Ethereum Proposal Seeks To Break Link Between Fees and Account Ownership

A proposal for Ethereum users to pay transaction fees in tokens or have someone else cover them entirely has been quietly advancing, according to Vitalik Buterin. EIP-8141 would replace the fixed shape of an Ethereum transaction with a sequence of up to 64 'frames,' each an ordinary contract call.

One frame validates the transaction, another approves who covers the gas, and the rest carry out whatever the user actually wanted to do. This separation of payment approval from the account that signs a transaction breaks the link between them, allowing wallets that only hold stablecoins to transact by paying fees in ERC-20 tokens.

Frames also allows several actions to be grouped so they succeed or fail together, ending dangling token approvals left behind when a swap reverts. The proposal isn't just addressing fees; its authors describe Frames as a 'native off-ramp' from elliptic-curve cryptography, ahead of the arrival of quantum computers capable of breaking it.

Co-author Matt Garnett notes that post-quantum signatures run to several kilobytes each, forcing the network toward signature aggregation. The proposal has been a draft since January and is not scheduled for any upgrade, but Buterin pointed to a testnet run by the ethrex client that pairs Frames with FOCIL, the censorship-resistance mechanism.