Matt Corallo built on his earlier August 25 post, highlighting how stablecoin users increasingly observe applications bypassing ETH, SOL, and other non‑stablecoin tokens.
A wallet can enable users to receive and send USDC without showing a native‑token balance, while behind the scenes an app, paymaster, sponsor, or infrastructure provider still pays the network fee in the chain’s native asset.
The discussion about native‑token demand centers on who funds execution, manages the fee balance, and absorbs volatility once the user no longer needs to hold the token.
The sheer scale of stablecoin activity elevates this issue beyond a mere UX detail. Visa’s Onchain Analytics dashboard recorded roughly $1.3 trillion in adjusted stablecoin volume and 230.3 million adjusted transactions over the 30‑day period ending August 27.
Prior to adjustment, the same window represented approximately $6.8 trillion and 1.75 billion transactions.
Visa and Allium’s adjusted approach applies probabilistic labels to over three million addresses, counts only the largest stablecoin transfer per transaction, and excludes unlabeled addresses that surpass 1,000 transactions or $10 million in rolling 30‑day volume.
The dataset still encompasses exchange, DEX, lending, mint‑and‑burn, and on‑ramp activity. Visa’s “retail‑sized” segment recorded about $7.6 billion across 158.8 million adjusted transactions under $250.
Gasless Transactions Shift the Payer: Ethereum as an Example
Fee abstraction divides the three roles that traditional wallets usually combine: the user authorizes the action, an intermediary funds execution, and the network charges the native fee.
Fee abstraction separates three roles that conventional wallets often bundle together: the user authorizes an action, an intermediary funds its execution, and the network charges its native fee.
Under Ethereum’s ERC‑4337 account‑abstraction standard, a user can initiate a smart‑account action without holding ETH. The operation requires a native‑currency deposit at the EntryPoint contract, which a paymaster—such as the wallet, app, or a provider like Coinbase or Alchemy—can cover. The paymaster settles the cost using developer billing, fiat charges, or token payments, and may sponsor the transaction or quote the fee in USDC. While the on‑chain operation still consumes native gas, the paymaster infrastructure handles service fees, monthly billing, or token recovery.
On Solana, fee sponsorship works similarly. A user can transfer a stablecoin without holding SOL, yet the transaction fee must still be paid in SOL by a designated fee‑payer account. The sponsor—often the app—may subsidize the cost or cover it off‑chain. Solana’s Kora service extends this model by allowing fees to be paid in an SPL token such as USDC or to appear fee‑less to the user, while the underlying network fee remains in SOL, covered by the Kora operator via SPL‑token payments, policy‑based subsidies, or service margins.
“Gasless” may accurately describe the user’s wallet experience, yet it can be misleading regarding the underlying chain economics.
Ethereum’s documentation explains that read operations require no gas, whereas state‑changing writes consume gas. Gas is denominated in ETH, the protocol‑set base fee is burned, and the priority fee is paid to the validator.
Under ERC‑4337, which introduced account abstraction, users submit operations that a bundler bundles into an Ethereum transaction. A paymaster may cover the operation in place of the smart account, but it must hold a native‑currency deposit at the EntryPoint contract. EntryPoint verifies that the deposit can cover the operation’s maximum cost and then debits the actual cost from it.
Solana changes the signer
Solana’s fee documentation states that every transaction requires a fee paid in SOL. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, split evenly between burning and the validator, while an optional priority fee can raise the total and goes to the validator.
By default, the fee payer is the first signer, but an app can name a sponsor instead. The user signs to authorize the stablecoin transfer and the sponsor signs to authorize the SOL fee.
Solana’s fee-abstraction guide makes the resulting requirement explicit: the sponsor needs SOL for fees, though it does not need to hold the token being transferred. Kora packages that primitive into a service that can fully sponsor fees or accept payment in an SPL token such as USDC.
The user may therefore experience an all-dollar transaction while the Solana transaction fee is still paid in SOL by the sponsor or Kora operator.
The 5,000-lamport base fee also shows why transaction count alone cannot establish large SOL demand. Signature counts and priority fees affect the bill, while service volume and the operator’s funding buffer determine how much SOL a sponsor needs.
Solana’s fee sponsorship, like Ethereum’s paymasters, changes who holds the fee balance. It gives the application control over when the user pays, which asset the user sees, and whether the app subsidizes the cost.
For a sponsor, the user-facing payment asset changes the recovery leg rather than the network leg. The service still needs a funded SOL fee-payer account before submission, while its USDC billing or subsidy policy operates around that requirement. A larger stream of sponsored transfers therefore increases the number of fees the operator must fund, even though signatures and priority settings determine each transaction’s SOL cost.
Native-token demand becomes wholesale
With sponsorship, an app or provider can aggregate the requirement that each active user needs a native-token balance. It may replenish a managed ETH or SOL balance and recover the cost in USDC, fiat, or a service charge.
That architecture can shift operational exposure toward fewer payers as stablecoin adoption grows. Sponsors must manage fee funding, pricing, and abuse controls even though their customers never see a gas balance.
Representative Coinbase, Alchemy and Kora implementations establish how the architecture works, while leaving its market-wide distribution unresolved. Any claim that a handful of providers already dominate Ethereum or Solana gas demand would require payer-level onchain analysis beyond these sources.
Aggregation can also reduce the need for every user to hold a dormant native-token balance. Managed services can replenish balances as needed and recover costs through their own billing models.
Native-asset demand also depends on how many transactions settle, the fees attached to them, execution efficiency, and the balances payers maintain. Value capture depends on what is burned, what validators receive, and whether activity moves to cheaper environments.
Solana activity can grow while SOL value capture remains limited, particularly when stablecoin users need little SOL beyond fees. Ethereum can host a large stablecoin economy while base-chain revenue remains comparatively thin.
Fee abstraction shifts the native‑asset customer upstream. While ETH and SOL may vanish from the user’s experience, they remain required at the network level. The gas bill moves to the firms that make stablecoin payments feel like ordinary money, concentrating operational responsibility even though the impact on overall token demand is still unmeasured.
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