By Stacy Muur, Cryptography Researcher
Compiled by: DeepSeek
Editor's Note: The article summarizes that within 30 days, 89 projects on 9 blockchains have achieved more than 2 million gas-free transactions through ERC-4337 smart wallets, saving about $117,000 in gas fees, showing the potential of the Paymaster payment model to significantly increase on-chain activities. However, the surge in transaction volume may mask real user demand. One-time activities such as NFT casting and airdrops have led to a short-term increase in the number of wallets but low retention rates, while a few games, DeFi and infrastructure applications have shown deeper reuse. Data shows that although Gas sponsorship can attract users, continued participation depends on attractive applications. ERC-4337 has promoted the popularization of gas-free transactions, but it faces technical complexity and cost challenges. In the future, EIP-7702 is expected to further simplify and accelerate its adoption.
The following is the original content (for easier reading and understanding, the original content has been reorganized):
In just 30 days, 89 projects on 9 blockchains supported more than 2 million gas-free transactions, saving up to $117,000 in gas fees.
The wave of gas-free transactions on multiple chains shows that solutions like Paymaster’s fee payment in ERC-4337 smart wallets can quickly boost on-chain activity.
Paymaster-driven usage may mask real user needs
A spike 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.
A one-off airdrop, free minting or claiming event may result in a short-term surge in the number of wallets, but with minimal subsequent usage.
NFT, gaming, and token projects have seen a surge in new wallets, but many wallets are only used for one-time operations (like minting or claiming rewards) rather than ongoing engagement.
On the other hand, a small subset of applications demonstrate deeper, repeated usage, often driven by more engaging game loops, repetitive DeFi operations, or infrastructure-level services.
These findings suggest that ERC-4337 smart wallets are reshaping on-chain activity, demonstrating both the power of gas sponsorship to attract users and the need for attractive, reusable applications to keep users engaged.
@0xKofi built a definitive dashboard to track this explosive growth, with data provided by @base.
Key Metrics
- 89 independent applications/protocols
- About 724,000 active smart wallets
- Approximately $117,000 in gas fees were waived
- About 2,087,799 gas-free transactions
ERC-4337 Development
The rapid growth of gas-free transactions is part of a larger trend. In 2024, ERC-4337 accounts performed more than 103 million user operations (UserOps), more than 10 times the 8.3 million in 2023. 87% of these transactions were paid by Paymaster, enabling a gas-free experience.
From the monthly Paymaster Gas expenditure chart, we can see the following evolution:
- Early Adoption (2023): Spending is minimal until mid-2023, with Optimism leading the early adoption.
- Growth Phase (end 2023): Monthly spending increases steadily to approximately $400,000 by October 2023.
- Peak activity (April 2024): Spending surges to ~$700K, driven primarily by Base.
- Recent Trends (late 2024 to early 2025): After reaching a new high in November-December 2024 (around $630,000), monthly gas spending fell sharply in early 2025, dropping to around $150,000 in February.
Apps and users spent more than $3.4 million on UserOp fees through Paymaster, with major providers including @biconomy, @pimlicoHQ, @coinbase, and @Alchemy. Despite a contracting market and a downward trend in overall spending in Q1 2025, @base ($391,117), @ethereum ($121,053), and @BNBCHAIN (~$112,493) remained the dominant players.
Ranking by On-Chain Activity
- Base (43.2%): Entertainment and social hub - dominates the gaming sector (76.8%).
- Polygon (21.4%): Community engagement layer — NFTs (50.7%) and Telegram wallets (42.3%).
- Optimism (8.5%): Security-focused – emphasis on restoring infrastructure.
- Celo (7.4%): Niche experts — prediction markets.
- BSC (4.2%): Value transfer layer - token-focused, with the highest gas cost.
Data analysis
Before diving into analyzing the data, it’s important to understand two key metrics:
- Tx/Wallet (Transactions per Wallet) - Measures the average number of transactions completed per wallet. Low values (e.g. ~1.0) indicate one-time use (e.g. minting NFTs or claiming airdrops). High values (e.g. ~25) indicate repeated engagement (e.g. active trading, gaming, or bot operation).
