Refuting the argument that Ethereum "abandoned" ETH: What does it really mean to pay Gas without using ETH?

Author: imToken

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

Receiving a stablecoin in a new address but unable to send it out due to a pop-up saying there is no ETH to pay for Gas; wanting to swap a coin on a DEX but getting stuck; withdrawing USDC from a trading platform only to realize you haven't prepared Gas…

In all these cases, you have to go elsewhere to find a fiat channel or ask around for some "water," which is one of the classic scenarios that discourage newcomers in the Crypto world.

Recently, Vitalik Buterin mentioned the progress of EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions), which once again presents new possibilities: in the future, you won't need ETH in your wallet to make transfers; Gas can be deducted directly from USDC, and some applications may even cover Gas for you to attract users.

Once the news spread, it quickly fermented into a frightening statement: "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 things.

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

Let's start with a regular Ethereum transaction today.

For example, if Frank has 1000 USDC in his wallet and wants to send 100 USDC to a friend, he cannot send the transaction if there is no ETH in his wallet.

The reason is simple: currently, the logic of a regular Ethereum account is very rigid. The person initiating the transaction is also 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 them.

According to the current design, a Frame Transaction can be divided into multiple different "Frames," each responsible for verifying the transaction, confirming who pays for Gas, and actually executing the user's operation.

So in the future, when Frank makes a transfer, it can become Frank still signing 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, and Frank pays a small amount of USDC to this Paymaster as a fee.

For Frank, he might only see a transfer of 100 USDC with a network fee of 0.1 USDC; throughout the process, he doesn't even need to know how much ETH Gas is, nor does he need to prepare ETH in advance.

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

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

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

When we swipe a Chinese Yuan credit card in Japan, what the user perceives is "deduction in Chinese Yuan," while the merchant receives Japanese Yen, but this does not mean that the underlying settlement currency in Japan has become Chinese Yuan; the front-end payment asset and the back-end settlement asset do not have to be the same thing.

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

The difference may seem minor, but it completely changes the meaning of ETH.

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

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

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

However, while ERC-4337 can do this, it mainly adds a set of UserOperation, Bundler, EntryPoint, and Paymaster infrastructure outside the protocol, whereas EIP-8141 attempts to integrate such capabilities more inherently into the Ethereum transaction structure itself.

Ultimately, the core is to solve a problem that should have been addressed long ago: why should ordinary users have to understand what Gas is?

In real life, when you transfer 200 yuan to a friend via WeChat, WeChat will never pop up and ask you to "first go to another platform to buy two yuan worth of settlement tokens."

But Crypto has been torturing people in this way.

In Ethereum, you need to prepare ETH; in Solana, you need to swap for SOL; in BNB Chain, you need to hold BNB; even when switching to a new L2, the first reaction is to check if there is starting capital in the wallet. Experienced users might spend two minutes to cross a chain, but for outsiders, this is a barrier that can directly make them close the webpage.

In addition to hiding Gas, Frame Transactions can also conveniently solve many persistent issues.

For example, when trading a new token on a DEX, you have to click once to approve authorization and then click again to swap, with the wallet popping up to confirm twice. If the subsequent swap fails, the previous authorization remains on the chain for a long time, leaving a risk of theft.

If we use Frames, these two actions can be directly packaged into an atomic batch: if the swap fails, the previous authorization automatically rolls back, leaving everything clean.

This opens up a larger imaginative space; in the future, who authorizes, who executes, who pays, and how verification is done can all be separated and recombined.

3. So is ETH a positive or negative factor?

This is also the aspect of this discussion that can easily lead to two extremes.

One viewpoint is, "If you don't need ETH to pay for Gas in the future, ETH has no value," while another viewpoint is, "Lower user thresholds will lead to a surge in transaction volume, which is super positive for ETH."

For major structural reforms involving the user experience of the underlying protocol, it is still difficult to draw conclusions, but one thing is certain: EIP-8141 has not eliminated ETH's role as the underlying Gas and fee settlement asset for Ethereum.

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

What changes is the position of ETH demand.

Today, there may be 1 million users, each holding a little ETH in their wallets for Gas; in the future, it may become a small number of Paymasters, wallet service providers, and applications holding a larger ETH turnover balance, then handling Gas for a large number of ordinary users uniformly.

Of course, don't naively think that "every time a user pays a stablecoin, the backend will go to the secondary market to buy an equivalent amount of ETH at market price." The payers have their own inventory management and hedging strategies, and it is difficult to directly translate into the instant buying power that retail investors fantasize about.

Paymasters can prepare inventory in advance, can dynamically replenish, and can use other capital management methods; therefore, merely relying on "in the future, you can pay Gas with stablecoins" makes it hard to directly deduce how much new buying pressure ETH will generate.

The real decisive factor is one logic: after optimizing the experience, has it ultimately brought about more genuine demand for using Ethereum, and can it truly expand the market?

Doing the math is quite straightforward:

• If in the past, 100 people intended to enter the market, and 70 of them gave up halfway due to buying Gas, calculating Gwei, and cross-chain hassles, leaving only 30 to complete the transaction;
• In the future, if the wallet handles all these troubles in the background, allowing 80 people to smoothly complete their transactions—even if they don't hold a single bit of ETH, the actual ETH consumed and destroyed by the network will be far greater than before;

Conversely, if the entire ecosystem fails to bring in incremental activity and merely replaces "paying out of pocket" with "finding someone to pay," then it will indeed not generate any new incremental value.

In conclusion

From my perspective, it weakens the notion that "every user must prepare a little ETH in advance to use Ethereum," but the gamble is that once this threshold disappears, more people will truly start using Ethereum.

For ordinary users, there is no need to change their usage habits because of this EIP just yet, but from the perspective of wallet development, the direction is already very clear.

In the future, a user-friendly wallet may increasingly not require users to first understand Gas; users should decide where their assets go and what operations to execute; the wallet should inform them of the risks and the final costs; as for which account to use for payment, whether to charge in ETH or stablecoins, and whether there are available Gas Sponsors, these complex protocol details should gradually be hidden in the background.

Truly mature infrastructure often works this way.