The bet on Ethereum is that once the threshold of Gas disappears, more people will truly start using Ethereum.

Written by: imToken

If you play on-chain, you have probably encountered these awkward situations:

You receive a stablecoin in a new address, but when you want to transfer it, a pop-up appears saying you don't have ETH to pay for Gas; you want to swap a coin on a DEX, but it gets stuck; you withdraw USDC from a trading platform, only to realize you haven't prepared for Gas.....

In all these cases, you have to go elsewhere to find fiat channels or ask people around to transfer some "water," which can be considered a classic new user discouragement scene in the Crypto world.

Recently, Vitalik Buterin mentioned the progress of EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions), which once again brought new imaginative possibilities to everyone: in the future, you can transfer directly even if there is no ETH in your wallet, with Gas being deducted directly from USDC, and even some applications may simply cover the Gas for you to attract users.

Once the news spread, it quickly fermented into a shocking assertion: "In the future, using Ethereum won’t require ETH, so what value does ETH have?"

The answer is not that simple.

What users use to pay fees and what the Ethereum protocol ultimately uses to settle fees are actually two completely different matters.

1. What does it mean to not pay Gas with ETH?

Let's start with a typical Ethereum transaction today.

For example, Frank has 1000 USDC in his wallet, and he wants to transfer 100 USDC to a friend, but as long as there is no ETH in the wallet, this transaction cannot be executed.

The reason is simple: currently, the logic of ordinary Ethereum accounts is very rigid; the person initiating the transaction is also the one responsible for paying the network Gas—Frank signs, Frank initiates the transaction, and Frank's ETH balance pays for Gas; these three things are basically tied together.

What EIP-8141 aims to do is to separate these processes.

According to the current design, a Frame Transaction can be split into multiple different "Frames," each responsible for validating the transaction, confirming who will pay the Gas, and executing the user's actions.

In the future, when Frank makes a transfer, it could mean that Frank still signs to prove "this 100 USDC is indeed what I want to transfer," but another Paymaster or account is responsible for providing ETH to pay Gas to the Ethereum network, while Frank pays a small amount of USDC to this Paymaster as a fee.

For Frank, what he sees might simply be a transfer of 100 USDC with a network fee of 0.1 USDC, during the entire process, he doesn't even need to know how much ETH Gas costs, nor does he need to prepare ETH in advance.

But from the perspective of the Ethereum protocol, it doesn't become "Ethereum starts accepting USDC as Gas"; it just means someone in the background paid Gas with ETH for Frank, and then settled with Frank using USDC.

The official ERC-20 payment example given by EIP-8141 shows a similar structure, where a Sponsor is responsible for approving and bearing the Gas, while the user can transfer ERC-20 Token to the Sponsor as a fee.

If we compare it to a real-life consumption scenario, it becomes easier to understand.

When we swipe a RMB credit card in Japan, the user perceives it as "RMB deduction," while the merchant receives JPY, but this does not mean that the underlying settlement currency in Japan has become RMB; the assets used for front-end payment and back-end settlement do not have to be the same.

What EIP-8141 does is essentially a similar abstraction. Ultimately, users no longer need to personally hold ETH, as other accounts can pay ETH Gas on their behalf, and then use assets like USDC to settle fees.

The difference may seem just a few words, but the implications for ETH are entirely different.

2. Why does Ethereum have to "hide" Gas?

In fact, the idea of "not having to prepare ETH yourself" is not a brand-new concept.

The Account Abstraction and Paymaster introduced by ERC-4337 already allow smart accounts to achieve Gas Sponsorship, where applications can pay fees on behalf of users or allow users to use stablecoins to bear costs.

However, what ERC-4337 can do is add a set of UserOperation, Bundler, EntryPoint, and Paymaster infrastructure outside the protocol, while EIP-8141 attempts to embed such capabilities more naturally into the Ethereum transaction structure itself.

Ultimately, the core is to solve an issue that should have been addressed long ago: why do ordinary users need to understand what Gas is?

