A proposal that would let Ethereum users pay transaction fees in tokens, or have someone else pay them entirely, has been advancing quietly for months, Vitalik Buterin said on Sunday.
The EIP-8141 replaces the fixed format of an Ethereum transaction with a sequence of up to 64 "frames", each one being an ordinary contract call. One frame validates the transaction, another approves who covers the gas, and the remaining ones carry out what the user actually wanted to do.
Splitting the payment approval into a separate step breaks the link between the account that signs a transaction and the account that funds it. This way, a wallet holding only stablecoins could transact while paying fees in ERC-20 tokens, or an application could sponsor its users directly.
No new wallet required
This has been possible since 2023 through ERC-4337, but only by routing transactions through a separate mempool and paying third-party bundlers. Frames work within Ethereum's public mempool, with rules written into the protocol that allow nodes to analyse a transaction's validation steps before accepting it.
Ordinary externally owned accounts are covered as well. The specification defines a "default code" that gives wallets without a deployed contract the same sponsored transactions, token-paid gas fees and batched calls, without users needing to migrate to a smart account.
Frames also allow several actions to be bundled so they succeed or fail together, eliminating the leftover pending token approvals that remain when a swap is reverted, and they decouple accounts from the ECDSA keys that control them, making key rotation possible for the first time.
The proposal is not only about fees. Its authors describe Frames as a "native off-ramp" from the elliptic-curve cryptography that Ethereum currently uses for authentication, anticipating the arrival of quantum computers capable of breaking it. Co-author Matt Garnett, who writes as lightclient, notes that post-quantum signatures run to several kilobytes each, forcing the network towards signature aggregation.
The proposal has been a draft since January and has no scheduled update. Buterin pointed to a testnet run by the ethrex client that combines Frames with FOCIL, the censorship-resistance mechanism, to allow privacy protocols to operate without relayers.
"Frames should be the last type of transaction we'll ever need for accounts," Garnett wrote.
* Translated and edited with permission from Decrypt.
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