Ethereum and Solana Fees Covered by Intermediaries

Ethereum and Solana require users to pay fees with their native assets, although stablecoin applications can obscure this process. Users can send and receive USDC through wallets and services without displaying ETH or SOL balances, with the fees covered by intermediaries. According to Visa's on-chain analysis, as of August 27, the adjusted trading volume of the stablecoin market over 30 days was approximately $1.3 trillion, with 230.3 million transactions. The unadjusted trading volume was $6.8 trillion, with 1.75 billion transactions. These figures are based on Visa and Allium's adjusted methodology, which considers transactions from over 3 million addresses. In Ethereum, fee abstraction separates operation authorization, fund provision, and network fee reception. Reading operations are free, but writing operations consume gas. The paymaster in ERC-4337 can cover operational costs, provided it maintains a deposit of native currency in the EntryPoint contract. In Solana, each transaction still requires fees to be paid in SOL, even if a sponsor pays on behalf of the user. Services can subsidize fees or charge in SPL tokens like USDC, but this network requirement remains. Fee abstraction changes the demand for holding ETH or SOL, but does not eliminate this demand at the execution layer; costs are removed from the user-visible process and concentrated on applications, providers, and operators.

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