Justin Sun, the creator of TRON, has revealed that his team is in the process of enabling gas-free stablecoin transfers in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Per his announcement, the solution would only work on TRON in the beginning. But he plans to deploy it on Ethereum and all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible public networks soon after.
Source: Justin Sun
Justin added that:
“I believe that similar services will greatly facilitate large companies in deploying stablecoin services on the blockchain, elevating blockchain mass adoption to a new level.”
How the gas-free stablecoin transfer would [probably] work
Justin hasn’t provided much info on the technicalities of the solution. Normally, when you make a transaction on, say TRON or Ethereum, you need to pay gas fees to compensate for the computational energy required to process and validate it.
Gas fees are often paid in the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain. So TRX for TRON and ETH for Ethereum.
In the scenario described by Justin, instead of paying gas fees with the native token, the fees would be covered by the stablecoins being transferred.
This means that if you’re sending USDT, a tiny portion of it will automatically be used to cover the transaction fees.
How smart contracts work. Credits: Softweb Solutions
Ideally, the solution will have to integrate a mechanism of some sort to calculate the equivalent amount of stablecoin needed to cover the gas fee. This is likely gonna be based on the current exchange rate between the stablecoin and the native token.
The solution will also probably be managed through smart contracts since they automatically handle conversion and payment of fees directly in stablecoins.
So you see, these contracts would act as intermediaries in your transactions to ensure that the correct amount of fee (like say 0.00000001 TRX) is deducted and paid to validators/miners.
What it could mean for validators and users
Now these validators will need to update their software to accept stablecoin payments for transaction processing, and it might involve changes at a fundamental level of TRON’s blockchain protocol.
For it to support Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains, the solution will have to adapt to the different blockchain architectures for compatibility across all of them.
Users won’t need to hold separate tokens to make stablecoin transactions, simplifying the process especially for those who primarily dabble in stablecoins. Or if you pay your employees with them.
Lowering the cost of transactions would undoubtedly improve the entire experience on these blockchains. It will make it even easier for people to send and receive stablecoins, so it’ll probably lead to more adoption of them.
Reporting by Jai Hamid