Fee-less/Gasless Transactions on Solana — Part 1
The blockchain world needs to prepare itself for mass adoption. Dapps and crypto in general require way too much onboarding and it is self-defeating if we are looking to bring on millions of new users into the blockchain world.
There have been many articles written about how the user has to go through around 10–12 steps before he can access the first feature on any dapp. For someone who is new to the crypto world, that will be a big task and many dapps are likely to fail to onboard new users due to this reason. Even the onboarded users have to ensure that they follow specific steps and when they find this to be very different from the other non-blockchain world fintech apps, they don’t stick around and hence dapps and networks find it very difficult to retain such users.
Gasless Transactions
Enter fee-less/gasless transactions. Right now, across all blockchain networks, including Solana, the user needs to maintain some quantity of the native token (SOL on Solana, ETH on Ethereum etc) in his wallet and use his wallet to perform any transaction or interact with any dapp. This token is needed to pay for the fees that is charged by the network for each transaction.
Come to think of it. Every transaction with a blockchain network, whether it is send or buy or selling or buying NFTs, interaction with DeFi, requires the payment of fees in SOL which makes the entire transaction a tiresome one. With the advent of Web3.0, it is important for the network and the ecosystem around it to also step up their game and get ready to welcome the next billion new users into the crypto world.
Solana Pay laid the foundation for this by bringing in a framework called Octane. It was upto the developers within the ecosystem to pick this up and run and run we did. The framework basically gave developers like us a way by which transactions could be processed on the Solana network without the need for the user to have SOL tokens in his wallet. The idea is to abstract away SOL from this process so that the user gets a much better UX as he then needs to deal with only the tokens that he cares about and which he is looking to transact with. If the user wants to send USDC, he should be worried about only USDC and not about having SOL in his wallet, isn’t it? This is similar to how it happens with fiat payment apps where if you want to send USD, you deal with USD only. So, why should crypto payment apps be any different?
DeFi and Gasless Transactions
The case for gasless swaps in DeFi is even more compelling. Hundreds of thousands of DeFi transactions take place on a daily basis at the various apps and for each user of each of these apps to have SOL and other native tokens just to pay fees is tedious and an enormous waste of the native tokens. In fact, many such users, if given a choice, would rather hold the native tokens and gain from the appreciation of the tokan value than give them away for fee payment.
Kana seeks to change this by making use of the Octane framework to come up with a unique way in which every transaction on the network can be paid for in any of the tokens in the network. In other words, we can abstract away the underlying token for fee payment and that truly opens the doors for cross-chain transactions to happen, which we will demonstrate in due course of time with our association with Neon Labs. We will go into more detail of the possible use cases in our next article.
