Original article by: Stacy Muur
Original translation: TechFlow
In just 30 days, 89 projects on 9 blockchains completed more than 2 million gas-free transactions, saving up to $117,000 in gas fees.
This wave of zero-gas transactions shows that solutions like Paymaster in ERC-4337 smart wallets can quickly increase on-chain activity by paying fees for users.
Paymaster-driven usage may mask real user demand
A surge in transaction volume does not necessarily reflect real user interest, especially when a small number of wallets (e.g. traders, bots) are calling the contract repeatedly.
For example, a one-time airdrop, free minting, or claiming event may result in a short-term surge in the number of wallets, but subsequent usage may be minimal.
Currently, NFT, game, and token-related projects have indeed attracted a large number of new wallets, but many of them are only used for one-time operations (such as minting or claiming rewards) and do not have continuous user participation.
On the other hand, some applications demonstrate deeper levels of repetitive usage, often thanks to more engaging gameplay loops, regular DeFi operations, or infrastructure-level services.
These findings show that ERC-4337 smart wallets are reshaping on-chain activities. On the one hand, the sponsorship of gas fees effectively attracts users; on the other hand, only applications that are attractive and can encourage users to use repeatedly can truly retain them.
@0xKofi created a definitive dashboard tracking this growth, powered by @base :
https://www.gogasless.io/leaderboard/all
Core Data
89 independent applications/protocols
About 724,000 active smart wallets
About $117,000 in gas fees were abstracted
About 2.08 million gas-free transactions
The Bigger Picture of ERC-4337 Evolution
The rapid growth of zero-gas transactions is part of a larger trend. In 2024, more than 103 million user operations (UserOps) were performed through ERC-4337 accounts, an increase of more than 10 times from 2023 (8.3 million). Of these, 87% of transactions were paid by Paymaster, providing a zero-gas experience.
An interesting glimpse into this evolution can be seen in the monthly Paymaster Gas spending chart:
Early Adoption Phase (2023): Spending is low until mid-2023, with Optimism taking the lead.
Growth Phase (late 2023): Monthly spending increases steadily to approximately $400,000 by October 2023.
Peak activity (April 2024): Spending surges to about $700,000, driven primarily by Base.
Recent Trends (late 2024 to early 2025): A new high is reached in November-December 2024 (approximately $630,000), but spending decreases significantly in early 2025, reaching approximately $150,000 in February 2025.
Apps and users have spent more than $3.4 million in UserOps fees through Paymaster, with major providers including @biconomy, @pimlicoHQ, @coinbase, and @Alchemy. Despite a contracting market, with total spending trending downward in Q1 2025, @base ($391k), @ethereum ($121k), and @BNBCHAIN (~$112k) remain the leaders.
Data source: https://www.bundlebear.com/
Developer: @0x Kofi
Chain activity ranking
Base (43.2%): entertainment and social center, leading the gaming sector (76.8%).
Polygon (21.4%): Community interaction layer, focusing on NFT (50.7%) and Telegram wallet (42.3%).
Optimism (8.5%): Focuses on security and emphasizes recovery infrastructure.
Celo (7.4%): An expert in niche areas, focusing on prediction markets.
BSC (4.2%): value transfer layer, with the highest gas cost and focusing on token transactions.
Key insights from the data
Before we dive into the data, there are two key metrics to understand:
1 ️⃣ Tx/Wallet (Transactions per Wallet) – Measures the average number of transactions per wallet. Low values (such as 1.0) indicate one-time use, such as minting NFTs or claiming airdrops. High values (such as 25) indicate repeated engagement, such as active trading, gameplay, or bot operation.
2 ️⃣ Cost/Tx (cost per transaction) – represents the average cost of each transaction. In a gas-free system, it reflects the abstracted cost of each transaction, not the actual cost paid by the user.
1. NFT projects: Large wallet counts usually mean one-time accounts
Piggybox: ~1 transaction/wallet, ~$0.004/transaction.
Somon Badge: ~1.4 transactions/wallet, ~0.007 USD/transaction.
Interpretation: Piggybox’s 1:1 ratio of wallets to transactions strongly suggests that it is primarily driven by minting or claiming activity. Piggybox is an NFT that users receive when they sign up for EARN’M, and comes with a raffle box that may contain EARNM tokens.
