Author: Stacy Muur; Compiled by: Shenchao TechFlow

In just 30 days, 89 projects distributed on 9 blockchains completed more than 2 million gas-free transactions, saving up to $117,000 in gas fees.

This wave of gas-free transactions shows that solutions like Paymaster (Paymaster) in the ERC-4337 smart wallet can quickly improve on-chain activities by paying for users.

Paymaster-driven usage may mask real user demand

The surge in transaction volume does not necessarily reflect real user interest, especially when a small number of wallets (such as traders, robots) repeatedly call contracts.

For example, one-time airdrop, free casting or collection activities will lead to a surge in the number of wallets in the short term, but subsequent use may be very small.

Nasdaq, NFT, gaming and token-related projects do attract a large number of new wallets, but many of them are only used for one-time operations (such as minting or receiving rewards) and have no ongoing user participation.

On the other hand, some applications show deeper reuse, often thanks to more attractive gameplay loops, regular DeFi operations, or infrastructure-level services.

These findings suggest that ERC-4337 smart wallet is 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 reuse can truly retain them.

@0xKofi creates an authoritative dashboard that tracks this growth, powered by @base:

https://www.gogasless.io/leaderboard/all

Core data

89 standalone applications/protocols

About 724,000 active smart wallets

About 117,000 Gas fees are abstracted

About 2.08 million Gas fees are in the evolution of ERC-4337

The rapid growth of Gas fees is part of a larger trend. In 2024, more than 103 million user operations (UserOps) performed through the ERC-4337 account, an increase of more than 10 times compared with 2023 (8.3 million). Of these, 87% of transactions are paid by Paymaster, providing a Gas-free experience.

The interesting trajectory of this evolution can be seen from the monthly Paymaster Gas expenditure chart:

Early adoption stage (2023): Optimism was the first to adopt it by mid-2023.

Growth Stage (end of 2023): By October 2023, monthly spending has steadily increased to about US$400,000.

Spike Activity (April 2024): Spending surged to about $700,000, mainly driven by Base.

Recent trends (end of 2024 to early 2025): reached a new high (about US$630,000) from November to December 2024, but expenditures dropped significantly at the beginning of 2025, reaching approximately US$150,000 in February 2025.

The UserOps fees paid by apps and users through Paymaster have exceeded $3.4 million, and the major providers include @biconomy, @pimlicoHQ, @coinbase and @Alchemy. Despite the market contraction, total spending in the first quarter of 2025 showed a downward trend, @base ($391,000), @ethereum ($121,000) and @BNBCHAIN ​​(approximately $112,000) remained the dominant players.

Data source: https://www.bundlebear.com/

Developer: @0xKofi

Chain activity ranking

Base (43.2%): Entertainment and social center, dominating the gaming field (76.8%).

Polygon (21.4%): Community interaction layer, focusing on NFT (50.7%) and Telegram wallet (42.3%).

Optimism (8.5%): Focus on security and emphasize recovery of infrastructure.

Celo (7.4%): Expert in segmented fields, focusing on forecasting the market.

BSC (4.2%): Value transfer layer, Gas is the highest cost, focusing on token trading.

Key Insights in Data

Before a deep analysis of data, two key indicators need to be understood:

1️⃣Tx/Wallet (number of transactions per wallet) – Measure the average number of transactions per wallet. Low values ​​(such as 1.0) indicate single use, such as casting NFTs or claiming airdrops. A high value (such as 25) indicates repeated participation, such as active trading, gameplay, or robotic operations.

2️⃣Cost/Tx (cost per transaction) – Indicates the average cost per transaction. In a Gas-free system, it reflects the abstraction of each transaction, rather than the actual payment of the user.

1.NFT project: The number of large wallets usually means a one-time account

Piggybox: about 1 transaction/wallet, about 0.004 USD/transaction.

Somon Badge: About 1.4 transactions/wallets, about $0.007/transaction.

Interpretation: Piggybox's wallet to transactions is a 1:1 ratio that strongly indicates that it is driven primarily by minting or collecting activities. Piggybox is an NFT obtained by a user when registering for EARN’M, and comes with a draw that may contain EARNM tokens.box.

