Paymaster

A paymaster pays the gas for someone else's transaction. On Tenzro Network 1, paymasters follow ERC-4337 v0.8 account abstraction. Use one to make your app gasless for its users, to sponsor only certain calls or callers, or to let accounts pay gas in a stablecoin instead of TNZO.

How sponsorship works

Smart accounts on Tenzro submit UserOperations to the EntryPoint rather than plain transactions. A UserOperation can name a paymaster:

1. The account builds the operation and asks the paymaster to sponsor it. The paymaster returns paymasterData, usually a signature over the operation plus a validity window.
2. The operation is sent to the network with eth_sendUserOperation.
3. During validation, the EntryPoint calls the paymaster, which accepts or rejects the operation under its own rules.
4. If it accepts, the EntryPoint charges the gas to the paymaster's deposit instead of the account. After execution, the paymaster's post-operation hook can settle anything it needs to, such as recovering the fee in a stablecoin.

The account still signs its own operation with its own hardware-rooted key. A paymaster pays for gas; it can never authorise an action on the account's behalf.

The v0.8 fields

In the packed ERC-4337 v0.8 format, sponsorship is carried in four fields:

A sponsored operation, as submitted:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "eth_sendUserOperation",
  "params": [
    {
      "sender": "0x<smart-account>",
      "nonce": "0x0",
      "callData": "0x<call>",
      "callGasLimit": "0x30d40",
      "verificationGasLimit": "0x186a0",
      "preVerificationGas": "0xc350",
      "maxFeePerGas": "0x<fee>",
      "maxPriorityFeePerGas": "0x<tip>",
      "paymaster": "0x<paymaster>",
      "paymasterVerificationGasLimit": "0x186a0",
      "paymasterPostOpGasLimit": "0xc350",
      "paymasterData": "0x<paymaster-signature-and-window>",
      "signature": "0x<account-signature>"
    },
    "0x<entrypoint>"
  ]
}

Related methods, all on https://rpc.tenzro.xyz:

Paying gas in stablecoins

Tenzro Network 1 lets accounts pay gas in stablecoins. There are two ways to use it:

• Directly. An account that holds a supported stablecoin pays the fee in it, and the network settles the fee in TNZO underneath. No paymaster is needed. See Stablecoin payments.
• Through a token paymaster. The paymaster pays the fee in TNZO from its deposit and, in its post-operation hook, collects the equivalent in a stablecoin from the account. This lets you set your own pricing and rules, for example sponsoring a user's first operations for free and charging in a stablecoin after that.

Either way, fees are denominated and settled in TNZO. The account never has to acquire TNZO to act.

Common sponsorship policies

A paymaster decides what to sponsor in its validation logic. Typical rules:

• only operations from accounts registered with your app;
• only calls to your own contracts, or to specific functions;
• a per-account or per-day gas budget;
• a validity window in paymasterData, so a sponsorship signature cannot be reused later.

New passkey accounts benefit directly: the first operation of a passkey account, which registers its passkey as the account's validator, can be sponsored so the user starts with no balance at all. See Console and passkey wallet.

Fees and burn

A sponsored operation pays the same fees as any other: an EIP-1559-style base fee, burned with a treasury split, plus a priority tip. On top of that, the paymaster fee is burned in full. The paymaster burn rate is fixed at 100% and cannot be redirected, so sponsored gas never becomes a way to route fees around the burn. Current burn settings are visible with:

tenzro adaptive-burn config

See Token economics for the base fee, burn and treasury split, and Smart-account policies for the validator modules that sign UserOperations.