A proposal on Ethereum, which is still in the draft stage, is attempting to change the way users pay for fees on the blockchain. According to the design, in the future, users will not need to hold ETH in advance to initiate a transaction; the ERC-20 tokens in their wallets can be directly used to pay for Gas. Applications can also bear this cost on behalf of the users.
The transaction is split into three steps.
This proposal is numbered EIP-8141. It splits an Ethereum transaction into up to 64 "frames," with each frame representing a regular contract call. Its core structure consists of three parts: first, it verifies whether the transaction is legal; then, it confirms who is making the payment ( Gas ); finally, it executes the operation that the user actually intends to complete.
This separation method handles 'who signs the transaction' and 'who bears the transaction fees' separately. As a result, wallets that only hold stablecoins or other ERC-20 tokens can also directly perform on-chain operations; some applications can even choose to pay the Gas fees on behalf of users, lowering the barrier for first-time use.
No longer dependent on an independent memory pool
Similar capabilities are not a new phenomenon. Since the launch of ERC-4337 in 2023, the Ethereum ecosystem has been able to implement a certain degree of account abstraction and payment-on-behalf mechanisms. However, this usually requires the use of independent mempool for transaction forwarding and relies on third-party bundler for transaction packaging.
The difference with EIP-8141 is that it aims to directly write the relevant rules into the protocol layer and continue to use Ethereum's public mempool. In this way, nodes can assess the verification steps before receiving transactions, reducing their dependence on additional intermediary parties, and users are not required to switch to a completely new wallet system.
Still want to solve the issues with rollback and keys.
The proposal author also hopes to use this opportunity to address some long-standing interaction issues. For example, multiple operations can be packaged together as a whole, either all succeeding or all failing. This way, when token exchanges are rolled back, it is less likely to leave any uncleaned up authorizations behind.
EIP-8141 also attempts to decouple the account from the currently commonly used ECDSA key, making key rotation possible. According to the author, this can also be seen as a preparatory step towards post-quantum signatures. Since post-quantum signatures are larger in size, future networks may need to rely more on signature aggregation.
Currently still a draft.
This proposal has been in draft status since January of this year and has not yet been scheduled for any Ethereum network upgrade. Vitalik Buterin recently mentioned that the ethrex client has been testing the combination of Frames and FOCIL mechanisms on the test network, with one of the goals being to enable the privacy protocol to operate without relying on relayer.
Currently, EIP-8141 does not have a clear timeline for launch, but if it proceeds onto the upgrade path, it may affect the design of Ethereum wallets, the way applications are guided, and the cost structure for users entering the blockchain for the first time.
