Ethereum Proposal Would Let Users Pay Gas Fees in Stablecoins

Ethereum's EIP-8141 would allow users to pay gas fees in stablecoins, not just ETH. The proposal has been making progress, but it's still a draft with no activation date. Core developers scheduled it for Hegotá, the upgrade due in 2027.

The Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote on X that there had been quiet progress on EIP-8141 over the past few months. The proposal would split three steps of an Ethereum transaction into separate frames, allowing fees to be paid in stablecoins without a third-party service.

Developers agreed to build EIP-8141, but nothing is built yet. The technical details can still change before deployment. Each software client has to implement it, the code has to run on test networks, wallets have to add support, and it has to pass security review.

The proposal would make wallets simpler and let an app pay a user's gas without routing the transaction through a separate service. However, there are open engineering concerns, including denial-of-service risk and the mempool, the waiting room where transactions sit before validators pick them up.