Gas Fee Abstraction
What is gas-fee abstraction?
Gas Fee Abstraction is a highly required feature for token transactions, allowing users to perform gas-fee and dApp-specific transactions using the dApp-specific tokens only, thus removing the need to obtain and transact in additional tokens outside the actual dApp token.
The importance of abstracting away gas-fees and how it is currently seen as a difficult challenge to overcome
Gas fees have been a persistent issue in dApps, creating a barrier for users and limiting adoption. Due to computational scalability constraints, most dApps force their users to interact with a separate platform gas token, a low-level element of the protocol. Blockchain based applications are to a large degree prevented from acquiring users through regular marketing channels because the conversion rate is dramatically reduced due to complicated onboarding and increased friction in user journeys from non-intuitive gas token requirements. For most non-crypto users, it is counter intuitive to keep two token balances to perform transactions in one application token. If gas fee abstraction is implemented, the gas cost of each transaction typically increases 2 or 3 fold, also causing low adoption rates.
The impact of gas tokens as user journey friction points is also something to consider when different L1 chains compete in transactions per second word games. Most of the time, these numbers are tweaked by reducing the flexibility of the transactions. Their coins or tokens might be capable of a high number of transactions, but the market has already extended far above the coin use case. Most of the innovations in use cases now require fully customisable transaction logic. The market steers towards programmable, composable transaction models - and low-friction user experience. This makes tx/s measurements for static coin use cases more or less irrelevant. Truly useful scaling of transactions has to target general computation, anything else will limit innovation and miss out on all the action.
Gas fee abstraction is a very basic, but highly relevant example of the above. Even the relatively limited additional computations required to perform the gas fee abstraction quickly paint a very different picture of the real-world scaling metrics of most blockchains. Even a relatively modest adoption as seen from a centralised application view will completely saturate most L1 blockchains if the gas fees are to be abstracted away. The computational model is simply not capable of supporting it.
How Coinweb extends gas fee abstraction making it truly scalable and interoperable over any combination of blockchains.
Coinwebs computational framework is powerful enough to support true gas-fee abstraction by executing atomic DEX and user transactions together, removing the need for gas fee sponsorship and cumbersome whitelisting. Coinweb supports several levels of gas fee abstraction, including natively at the protocol level. One of the utilities of CWEB, Coinweb's native platform token is to abstract away all L1 gas tokens. Users can transact freely using any of Coinweb connected blockchain without keeping any native L1 balances. This abstraction is of course useful from a user journey point of view, but also strictly necessary for the operation of the Coinweb platform. However, the abstraction of L1 native platform fees using CWEB is only the first level of gas-fee abstraction supported by Coinweb. Coinweb also allows the CWEB token to be abstracted away using atomic gas-fee DEX operations within dApp-specific token transfers. This allows dApps to be completely on-pair with centralised solutions from a user experience perspective, and of course with the huge advantage from blockchain based tokens flexibility and composability with regards to overall token utility.
Even for existing L1 tokens and DApss, Coinweb can enable gas-fee abstraction by retrofitting L2 DEX operations on top of existing L1 smart contracts, vastly improving efficiency and solution space for existing L1 dApps.
Click here for more details about both L2 gas-abstraction as well as retrofitting on existing L1 tokens - use case For more information and use cases, please read this article.