café, merchant, issuing bank, acquiring bank) absorbs some of the cost, at least temporarily. The same is true in Web3. The most logical payer is the party that captures value from the transaction - usually the dapp or service, not the end user. If those dapps don’t step up, the chain is left with two bad options: run indefinitely as a subsidised product, or push costs back onto users - which can undermine the very promise of a seamless, gas-free UX.

So given that the economic burden must fall somewhere, here’s the general 5 pathways to fund gas:

🤖 Spam Protection

Whichever path is taken, a challenge that every gas sponsor model eventually faces is spam. If sending transactions is free, there’s no natural limit to how much people, or bots, will try to push through. So how do we protect the network without charging the user? One under explored option is to bring validators into the picture. Not L1 consensus validators - but application layer validators, lightweight nodes that:

• Vet and filter user-submitted transactions

• Enforce rate limits, balance quotas, or proof-of-personhood conditions

• Reject spam at the relayer layer before gas is ever burned

In other words: if users don’t pay gas, they must instead “prove they deserve it.” This can be done with:

• ID (proof of human uniqueness)

• Social graphs

• Usage history

• App specific credibility scoring

• Reputation staking or anti-sybil proofs

🚢 Bring it into Harbour

This question of “who actually pays” isn’t theoretical for us at Safe Research. It’s playing out right now in live research efforts like Harbour, which combines onchain transaction queues with ERC-4337 gas abstraction.

Safe smart accounts handle almost 80% of all ERC-4337 UserOps - so Harbour isn’t just research, it’s being built into the dominant account model. We’re building Harbour’s UX to streamline signing, abstract fee logic with paymasters, and use validators for spam protection. However, Harbour inherits the same economic tension we just covered. The relayer and paymaster needs someone to fund it. The validator set needs incentives (and penalties, via slashing) to prevent spam. In other words: Harbour solves for fully onchain multisig operations and the mechanics of gasless signature collection, but not the economics. It still has to wrestle with:

• whether dapps using Harbour will step up to fund the relayers

• whether validators will have sustainable incentives to keep operating

• and how to design spam protection that doesn’t kill UX

That’s why Harbour is interesting. We’re not just building out the technical architecture and its UX, we’re actively exploring its own economics which covers the tradeoffs this post has been talking about.

💬 Final Thoughts

A gas-free UX is appealing, but without sustainable economics, someone always pays - and often it circles back to the user. And if all we’ve done is push costs onto users to support infrastructure that isn’t economically viable, then we haven’t really advanced beyond Web2 payments - we’ve just made transactions clunkier.

The takeaway is simple:

your gasless dapp/chain is only as strong as the economics behind it

About Safe Research

Safe Research is the applied R&D arm of Safe, dedicated to advancing the self custody stack. Our work is grounded in the cypherpunk principles of security, censorship resistance, and privacy, and we focus on building trustless, user centric infrastructure for smart accounts and wallets.

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