Gasless Crypto Transactions Explained: Who Actually Pays the Fees?

• A gasless transaction still pays the network. Gasless only means the person signing the transaction does not pay the fee in the chain’s native coin, because an app, a relayer, a foundation, a trading counterparty or the protocol itself covers it.
• There are five main payment models: an app sponsors the fee, the user repays a paymaster in a stablecoin with a markup, a relayer deducts the fee from the transfer, a solver builds the cost into a swap price, or the protocol waives the fee for selected transactions.
• Published markups are concrete. Coinbase’s paymaster bills apps for sponsored gas plus 7%, Circle’s paymaster charges users a 10% surcharge on gas paid in USDC, and Tron’s GasFree service has charged a flat 1.5 USDT per transfer since 9 May 2026.
• Protocol-level gasless transactions on Plasma, Stable and Sui come with limits, such as identity checks, rate limits, minimum amounts or lower priority, and the cost falls on a foundation treasury or on validators who forgo fee revenue.
• Sponsored transactions remove the warning sign of a pending gas fee, which makes careful signing more important. Early EIP-7702 activity was dominated by wallet-sweeping contracts.

What a gasless transaction actually is

Every transaction on a public blockchain consumes computation and storage, and the network charges a fee, usually called gas, to pay the validators who process it and to stop spam. On Ethereum that fee is paid in ETH, on Solana in SOL and on Tron in TRX or in network resources called energy and bandwidth. A gasless transaction is one in which the user signs an instruction while somebody else supplies the native coin for the fee.

The feature exists because of a simple onboarding problem. A new user who receives 50 USDC on Ethereum cannot move it until they also buy some ETH, which means an exchange account, a second purchase and a second withdrawal. Each extra step is a point where a new user can give up, so wallets, payment apps and blockchains have built ways to cover or repackage the fee.

The fee itself never disappears. Validators still need to be paid for including the transaction, so the useful question for any gasless product is who pays, how much, and on what terms. The answer varies widely between chains and products, and it decides whether “gasless” means genuinely free, quietly marked up, or free only until a promotion ends.

The five ways a fee gets paid when the user does not pay it

The products on the market today fall into five payment models. Each one moves the cost to a different party, and each one has a different failure point.

The first two models dominate on Ethereum and its layer 2 networks, the relayer model is common on Tron and Solana, and protocol waivers are the selling point of the new stablecoin-focused chains.

Ethereum and layer 2s: paymasters, ERC-4337 and EIP-7702

On Ethereum-compatible chains, most gasless products run on ERC-4337, the account abstraction standard that went live in March 2023. Account abstraction lets a wallet be a programmable smart contract instead of a plain key-controlled address, which opens up features such as sponsored gas, passkey logins and social recovery in smart wallets. Under ERC-4337, the user signs a “UserOperation”, a bundler packages many of these into one on-chain transaction, and a paymaster contract can agree to pay the gas for any operation that meets its rules.

Etherspot’s review of 2024 counted more than 103 million UserOperations that year, up from 8.3 million in 2023, with 87% paid for by a paymaster and $3.4 million of fees covered. By 8 November 2026, the BundleBear dashboard showed about 1.36 billion UserOperations in total, more than 72 million accounts with at least one operation, and $15.5 million of gas covered by paymasters.

A 2026 paper analysing BundleBear data found that a single paymaster provider processed more than 71% of sponsored UserOperations by count, and that the top three providers accounted for over 62% of paymaster gas spend. A sponsored transaction that depends on one provider’s signing server stops working when that server refuses or goes offline, so the convenience comes with a dependency.

EIP-7702 extended the same features to ordinary wallets. Activated in Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade on 7 May 2025, it lets a normal key-controlled address delegate to smart contract code, so the address can batch actions and have another account pay its fees without moving funds to a new wallet. A delegated address can plug into the same bundlers and paymasters that ERC-4337 accounts use.

Where to find pricing for paymaster services?