- Cost/Tx — represents the average cost of each transaction. In a gas-free system, it reflects the fees waived per transaction, not the fees paid by the user.
1. NFT Projects: Large Number of Wallets Usually = One-Time Accounts
- Piggybox: → ~1 tx/wallet, ~$0.004/transaction.
- Somon Badge: → ~1.4 tx/wallet, ~$0.007/transaction.
Interpretation: The 1:1 ratio of wallets to transactions (Piggybox) strongly indicates a minting or claiming activity. Piggybox is the NFT you get when you sign up for EARN』M, plus a lottery box that may receive EARNM tokens.
One-time surge: Many wallets only make one transaction (initial minting/claiming) and never go back, thus approaching a perfect 1:1 ratio.
Ranking: Piggybox is near the top of the overall rankings due to many new wallets being minted. But if you filter out one-time wallets, it would probably fall out of the top five, with extremely low retention rates.
2. Tokens: Token trading is concentrated in a few projects
There are 26 token projects in the list, far more than any other category. Two of them, $BVRP and $USDC, account for the majority of the trading volume with over 667k transactions.
- $BVRP: → ~25 tx/wallet at $0.012/tx.
- $USDC: → ~4.6 tx/wallet at $0.21/tx.
Interpretation:
- This concentration suggests that not all “token” projects are equally active, but rather a few heavyweights drive the total volume.
- $BVRP shows high transaction activity relative to the number of wallets, indicating that these platforms have high user engagement and frequent automated or repetitive transactions.
3. Games: A “hot item”, but the wallet/transaction ratio needs to be watched
- @SuperChampsHQ: → ~1.49 tx/wallet, ~$0.017/transaction.
- @BLOCKLORDS: → ~42 tx/wallet, ~$0.009/transaction.
- @miracleplay_cn: → ~14 tx/wallet, ~$0.012/transaction.
Interpretation:
- Super Champs dominates total gaming usage (463k vs. ~13k for other projects combined), but only sees ~1-2 transactions per wallet.
- Blocklords has a smaller number of wallets, but a very high transaction ratio per wallet (~42). This is often associated with bot-driven repetitive actions, as David Johansson of Blocklords said: "They are fighting bots."
4. Bridges and plugins: moderate but stable usage, high gas cost
- UniversalX: → ~4.4 tx/wallet, ~$0.55/transaction.
- Safe4337Module: → ~5.1 tx/wallet, ~$0.053/transaction.
Interpretation:
- Behind the scenes tools: Bridges and plugins don’t have the “headline” volume like tokens or games, but they maintain steady usage as multiple dApps rely on them.
- Ecosystem health indicator: Moderate usage of infrastructure services indicates real utility, not hype-driven surges.
5. Chain specialization is taking shape
- @base: 99.5% of gaming wallets active (310,934 out of 312,361 wallets).
- @0xPolygon: Dominates NFT/social activity (87% of ecosystem NFT wallets).
- @BNBCHAIN: Leading in high value bridge transactions (23.2% of all exempted gas).
- @Celo: Strong in prediction markets (25,574 wallets, 12.7 tx/wallet).
6. Cross-chain cost differences
The 100x cost difference between different chains drives certain application categories to concentrate on 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. Argument: 100x difference in cost structure between chains will drive specific application categories to converge on specific chains regardless of technical similarity. Games and social applications are not economically viable on high-cost chains.
Overall situation
- NFTs use wallets that may show tens of thousands of mints at once (like Piggybox), but the reuse rate is extremely low.
- Infrastructure (bridges, plugins) remains stable, medium volume, usually with a high cost per transaction (bridges) or uses stability behind the scenes (plugins).
- The disparity in transactions per wallet across all categories highlights different usage patterns: some are highly repetitive, others are purely one-off operations.