In real life, when you transfer two hundred bucks to a friend on WeChat, WeChat won’t pop up to ask you to "first go to another platform to buy two bucks of clearing tokens."

However, Crypto has always tormented people in this regard.

When preparing ETH for Ethereum, you must exchange for SOL on Solana, and then you need to stock up on BNB on BNB Chain; even when switching to a new L2, the first instinct is to check if there’s enough initial funding in the wallet. Experienced users can get through this hassle with a two-minute chain swap, but for someone outside the circle, this can be a hurdle that makes them close the webpage and leave.

In addition to hiding Gas, frame transactions can effectively resolve many persistent issues.

For instance, when you want to trade a new token on a DEX, you first have to click Approve to authorize, then click Swap, requiring confirmation twice from your wallet. If the Swap fails at the end, the previous authorization remains on-chain for a long time, posing a risk of being stolen.

If Frames are used, these two actions could be packaged into one atomic batch: if the Swap fails, the prior authorization would automatically roll back, leaving everything tidy.

This opens up a larger imaginative space; who authorizes, who executes, who pays, and how validation is done can all be disassembled and recombined.

3. So is ETH a positive or negative factor?

This is also the area in this round of discussions that can easily lead to two extreme points.

One viewpoint is, "In the future, if Gas doesn’t need ETH, ETH is worthless," while another viewpoint claims, "Barrier for user entry is lowered, transaction volume soars, therefore it is super bullish for ETH."

For large structural reforms that affect the experience of using the underlying protocol, it's still hard to reach a conclusion, but what can be confirmed is that EIP-8141 does not eliminate ETH’s role as the underlying asset for Gas and fee settlement on Ethereum.

Users may not perceive ETH, but the Paymaster, applications, or other accounts responsible for making payments on behalf of users still need to have the capability to bear the network fees priced in ETH, and the existing EIP-1559 fee market has not been replaced by stablecoins due to Frames.

What changes is only the position of ETH demand.

Today, there might be a million users, and each one places a little ETH in their wallets for Gas; in the future, it might shift to a few Paymasters, wallet service providers, and applications holding a larger ETH working balance, handling Gas for a large number of ordinary users collectively.

Of course, don't naïvely think that "every time a user pays a stablecoin, the backend will go to the secondary market and buy an equivalent amount of ETH at market price." The payment agents manage their own inventory and hedging strategies, and it isn't easy for them to directly translate into the individual retail fantasizing about instant purchases.

Paymasters can prepare inventory in advance, can dynamically restock, and may use other capital management methods, so merely stating "in the future you can pay Gas with stablecoins" hardly leads to a direct conclusion about how much new buying pressure for ETH will be generated as a result.

The real decisive factor is only one logic: after experience optimization, whether it ultimately brings more genuine demand for Ethereum usage, whether it can really expand the market?

Calculating the figures makes it very straightforward:

• If in the past there were 100 people intending to enter the market, and 70 people dropped out along the way due to issues with buying Gas, calculating Gwei, and cross-chain troubles, ultimately only 30 completed the transactions;
• If in the future the wallet handles all these troubles in the background, allowing 80 people to smoothly finish their transactions— even if they don't have a single bit of ETH in hand, the actual consumption and destruction of ETH by the network will surely be much greater than in the past;

Conversely, if the entire ecosystem fails to generate incremental activity and merely replaces "paying out of pocket" with "finding someone to pay instead," it truly won't create any new incremental value.

In Conclusion

From my perspective, it weakens the necessity for "every user must stockpile a little ETH in advance to use Ethereum," but the wager is that after this threshold disappears, more people will truly begin to use Ethereum.

For ordinary users, now they certainly do not need to change their usage habits because of this EIP, but from the perspective of wallet development, the direction it points to is already quite clear.

In the future, a good wallet should increasingly not require users to first understand Gas; users are responsible for deciding where their assets go and what operations to execute; the wallet's role is to inform them of the risks and how much they will ultimately spend; as for which account to use for payment, whether to bill in ETH or stablecoins, or whether there is a Gas Sponsor available, these complex protocol details should gradually be hidden in the background.

Truly mature infrastructure often works this way.