One-time surge: Many wallets only make one transaction (initial minting or claiming) and then never use it again, resulting in an almost perfect 1:1 ratio.
Distortion of rankings: Piggybox ranks at the top of the wallet quantity/transaction volume rankings due to the large number of new wallets participating in the minting. However, if one-time wallets are filtered out, its ranking may fall from the top five, and its user retention rate is also very low.
2. Token trading: a few projects dominate
Data analysis: The total number of token transactions (868,000) seems to dominate, but there are 26 token projects in the list, which is far more than other categories. However, only two tokens ($BVRP and $USDC) have more than 667,000 transactions, accounting for the vast majority of transactions.
$BVRP: Average of ~25 transactions per wallet, costing $0.012 per transaction.
$USDC: ~4.6 transactions per wallet on average, costing $0.21 per transaction.
Interpretation:
This concentration of trading volume suggests that not all token projects are equally active, but rather a small number of leading projects are driving the growth of total trading volume.
$BVRP shows extremely high trading activity compared to the number of wallets, which may indicate high user engagement on the platform, frequent transactions, and possible automated or repetitive operations.
3. Games: The difference between a “hit” and the wallet/transaction ratio
Data Analysis:
@SuperChampsHQ : ~1.49 transactions per wallet, costing $0.017 per transaction.
@BLOCKLORDS : ~42 transactions per wallet, costing $0.009 per transaction.
@miracleplay_cn : About 14 transactions per wallet, costing $0.012 per transaction.
Interpretation:
Although Super Champs’ total transaction volume (463,000) far exceeds that of other games (about 13,000 in total), each wallet only completes about 1-2 transactions, indicating low user engagement.
Blocklords, while having a smaller number of wallets, has an extremely high volume of transactions per wallet (around 42), which is often associated with repetitive behavior that could be operated by bots. As David Johansson of Blocklords put it, “They are fighting bots.”
https://www.blockchaingamer.biz/features/interviews/33860/blocklords-david-johansson-podcast/
4. Cross-chain bridges and plug-ins: stable use and higher gas costs
UniversalX: ~4.4 transactions per wallet, costing $0.55 per transaction.
Safe 4337 Module: ~5.1 transactions per wallet, costing $0.053 per transaction.
Interpretation:
Behind the scenes tools: Cross-chain bridges and plugins don’t get as much attention as tokens or games, but their usage remains steady as multiple dApps rely on them.
Ecosystem health indicators: Sustained moderate usage of infrastructure services indicates that they provide real utility value, rather than short-term surges driven by hype.
5. Professionalization of on-chain activities
@base : 99.5% of gaming wallet activity (312,361 out of 310,934 wallets).
@0x Polygon : Dominates NFT and social activity, accounting for 87% of the ecosystems NFT wallets.
@BNBCHAIN : Leading in high-value cross-chain bridge transactions, accounting for 23.2% of all Gas abstracted transactions.
@Celo : Strong performance in prediction markets (25,574 wallets, 12.7 transactions per wallet).
6. Cost Differences Between Chains
Gasless transaction costs on different chains can vary by up to 100x, driving different application categories to choose specific chains:
Ethereum: $2.41 per gas-free transaction (maximum).
BSC: $0.50 per gas-free transaction.
Base: $0.02 per gas-free transaction (lowest among major chains).
Polygon: $0.03 per gas-free transaction.
Conclusion: This huge difference in cost structure will drive the selection of specific blockchains for specific application categories, regardless of technical similarities. For example, high-cost chains are not suitable for games and social applications with high economic requirements.
Overall observation
NFT Adoption: While NFT activity may show tens of thousands of wallets minting once (like Piggybox), subsequent usage is minimal.
Infrastructure: Bridges and plugins have stable usage, with high transaction costs (bridges) or low volatility as backend tools (plugins).
Differences in transaction patterns: The transaction volumes of each wallet in different categories vary significantly, some are highly repetitive operations, and some are one-time behaviors.
Project long tail effect: Many projects have little user participation, indicating that free gas alone is not enough to stimulate demand; dApps need to provide real value propositions to retain users.