- Finally, a large number of projects have close to zero participation, indicating that free gas alone is not enough to generate demand; dApps need real value propositions to retain users.
Summarize
Account abstraction and gas sponsorship can indeed drive transaction volume and user registrations, but the true test is repeat engagement. Combining the number of wallets, waived gas fees, and gas-free transactions, the data highlights the phenomenon of concentrated usage in each category, often from just one or two star dApps or large-scale single-claim events. Projects like Piggybox show how a near 1:1 ratio of wallets to transactions can push NFT projects to the top of the charts, but can quickly fall after filtering out one-time accounts. Meanwhile, bridge and plugin solutions show more stable medium-level transaction volumes, reflecting real demand in the ecosystem rather than short-lived hype.
The role of ERC-4337 smart wallet
All of these trends — gas-free gaming, seamless DeFi, chain specialization — are driven by ERC-4337 smart wallets.
Unlike traditional EOA (Externally Owned Account), Smart Wallet introduces automation, security and flexibility, significantly improving the user experience.
What is ERC-4337 Smart Wallet?
A smart contract wallet or smart wallet is a programmable Ethereum account that enhances the user experience by:
Batch transactions — users can combine multiple operations (such as approve + swap on DEX) into a single transaction.
Gas fee abstraction - users do not need to hold ETH to pay gas fees; fees can be paid by sponsors or paid with other tokens.
Secure – Users can authenticate via passwords, social recovery, or multi-factor authentication rather than using risky seed phrases.
How do Gasless Transactions work?
When a user initiates a transaction, Paymaster (a special smart contract) can step in to pay the Gas fee or allow the user to pay with any ERC-20 tokens they hold. This greatly reduces the entry barrier for new users and makes blockchain applications as seamless as Web2 applications.
However, ERC-4337 also faces significant adoption challenges. The above retention issues may directly stem from the following key limitations:
- Technical barriers: Complex components such as UserOperations, Bundlers, and EntryPoint contracts have a steep learning curve for ordinary users and developers.
- Cost issues: While gas-free transactions are helpful for users, implementing a full stack can be costly and Bundler profitability is volatile during gas fluctuations.
- Reliability issues: Network congestion can cause transaction delays, while complex verification logic introduces potential security vulnerabilities.
- User experience gap: Multi-chain fragmentation leads to inconsistent wallet experience and hinders seamless cross-chain management.
Summarize
Account abstraction and Gas sponsorship have successfully increased transaction volume and new wallet registrations, but the real challenge is sustained engagement. Data shows:
- Many dApps see one-time usage surges (e.g. NFT minting, airdrops) rather than long-term retention.
- A small number of projects drive the majority of activity, while many others struggle to attract real user demand.
- Bridging and infrastructure solutions show more consistent usage, highlighting real utility rather than hype.
While ERC-4337 enables gas-free transactions and improves user experience, its complexity and cost barriers limit mainstream adoption. EIP-7702 addresses these issues by:
- Allow EOAs for account abstraction: The core problem with ERC-4337 is that it excludes EOAs, requiring users to switch to smart contract wallets. EIP-7702 solves this problem by allowing EOAs to temporarily adopt smart contract code, thereby accessing features such as gas sponsorship (paying fees with ERC-20 tokens) and batching transactions (such as approving and spending ERC-20 tokens in one transaction).
- Simplify complexity and cost: Allow EOA to temporarily adopt smart contract functions, reduce the need for permanent wallet contracts, reduce gas costs, and reduce dependence on EntryPoint or Bundlers.
- Improved efficiency: Introduced transaction type 0x04 for batch EOA operations, providing a more streamlined alternative to ERC-4337's UserOps.
- Simplify infrastructure: limit smart contract code to transaction execution, reducing reliance on alternative memory pools and bundlers.
- Empowering developers: Integrates with ERC-4337 while providing a flexible, low-friction upgrade path.
ERC-4337 laid the foundation, but EIP-7702 will make smart wallets cheaper, simpler, and more accessible, accelerating the next wave of Web3 adoption.