One-time surge: Many wallets only trade once (initial minting or collection) and then no longer use it, thus an almost perfect 1:1 ratio.

Leader twist: Piggybox ranks among the top in the wallet quantity/trade volume rankings due to a large number of new wallets involved in the minting. But if disposable wallets are filtered out, their ranking may fall from the top five and user retention rates are also very low.

2. Token trading: A few items dominate

Data analysis: Total token trading volume (868,000 transactions) seems to dominate, but the list has 26 token items, far more than other categories. However, only two tokens ($BVRP and $USDC) have transaction volumes of more than 667,000, accounting for the vast majority of transaction volumes.

**$BVRP**: Each wallet has an average of about 25 transactions, with a cost of $0.012 per transaction.

**$USDC**: The average price per wallet is about 4.6 transactions, with a cost of $0.21 per transaction.

Interpretation:

This concentration of transaction volume shows that not all token projects are equally active, but that the growth of total transaction volume is driven by a few top projects.

$BVRP shows extremely high transaction activity compared to the number of wallets, which may indicate high user engagement on its platform, frequent transactions and may include automation or repetitive operations.

3. Game: The difference between a "hot product" and a wallet/transaction ratio

Data analysis:

@SuperChampsHQ: Each wallet has about 1.49 transactions, and each transaction cost is $0.017.

@BLOCKLORDS: About 42 transactions per wallet, costing $0.009 per transaction.

@miracleplay_cn: About 14 transactions per wallet, costing each transaction is $0.012.

Interpretation:

Although the total transaction volume of Super Champs (463,000 transactions) far exceeds other games (total of about 13,000 transactions), it only completed about 1-2 transactions per wallet, indicating low user participation.

Blocklords Although there are fewer wallets, the transaction volume per wallet is extremely high (about 42 transactions), which is usually associated with repetitive behaviors that may be operated by robots. As David Johansson of Blocklords said: "They are fighting robots."

https://www.blockchaingamer.biz/features/interviews/33860/blocklords-david-johansson-podcast/

4. Cross-chain bridges and plug-ins: Stable use with higher Gas costs

UniversalX: Each wallet is about4.4 transactions, cost per transaction.

Safe4337Module: About 5.1 transactions per wallet, costing $0.053 per transaction.

Interpretation:

Behind the Scenes Tools: Cross-chain bridges and plug-ins are not as eye-catching as tokens or games, but because multiple dApps rely on them, their usage remains stable.

Ecological Health Indicators: The sustained moderate use of infrastructure services indicates that it provides real practical value rather than a hype-driven short-term surge.

5. Trend of specialization in on-chain activities

@base: 99.5% of game wallet activities (312,361 of 310,934 wallets).

@0xPolygon: Dominates NFT and social activities, accounting for 87% of the ecosystem's NFT wallets.

@BNBCHAIN: Leads in high-value cross-chain bridge transactions, accounting for 23.2% of all Gas abstract transactions.

@Celo: Strong performance in the forecast market (25,574 wallets, an average of 12.7 transactions per wallet).

6. Inter-chain cost difference

The Gasless transaction costs on different chains are as different as 100 times, driving the selection of specific chains in different application categories:

Ethereum: $2.41 per Gas transaction (highest).

BSC: $0.50 per Gas transaction.

Base: $0.02 per Gas transaction (lowest in the main chain).

Polygon: $0.03 per Gas transaction.

Conclusion: This huge difference in cost structure will drive specific blockchains to be selected in specific application categories, regardless of technical similarity. For example, high-cost chains are not suitable for games and social applications with high economic requirements.

Overall Observation

NFT Adoption: Although NFT activity may show that tens of thousands of wallets are minted once (such as Piggybox), subsequent usage is extremely low.

Infrastructure: The usage of cross-chain bridges and plug-ins is stable, with high transaction costs (cross-chain bridges) or has low volatility as backend tools (plug-ins).

Difference in transaction mode: The transaction volume of each wallet in different categories varies significantly. Some are highly repetitive operations, while others are "completed in one go".

