Vara Abstracts Away Gas Fees & Transaction Signing To Simplify Web3 Interactions

The innovative layer-1 blockchain network Vara has announced a new feature that aims to solve two of the biggest hassles in the crypto and DeFi industries — the need to sign each transaction and pay gas fees to ensure it’s processed. 

Although many crypto natives have long accepted that signing transactions and paying gas fees is part and parcel of the digital asset experience, it’s still a major stumbling block that could inhibit adoption among less technical users. 

Transaction fees are a fact of life in crypto, but the requirement that users must pay their gas in a specific token, even if they’re not spending that token, is an unnecessary one that undoubtedly confuses many new users, and may even put them off using crypto altogether. For instance, if someone intends to spend USDC tokens on Ethereum, but doesn’t have enough ETH in their wallet to pay the gas fee, their transaction simply won’t be processed. But what if that person is still new to crypto, and doesn’t even know what ETH is? It increases the likelihood that they’ll simply give up on using crypto altogether. 

Gas fees are a massive barrier to entry as a result of this. Numerous blockchain-based games, for instance, use their own native tokens for in-game transactions, but because they live on a blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana, they require users to hold two different tokens. That adds to the complexity and presents a significant hurdle for new players to overcome. 

There’s also the need to sign each transaction in crypto by entering a password in your wallet each time. When playing a blockchain game and regularly using the in-game tokens to pay for items or place bets, the last thing the user wants to do is keep entering their password every five minutes. Yet it remains a necessity. 

Transactions, Simplified

It’s this frustrating state of affairs that Vara is trying to fix with its innovative new Signless and Payless transactions capabilities, which not only eliminate the above hassles but also reduce the cost of gas fees and enhance user privacy. The intention is to simplify the user experience and make decentralized applications or dApps more palatable to users who’re more familiar with the convenience of Web2. 

To enable Signless and Payless transactions, Vara has developed the concept of “vouchers”, which are tokens developers can give to new users that facilitate their transactions without the need for a specific cryptocurrency in their wallet. Vouchers can be thought of as a kind of pre-payment for gas fees, so as long as the user has one that’s valid, they’ll always be able to transact. The idea is that developers will give them away to their users for free. 

Payless Transactions

The first advantage provided by these vouchers is that they remove the need for users to pay gas fees themselves, so they can get started in exploring any dApps’ ecosystem with minimal hassles. 

When a user has a voucher in their wallet, they won’t be required to hold any other token besides the one they’re spending. The actual gas fees will be paid by the developer of the dApp, who can then earn this money back by implementing monetization strategies such as ads and subscriptions. For developers, prepaying user’s gas fees can be thought of as an investment, as it paves the way for more people to use their dApps. 

Vara says this model is similar to Web2, where developers are required to rent server space for their applications, before covering these costs through subscriptions, in-app payments or advertising. 

One significant advantage of using Vara’s vouchers is that paying for gas upfront can lead to significant cost reductions, meaning lower costs for end users. Meanwhile, it becomes much easier to use the actual dApp, potentially meaning more rapid user growth. 

Vara said payless transactions are perfect for various Web3 use cases. For instance, someone can get started playing a blockchain-based, play-to-earn game without buying any tokens at all if the developer gives them an initial handout. Because there’s no gas fees and the players have an initial stack of tokens, they can immediately immerse themselves in the game. Once they’re already hooked, they become much more likely to purchase additional tokens to continue playing. 

Payless transactions will also facilitate microtransactions, enabling DeFi users to make more frequent payments and trades without worrying about accumulating gas fees. 

Vara said its Battleship Game is one of the first to embrace payless transactions, although the feature is currently still being tested and is only available intermittently to prevent misuse. 

Signless Transactions

Besides paying gas fees, the other major headache is the need to sign each individual crypto transaction, which quickly becomes a massive annoyance on certain kinds of dApps, such as trading platforms and games where players frequently need to spend their in-game tokens. 

With its Signless Transactions feature, Vara enables dApp users to interact with dApps without ever needing to sign in, eliminating these repetitive hassles once and for all. It’s a feature that not only enhances the user experience, but also means greater privacy for users, as the dApp will never be able to see the token balance inside their wallet. 

dApp developers can use vouchers that enable users to interact with their dApps for a specified timeframe, during which there’s no need to sign each transaction manually. It’s as if they remain signed into the dApp, without actually signing in. 

According to Vara, signless transactions also go a long way towards facilitating more frequent microtransactions, which could make dApps more useful in the real-world, such as paying for items like coffee and tipping online creators. The feature may also encourage more users to share their on-chain data, for instance by offering their health data to researchers in return for crypto rewards, without revealing who they are. Another potential use case is anonymous voting, which would improve the security and privacy of elections. 

Signless and Payless transactions are a small but important update that could go some way towards boosting Web3 adoption. With Vara, it has become easier than ever to access and interact with every kind of Web3 dApp, mirroring the simplicity that has come to characterize Web2, but with greater privacy than ever before.