Native Meta-Transaction Proposal Roundup

Execution Layer Research
2

Thanks for putting this up.
I would like to defend the EIP-2473 (Gas Abstraction through Expansion of Miner Duties):

Cons: txs paying in esoteric tokens would face increased latency

Can be worked around:
Miners could automatically monitor several DEXes to find good trade deals with esoteric tokens, and include the DEX trade to ether in the last transaction of the block, and only seal the block if the new block renders the state where they have the ETH they want. This can be done whenever there is some “free gas” in the block to fill this DEX trade transaction.
This is not necessary for well established tokens, such as Wrapped ETH (guaranteed 1-1 ETH rate) and tokens that don’t vary a lot in the ETH rate, as benevolent miners would prefer to accumulate them and exchange them in big trades to save gas (which is “free” for them but have a network cost)

Cons: the duties of the miner would increase significantly to provide these services

Agreed, however :

  • This can also increase the earnings of block validators.
  • This can also increase the value of ETH as the ecossystem becomes more versatile, and ETH still used as base market. (miners usually change ERC20 to ETH after the transaction is done)
  • This is optional free market, miners would still be able as they currently, but can opt-in to accept tokens with well established ETH value, and the exchange for ETH can be automated with DEX.
  • This process can be standardized (possibly by other ERCs), but essentially ERC20 gas market would be more expansive than ETH market, so would be rational for users exchanging some ETH to get faster transaction timing and cheaper gas rates.
  • Is in the best interest of miners to accept good deeds for a gasPrice, even if it means including a gasPrice 0 transaction, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a miner build this closed source and have exclusivity in ERC20 gas market, where they can rule the price.

Cons: so not all onboarding use cases for dapps would be covered

Can be worked around:

  • it’s possible to relay in top of another contract which pays the meta-transaction in ETH (gasToken set to zero) and passes the user signature to the identity user account contract. (Meta-meta-transaction with innermost gasPrice and gasToken set to zero)

Additional considerations:

  • This is the smallest change to network possible to provide this feature, which is opt-in by miners.
  • Can co-exist with future changes to EVM, with remarks to EIP-2489*

*EIP-2428 - UNGAS EVM EIP:

  • as it is now, would automatically invalidates any previous meta-transaction (it would fail at SafeMath.mul() due int overflow and in gasLimit). However, if the EIP-2489 uses default value of “GAS” OPCODE to one, gasPrice becomes a fixedFee variable, and gasLimits gets kicked off.
  • meta transactions could use delegatecall to a library-contract that contains gas payment logic, which could have its bytecode upgraded together with EIP-2489.
  • EIP-1077 could be designed from beginning without gasLimit and gasPrice*gasUsed, and start off using a plain totalFee which is paid regardless of cost of transaction, but only when succeeded.
  • It is very improbable that EIP-2428 ever gets approved as it changes fundamental things solidity used for in many livenet contracts, and being a very complex/risky upgrade of EVM.