Summary of key points
Account abstraction and gas sponsorship do increase transaction volume and user registrations, but the real test is repeat user engagement. Combining data on wallet count, gas abstraction, and gas-free transactions shows that usage in each category tends to be concentrated in a few star dApps or large-scale one-off campaigns. Projects like Piggybox can quickly climb the charts with an almost 1:1 wallet to transaction ratio, but their rankings quickly drop when one-off accounts are filtered out. Cross-chain bridge and plugin solutions show more stable medium usage, reflecting the actual needs of the ecosystem rather than short-term hype.
The role of ERC-4337 smart wallet
All of these trends — gas-free gaming, seamless DeFi, on-chain professionalization — are driven by ERC-4337 smart wallets.
Unlike traditional externally owned accounts (EOAs), smart wallets significantly improve the user experience through automation, security, and flexibility.
What is an ERC-4337 Smart Wallet?
A smart contract wallet (or smart wallet) is a programmable Ethereum account that provides the following functions:
✅ Batch transactions: Users can combine multiple operations (such as authorization + trading on DEX) into a single transaction.
✅ Gas fee abstraction: Users do not need to hold ETH to pay for Gas fees; fees can be paid by sponsors or paid with other tokens.
✅ No-mnemonics security: Users can authenticate through keys, social recovery, or multi-factor authentication instead of relying on high-risk mnemonics.
How do Gas-free transactions work?
When a user initiates a transaction, Paymaster (a dedicated smart contract) can pay the Gas fee on their behalf, or allow the user to pay with any ERC-20 token. This greatly reduces the entry barrier for new users and makes blockchain applications as smooth as Web2 applications.
Challenges of ERC-4337 and Solutions of EIP-7702
While ERC-4337 facilitates gasless transactions, it faces significant adoption challenges that directly lead to the retention issues mentioned above:
Technical barriers: Complex components such as UserOperations, Bundlers, and EntryPoint contracts set high barriers for ordinary users and developers.
Cost issues: Although gas-free transactions are beneficial to users, the cost of implementing a full technology stack is high, and the profitability of packagers will also be affected during gas fluctuations.
Reliability issues: Network congestion may cause transaction delays, while complex verification logic increases potential security vulnerabilities.
User experience flaws: Multi-chain fragmentation leads to inconsistent wallet experience and hinders seamless cross-chain management.
Summary of key points
Account Abstraction and Gas Sponsorship have indeed effectively increased transaction volume and the number of new wallet registrations, but the real challenge lies in how to maintain continuous user participation. Data shows:
Many dApps only see a surge in usage during one-time events (e.g. NFT minting, airdrops) and have low long-term retention.
A few star projects drive most of the on-chain activities, while most projects face the dilemma of insufficient actual user demand.
Cross-chain bridges and infrastructure solutions are showing more stable usage, demonstrating that they provide real utility value rather than short-term hype.
While ERC-4337 facilitates zero-gas transactions and improves user experience, its complexity and cost barriers limit widespread adoption by mainstream users. EIP-7702 fills these gaps by:
Let EOA support account abstraction
The core problem of ERC-4337 is that it excludes externally owned accounts (EOA), requiring users to switch to smart contract wallets. EIP-7702 solves this problem by allowing EOA to temporarily adopt smart contract code, enabling it to use gas sponsorship (such as paying fees with ERC-20 tokens) and transaction batching (such as completing the authorization and use of ERC-20 in one transaction). For example, users can now batch the authorization and consumption of ERC-20 tokens, which is a common operating process for decentralized exchanges (DEXs), without switching to smart contract wallets.
As mentioned in the community post, this is particularly beneficial for users who love their external accounts (EOA) and find it too cumbersome to migrate their assets to a new account.
Simplify complexity and reduce costs
Allows EOA to temporarily adopt smart contract functions, reducing the need for permanent wallet contracts, reducing gas costs, and reducing dependence on EntryPoint or Bundlers.
Improve efficiency
Introducing transaction type 0x04 for batching EOA operations, providing a leaner alternative to ERC-4337s UserOps.
Optimizing infrastructure
Limiting smart contract code to the scope of transaction execution reduces reliance on alt mempools and packagers, thereby simplifying infrastructure.
Empowering developers
Integration with ERC-4337 while providing a flexible, low-barrier upgrade path makes it easier for developers to provide enhanced features to users.
ERC-4337 laid the foundation, but EIP-7702 will make smart wallets cheaper, simpler, and easier to use, accelerating the next wave of Web3 adoption.