Pricing for paymaster services is published, and it shows that sponsorship is a paid product. Coinbase Developer Platform’s paymaster works only on Base and Base Sepolia, and it bills the app for the sponsored gas plus a 7% fee, invoiced monthly. Apps can configure allowlists, per-user limits and global spending caps, and Coinbase offers up to $15,000 of gas credits through its Base Gasless Campaign. Circle’s paymaster works the other way round: the user pays gas in USDC, and Circle adds a 10% surcharge on the gas cost, so a $0.01 fee becomes $0.011 in Circle’s own example.

Those two products illustrate the main split on EVM chains. With full sponsorship, the app absorbs the fee and treats it like a marketing or operating expense. With token paymasters, the user still pays, only in a more convenient currency and with a margin for the operator. On cheap layer 2 networks, where a transfer often costs a fraction of a cent, a 10% markup is trivial. On Ethereum mainnet during congestion, the same percentage applies to a much larger fee.

Solana: the fee payer field and Kora

Solana handles sponsorship at the protocol level more simply, because every Solana transaction names a fee payer, the signer whose account covers the network fee in SOL. The fee payer does not have to be the person sending the tokens, so an app can sign as fee payer for its users and the transaction still settles through the normal path.

The Solana Foundation turned this into a standard tool with Kora, a fee relayer and signing node. A Kora node checks that a transaction meets its security rules and, where configured, that it includes a payment to the node operator in an SPL token such as USDC. The node then co-signs as fee payer and pays the SOL fee from its own balance. That means a Kora setup can run as full sponsorship, where the app absorbs the fee, or as fee abstraction, where the user pays in a token of their choice and the node operator collects it.

Solana’s base fees are small enough that sponsorship is cheap for most apps. The harder questions are operational: the fee payer account must be funded, protected and rate-limited, because a public sponsor with no limits invites abuse.

Tron: GasFree and the flat 1.5 USDT fee

Tron shows that “gasless” can sometimes cost more than paying the network directly. USDT transactions on Tron consume energy and bandwidth, which users normally obtain by holding and staking TRX, renting energy, or paying TRX at the time of the transfer. GasFree, a smart wallet feature in the JustLend DAO and JUST ecosystem that launched in March 2025, lets users send USDT without holding any TRX. Service providers collect the user’s signed authorisation, advance the network cost, and deduct their fee from the USDT being transferred.

Since 9 May 2026, GasFree has charged a flat 1.5 USDT per transfer, plus a one-off 1.5 USDT activation on first use, regardless of the amount sent. By 21 May 2026, it had processed about $89.3 billion of cumulative volume across more than 5.16 million transactions, according to figures reported by ChainCatcher. CryptoQuant’s July 2026 research on Tron put the effective GasFree fee rate at 0.009% on an average transfer of $16,300, which fits a flat fee of around $1.50.

A flat fee favours large transactions and penalises small ones. Sending $16,000 for 1.5 USDT is cheap, while sending $20 for the same 1.5 USDT costs 7.5%. Users who already hold TRX or rent energy can often pay less, since CryptoQuant put the average Tron transaction fee at $0.49 in July 2026, although that average covers all transaction types. On Tron, then, the user pays the gasless fee directly, in USDT, at a price the service provider sets.

Stablecoin chains: Plasma, Stable and Sui

The newest stablecoin-focused blockchains go furthest, by waiving fees for selected transfers at the protocol level. Each one still has to pay its validators, so the design question shifts from “who pays this user’s fee” to “who funds the whole free tier”. The competition among these stablecoin blockchains for payment flows and reserve income explains why they are willing to absorb the cost.

Gasless Transactions on Plasma

Plasma, a stablecoin chain linked to the Tether and Bitfinex ecosystem that launched its mainnet beta on 25 September 2025, runs a protocol-maintained paymaster for USDT. That paymaster covers gas from a pre-funded balance of XPL, the chain’s native token, supplied by the Plasma Foundation. It sponsors only standard transfer and transferFrom calls, applies identity-based rate limits and eligibility checks, and leaves every other transaction to pay gas, which can be settled in USDT or XPL. The free tier is therefore a foundation subsidy with usage controls.

Gasless Transactions on Stable

Stable, a Tether-backed chain that launched its mainnet on 8 December 2025, uses USDT0 as its gas token. Simple peer-to-peer USDT0 transfers carry no gas fee at the protocol level, while smart contract interactions and transfers of other assets pay fees denominated in USDT0. Users only ever need to hold the stablecoin, and the chain gives up fee revenue on simple transfers while collecting USDT0 fees on everything else.

