In this series of article, I will discuss some interesting De-fi and wallet application on blockchains from a user perspective. I will also discuss some of the technology aspect but as I am not involved in the projects, some of the information is my best guess and please always refer to project’s white paper and documents. Also, this is my personal opinion and not a financial advice.

Last time I have shared my experience in participating Particle Network testnet - Pioneer. I have outlined the experience and try to figure out the technology behind it. I am very amazed the work from their team because their universal gas feature is an awesome implementation of paymaster and smart account feature in ERC-4337 account abstraction. But why does it matter?

Last month, I have joined WireXPay node sale. They are selling their node on Polygon network and they charges ETH for the node. Here is what I have done to accomplish:

1. Transfer ETH from CEx to Arbitrum One

2. Bridge ETH from Arbitrum One to WETH on Polygon via Portal

3. Swap for some MATIC on Mainnet

4. Bridge MATIC from Mainnet to Polygon network

5. Purchase WireX pay node

The whole process has taken more than an hour to complete, due to the requirement to wait for block finality for bridging. I would have miss out if the sale happens during a bull market, where everyone FOMO.

The purchase would have been much easier if I don’t have to source MATIC to pay for the gas fee of the transaction and if I could use my ETH in my account on any blockchain easily. I think this is a common pain point for most crypto users and Particle Network was built to solve this.

ERC-4337 account abstraction has offered a feature called gas sponsoring (or gasless transaction). I don’t really like the term “gasless transaction” because that would lead to people to associate it with “free of transaction fee” transaction or transaction doesn’t need gas. However, “gasless transaction” actually means users are able to pay gas without having the platform token (i.e. ETH in Ethereum, POL in Polygon, etc.). Instead, they are able to pay with any ERC-20 token like USDC or USDT. Or in some case, the transactions fee are sponsored to incentify the activity on chain. Before the ERC-4337 was established, gasless transaction has already exist in the Ethereum ecosystem. Most of them were achieved by meta transaction, which users sign a transaction with all transaction details (from, to, value, data, etc.) and submit it to a off-chain relayer network. Relayers are then responsible to submit the transaction onto a specific smart contract, which verifies the signature, manage the nonce and execute the call data. Relayers are also responsible to pay the gas fee on behalf of the users. Argent wallet is one of the example that has adopted meta transaction for gasless transaction.

Meta transaction requires setup of relayer network and makes it difficult to scale to different EVM blockchains. Whereas ERC-4337 has established a standard and infrastructure to accomplish gasless transaction. In the ERC-4337 transaction life cycle, users can opt to choose a paymaster when they submit the user operation to bundler service. With paymaster, users doesn’t have to hold the platform token in order to complete a transaction. Instead, they have to pay the paymaster such that it would sponsor the ETH for the transaction. They can pay with ERC-20 token for some of the paymaster or even pay off-chain and visa has done a POC on that.

However, I don’t think this paymaster feature has been utilised very much because of the fact that ERC-4337 has not widely adopted. Many AA account provider enables use of ERC-20 to pay for the gas fee. Particle network has make it even more revolutionise by setting up a layer 1 blockchain as a settlement layer for this gas fee balance (and for the universal liquidity balance as well).

Imagine effortlessly managing your blockchain transactions without worrying about ETH balances. With ERC-4337, Particle Network makes this a reality—changing how we think about blockchain.

In this series of article, I will discuss some interesting De-fi and wallet application on blockchains from a user perspective. I will also discuss some of the technology aspect but as I am not involved in the projects, some of the information is my best guess and please always refer to project’s white paper and documents. Also, this is my personal opinion and not a financial advice.

Last time I have shared my experience in participating Particle Network testnet - Pioneer. I have outlined the experience and try to figure out the technology behind it. I am very amazed the work from their team because their universal gas feature is an awesome implementation of paymaster and smart account feature in ERC-4337 account abstraction. But why does it matter?

Last month, I have joined WireXPay node sale. They are selling their node on Polygon network and they charges ETH for the node. Here is what I have done to accomplish:

1. Transfer ETH from CEx to Arbitrum One

2. Bridge ETH from Arbitrum One to WETH on Polygon via Portal

3. Swap for some MATIC on Mainnet

4. Bridge MATIC from Mainnet to Polygon network

5. Purchase WireX pay node

The whole process has taken more than an hour to complete, due to the requirement to wait for block finality for bridging. I would have miss out if the sale happens during a bull market, where everyone FOMO.

The purchase would have been much easier if I don’t have to source MATIC to pay for the gas fee of the transaction and if I could use my ETH in my account on any blockchain easily. I think this is a common pain point for most crypto users and Particle Network was built to solve this.

ERC-4337 account abstraction has offered a feature called gas sponsoring (or gasless transaction). I don’t really like the term “gasless transaction” because that would lead to people to associate it with “free of transaction fee” transaction or transaction doesn’t need gas. However, “gasless transaction” actually means users are able to pay gas without having the platform token (i.e. ETH in Ethereum, POL in Polygon, etc.). Instead, they are able to pay with any ERC-20 token like USDC or USDT. Or in some case, the transactions fee are sponsored to incentify the activity on chain. Before the ERC-4337 was established, gasless transaction has already exist in the Ethereum ecosystem. Most of them were achieved by meta transaction, which users sign a transaction with all transaction details (from, to, value, data, etc.) and submit it to a off-chain relayer network. Relayers are then responsible to submit the transaction onto a specific smart contract, which verifies the signature, manage the nonce and execute the call data. Relayers are also responsible to pay the gas fee on behalf of the users. Argent wallet is one of the example that has adopted meta transaction for gasless transaction.

Meta transaction requires setup of relayer network and makes it difficult to scale to different EVM blockchains. Whereas ERC-4337 has established a standard and infrastructure to accomplish gasless transaction. In the ERC-4337 transaction life cycle, users can opt to choose a paymaster when they submit the user operation to bundler service. With paymaster, users doesn’t have to hold the platform token in order to complete a transaction. Instead, they have to pay the paymaster such that it would sponsor the ETH for the transaction. They can pay with ERC-20 token for some of the paymaster or even pay off-chain and visa has done a POC on that.

However, I don’t think this paymaster feature has been utilised very much because of the fact that ERC-4337 has not widely adopted. Many AA account provider enables use of ERC-20 to pay for the gas fee. Particle network has make it even more revolutionise by setting up a layer 1 blockchain as a settlement layer for this gas fee balance (and for the universal liquidity balance as well).

Imagine effortlessly managing your blockchain transactions without worrying about ETH balances. With ERC-4337, Particle Network makes this a reality—changing how we think about blockchain.