One of the biggest UX challenges to widespread blockchain adoption is the fact that users have to pay a transaction fee in order to change something on the blockchain. This transaction fee, also referred to as the gas fee, is used to both secure the network and incentivize miners to maintain the shared ledger in a decentralized manner.
If you haven’t fully grasped the concept of “gas” yet, don’t worry. It’s a concept that takes new blockchain and dApp developers a bit of time to grasp. Just understand that a decentralized blockchain system is able to remain decentralized because everyone is paid to do the right thing. And if they do the wrong thing, it costs them money. The practical science that governs how all of this works is called Cryptonomics.
Fortunately, there’s a way for dApp developers to pay the associated gas fees on Ethereum instead of their users. And there are ways to implement an appropriate business model that can fund user gas fees at zero cost to a dApp developer.
The Ethereum community refers to gasless transactions with the more technical term “meta transactions”. So if you hear the term “meta transactions”, just think “gasless transactions for users”.
In order to add meta transaction capabilities to your dApp, you need to connect to what we call a “relayer”. A relayer as just a general term for a 3rd party that relays some information from one party to another. In the context of blockchain, a relayer submits a user’s transaction to the Ethereum network on their behalf and pays the associated gas fee.
Relayers are businesses, and not charities. So their intention is to earn a small amount of money by charging the Smart Contract that sits behind a dApp that pays for a user’s gas fees.
Ultimately, as a dApp developer you’ll want to implement a way of having your blockchain business model pay for the service that relayers provide to your dApp. The possibilities are endless, but keep in mind that one of the most powerful UX enhancements you could make to your dApp is to prevent your users from paying the dreaded gas fee every time then want to update the state of the blockchain.