Gasless Transactions on Sui

Sui took a different route on 20 May 2026, when it set gas for peer-to-peer transfers of supported stablecoins to zero through a new Address Balances system. The Sui Foundation described the change as structural and said it was neither a subsidy nor a temporary promotion. The feature comes with its own controls: transfers below 0.01 of a token do not qualify, and transactions that pay gas still take priority over gasless ones during congestion. In Sui’s design the cost falls on the network itself: those transfers generate no fee revenue, a trade-off analysts flagged for SUI holders at launch.

Gasless swaps: the cost moves into the price

Trading apps offer a fifth version of gasless, in which the fee is folded into the exchange rate. With UniswapX, a user signs an off-chain order, and third-party “fillers” compete to execute it on-chain. The filler pays the gas and prices that cost into the swap, and if the swap fails the user pays nothing. CoW Swap and 1inch Fusion use similar designs, which are part of the wider shift toward intents and solver networks across chains.

For users, this model is often a good deal, because failed transactions cost nothing and fillers can batch orders to reduce gas per trade. The fee is still there, inside the difference between the quoted price and the market price, alongside any value the filler captures from ordering, which is closely related to the MEV that searchers and builders extract from ordinary trades. Comparing the final amount received against a live market price is the only reliable way to see the total cost.

What the user pays in each model

Putting the published pricing side by side shows how different the outcomes are for the same simple task: sending a stablecoin or making a swap without holding the native coin.

Two patterns stand out. Where a business has a clear reason to pay, such as acquiring users or settling payments on its own chain, the user often pays nothing at all. Where a service provider simply converts the fee into another currency, the user pays the fee plus a margin, and the word “gasless” describes the user interface more than the economics.

The risks behind gasless transactions

Free tiers come with conditions, and the conditions can change. Sponsorship budgets run out, credits expire, and rate limits, allowlists or minimum amounts decide which transactions qualify. Any product that relies on a single paymaster provider also inherits that provider’s uptime and its screening decisions, given how concentrated sponsorship has become on EVM chains.

The bigger risk is security, because sponsorship changes what users see at the moment of signing. A normal transaction shows a gas fee to approve, and that prompt gives users a moment to notice something odd. When a third party pays the fee, a malicious request can arrive with no cost attached. Within weeks of EIP-7702 going live, trading firm Wintermute found that more than 80% of EIP-7702 delegations pointed to copies of the same sweeper contract, built to drain incoming funds from wallets with compromised keys.

The largest gasless transaction incident ever recorded

The largest incident so far involved an institution. On 29 October 2026, about $6.4 billion was moved out of Binance wallets across 10 blockchains, a theft that TRM Labs and Chainalysis attributed to the North Korean group TraderTraitor. On Ethereum, the attacker used an EIP-7702 delegation with 50 pre-signed authorisations to turn a Binance hot wallet into a sweeper, while losses on the other chains came through ordinary signed transfers. TRM said this pointed to a compromise of Binance’s signing infrastructure, since a delegation still requires a valid signature from the account itself. The case fits a broader pattern in which attackers compromise the signing process instead of the cryptography.

The practical lesson here is to treat any unexpected “free” signature request as a red flag. Security firm SlowMist urged wallet providers in 2025 to display the target contract prominently whenever a user signs a delegation, and wallets that do so give users a last chance to spot a sweeper.

How to evaluate a gasless offer

Users and businesses can test any gasless product with the same five questions.

1. Who pays the network? Identify whether the app, a relayer, a foundation, a solver or the protocol supplies the native coin.
2. What do I pay instead? Check for a flat fee, a percentage markup, a worse exchange rate or nothing at all, and compare it with paying gas directly.
3. What are the limits? Look for rate limits, minimum amounts, eligible tokens, allowlists and priority rules that decide which transactions stay free.
4. How long is it promised? Distinguish protocol rules from promotional credits and foundation budgets, which can be reduced or withdrawn.
5. What am I signing? Read every signature request, especially delegations and approvals, because a sponsored transaction removes the fee prompt that often signals a problem.