Project long-tail effect: Many projects have little user participation, which shows 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 can indeed increase transaction volume and user registration, but the real test lies in the repeated participation of users. Combining the data on wallet count, Gas abstraction and Gas-free transaction volume, it can be seen that the usage of various categories is often concentrated in a few celebrity dApps or large-scale one-time activities. Like PiggyboxThe project can quickly top the ranking list through an almost 1:1 wallet-to-transaction ratio, but when filtering out one-time accounts, its ranking will drop rapidly. Cross-chain bridge and plug-in solutions show a more stable medium usage, reflecting the actual needs of the ecosystem rather than short-term hype.

The role of the ERC-4337 Smart Wallet

All these trends—Gas-free gaming, seamless DeFi, on-chain specialization—are driven by the ERC-4337 Smart Wallet.

Unlike traditional external accounts (EOA), smart wallets significantly improve user experience through automation, security and flexibility.

What is ERC-4337 smart wallet?

Smart Contract Wallet (or Smart Wallet) is a programmable Ethereum account that provides the following features:

✅ Batch Transactions: Users can combine multiple operations (such as authorization + transactions on DEX) into a single transaction.

✅ Gas fee abstraction: Users do not need to hold ETH to pay Gas fee; fees can be paid by the sponsor or with other tokens.

✅ Mnemonic word security: Users can authenticate through keys, social recovery, or multi-factor authentication rather than relying on high-risk mnemonic words.

How does Gas-free transaction work?

When a user initiates a transaction, Paymaster (a dedicated smart contract) can pay Gas fees on behalf of others, or allow users to pay with any ERC-20 token. This significantly lowers the entry barrier for new users and makes blockchain applications as smooth as Web2 applications.

ERC-4337 Challenges and EIP-7702 Solutions

Even though ERC-4337 drives Gas-free transactions, it also faces significant adoption challenges that directly lead to the above retention problem:

Technical barriers: Complex components (such as UserOperations, Bundlers, and EntryPoint contracts) set high barriers for average users and developers.

Cost issue: Although no Gas transaction is beneficial to users, the cost of implementing a complete technology stack is high, and the profitability of the packager will also be affected during Gas fluctuations.

Reliability issues: Network congestion can lead to transaction delays, while complex verification logic adds potential security vulnerabilities.

User experience defects: Multi-chain fragmentation leads to inconsistent wallet experience, hindering seamless cross-chain management.

Summary of key points

Account Abstraction and Gas Sponsorship have effectively increased transaction volume and registrations for new wallets, but the real challenge is how to keep users engaged. Data shows:

Many dApps only experience surge in use in one-time activities (such as NFT casting, airdrop), and long-term retention rates are low.

A few celebrity projects drive most on-chain activities, while most projects face the dilemma of insufficient actual user needs.

The cross-chain bridge and infrastructure solutions show more stable usage, indicating that they provide real practical value rather than short-term hype.

ERC-4337 drives Gas-free transactions and improves user experience, its complexity and cost barriers limit widespread adoption by mainstream users. EIP-7702 fills these gaps in the following ways:

Let EOA support account abstraction

The core problem of ERC-4337 is to exclude external accounts (EOA, Externally Owned Accounts) and require 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 for fees with ERC-20 tokens) and transaction batching (such as completing the authorization and use of ERC-20 in a single transaction). For example, users can now batch-process authorization and consumption of ERC-20 tokens, a common operational process for decentralized exchanges (DEXs) without switching to a smart contract wallet.

As mentioned in the community post, this is especially beneficial for users who love their own external accounts (EOA) and think it is too cumbersome to move assets to new accounts.

Simplify complexity and reduce costs

Allow EOA to temporarily adopt smart contract functions, reduce the demand for permanent wallet contracts, reduce Gas costs, and reduce dependence on EntryPoints or Bundlers.

Enhance efficiency

Introduce transaction type 0x04 for batch processing of EOA operations, providing a more streamlined alternative to UserOps for ERC-4337.

Optimize infrastructure

Simplify infrastructure by limiting smart contract code to transaction execution, reducing dependence on alternate memory pools and packagers.

Empower developers to integrate with ERC-4337, while providing flexible and low-threshold upgrade paths, allowing developers to provide users with enhanced features more easily.

ERC-4337 lays the foundation, but EIP-7702 will make smart wallets cheaper, simpler and easier to use, accelerating the next wave of popularization in Web3.