🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the centralization risks inherent in existing ERC-4337 paymasters, which rely on off-chain signature servers and thereby face trade-offs between censorship resistance and availability. We propose an Asset-Oriented Abstraction (AOA) paradigm that encapsulates payment capability into user-held on-chain “Gas Cards,” leveraging soulbound token states and deterministic policy rules to enable sponsorless transaction sponsorship without centralized signing. Following the design science research methodology, we deployed the SuperPaymaster system on the Optimism mainnet, eliminating centralized verification points with only ~32k gas overhead. Empirical evaluation demonstrates a 49% reduction in pure L2 execution gas consumption compared to leading commercial solutions, while fault-tolerance simulations confirm effective bypassing of non-cooperative relays, substantially enhancing both economic efficiency and censorship resistance.
📝 Abstract
Most production ERC-4337 Paymasters rely on Process-Oriented Abstraction (POA): a centralized off-chain server signs each sponsorship request and therefore acts as a potential censorship bottleneck. We propose Asset-Oriented Abstraction (AOA), which encapsulates payment capability in a persistent, user-owned on-chain asset -- the ``Gas Card'' -- rather than in an off-chain signing process. Following Design Science Research, we implement SuperPaymaster on Optimism Mainnet. Its sponsorship validity is anchored in on-chain Soulbound Token state and deterministic policy rules, removing the off-chain signer as a hard validity gate. We evaluate gas cost on Optimism Mainnet using single-UserOp ERC-20 transfers ($n{=}50$ per system). Trace-level decomposition isolates an approximately 32k-gas delta as the execution cost of eliminating centralized signing. In pure L2 execution gas, SuperPaymaster (167,830) is lower than both vendor-as-deployed commercial samples, including a 49\% reduction against the DEX-routed ERC-20 baseline (328,937), because it replaces an on-chain liquidation path with an internal balance update. In total billed gas, the remaining gap to the cheapest baseline is explained primarily by bundler pricing rather than paymaster architecture. A failover simulation shows that non-cooperative relayers can be bypassed when an alternative relayer is available. These findings suggest that AOA can reduce the tension among usability, sponsorship decentralization, and economic efficiency.