Gasless transaction (meta-transaction)

Fees still exist in a gasless transaction; someone else pays them. In the older meta-transaction model, the user signs a message describing what they want, and a relayer wraps it in a real transaction and pays the gas, with the target contract trusting a forwarder to read the original sender. Newer routes include paymasters in account abstraction, token permits that turn approvals into signatures, and intent-based swaps where a solver executes the trade and recovers the fee from the tokens being swapped.

Gasless flows remove one of the biggest hurdles for newcomers: needing ETH, or another native coin, before doing anything else. Wallets offer gasless swaps of stablecoins, apps sponsor onboarding, and exchanges use relayers to sweep deposits. For stablecoin payments in particular, not holding a separate gas token makes the experience feel closer to a normal payment app.

The cost is usually passed on through a spread, a fee in the token or the app's own budget. Relayers and solvers add trust and censorship points. And because gasless actions often rely on signing messages, they are a favourite disguise for phishing that tricks users into signing away tokens.