Engineering

AERE goes gasless, multi-paymaster stack live

By AERE Network May 31, 2026 6 min read

On May 31, 2026, the same day AERE activated the Pectra and Fusaka EVM rulesets, we deployed a five-contract paymaster stack on chain 2800. Together they unlock the modern wallet UX every consumer chain in 2026 needs: users transact on AERE without ever needing to hold AERE.

What this changes for users: a new wallet on AERE no longer needs to first acquire AERE to do anything. Users can pay gas in any whitelisted stablecoin, get a daily free-transaction quota by staking AERE (an EVM first), or get sponsored by the dApp they're using. The "you must own AERE to use AERE" onboarding wall is gone.

The five contracts

Contract	Address	What it does
AereEntryPoint	0x19773ba45287A64B05d0BCBD59D1371BF51Bd5D2	ERC-4337-style v0.7 EntryPoint adapted for AERE. The central hub all smart-account wallets and paymasters connect through. Holds paymaster gas deposits, dispatches validate / postOp hooks, manages staking-for-anti-DoS.
AereOnboardingPaymaster	0x4058E406475Dbed7056Aee0c808f293F05fEa879	Foundation-funded, hard-capped. Sponsors the first 3 transactions of each first-time sender (lifetime, never resets). Sitewide daily cap of 100 sponsored UserOps to prevent Sybil draining. Foundation pre-fund is a one-time seed; cannot refill without governance.
AereTokenPaymaster	0x217f56a5b0C7f35abe4D2fff924A6c13B85d7243	Users pay AERE gas with any whitelisted ERC-20, USDT, USDC, or any token Foundation enables. Reads token price from AereOracle, computes AERE-equivalent cost, charges the user a small markup (default 5%). Self-funding, the markup keeps the contract solvent without subsidy.
AereStakeQuotaPaymaster	0xE50464ca7E8E7F542D1816B3172a2330cFE384E8	Stake-for-free-transactions, on EVM. Users who stake AERE (in AereLockedStaking, or by holding sAERE) earn a daily quota of free transactions, proportional to their stake. Default: 20 free UserOps per day per 1,000 AERE staked. Quota resets per UTC day. Funded by a 5% routing of the validator coinbase fee remainder (via AereCoinbaseSplitter), self-sustaining from the chain's own economics. Users keep their AERE staked, still earning their normal staking yield on top.
AereAppPaymasterFactory	0xEC22603E8712cBc5c31E53370D10f1a80CcB4DF0	Permissionless factory. Any dApp calls `createPaymaster()` and gets its own `AereAppPaymaster` contract, funded from the dApp's own treasury, sponsoring only its own users on its own whitelisted contracts. Each dApp's customer-acquisition cost stays in that dApp's books.

Why this matters

Until today, the AERE onboarding flow had a hard wall: a user with no AERE could do nothing on AERE. Even claiming a faucet drop required an existing wallet with gas. Even calling a registration contract on a consumer app required gas. Chicken-and-egg.

The paymaster stack removes that wall four different ways, with four different funding models. Each path stays self-sufficient or is capped:

OnboardingPaymaster is the only Foundation-funded path, and it's hard-capped at ~50,000 AERE total pre-fund, enough to sponsor first-timer transactions for ~100,000 users at chain-level gas costs, with no automatic refill. After that, users have to use one of the other paths.
TokenPaymaster earns 5% on each token-to-AERE conversion. The markup keeps the contract perpetually solvent, accumulating token reserves the Foundation periodically swaps to AERE via AereSwap.
StakeQuotaPaymaster is funded by routing 5% of the validator coinbase fee remainder (via AereCoinbaseSplitter) into the contract. Validators voluntarily opt in via a config flag. Self-sustaining from the chain's own economics.
AppPaymaster instances are funded by each dApp from their own treasury. A consumer app's paymaster is funded from that app's own budget.

The stake-for-gas model, and why it matters for consumer apps

The single biggest driver of stablecoin adoption has been the model where users who stake the native asset get a daily quota of transactions that covers normal usage. They never pay gas. The crypto is just money, the chain is invisible.

No major EVM chain has shipped this UX. We just did.

For a consumer app, this is structural. A user staking 5,000 AERE (a reasonable position for an active user) gets ~100 free transactions per day, payments, transfers, swaps, all gasless. Their stake still earns its normal staking yield (via AereLockedStaking or sAERE). Daily transactions cost zero. They never see "approve gas fee" on a Face ID prompt.

How developers integrate

Each paymaster follows the standard ERC-4337 v0.7 interface. To sponsor a UserOperation with one of them, set the paymasterAndData field of the UserOp to the paymaster's address (plus any paymaster-specific data, such as token address for TokenPaymaster).

Bundlers (Pimlico, Biconomy, ZeroDev) that already support ERC-4337 will work on AERE once they add chain 2800 to their supported-chain registry. We've opened the relevant onboarding requests with each.

For a dApp wanting to sponsor its own users, the integration is one transaction:

// One call to spin up an app-controlled paymaster
const factory = new Contract("0xEC22603E8712cBc5c31E53370D10f1a80CcB4DF0", FACTORY_ABI, signer);
const tx = await factory.createPaymaster();
await tx.wait();
// You're now the owner of a fresh AereAppPaymaster.
// Configure target whitelist + sender allowlist + fund it from treasury.

What's still pending for full Tier 1.3 completion

The chain layer is done. Three follow-ups remain before users see the gasless UX in their wallets:

Foundation pre-funds the OnboardingPaymaster and StakeQuotaPaymaster seed balances (one-time AERE transfer to the EntryPoint).
Foundation calls setToken() on the TokenPaymaster for the initial whitelisted ERC-20s (the canonical USDT/USDC bridged onto AERE, once those land via Hyperlane in Tier 1.4).
Pimlico/Biconomy/ZeroDev finish chain-2800 onboarding, usually 1-2 weeks.

Any consumer app can deploy its own AppPaymaster against the factory whenever its team is ready. That's on the app's schedule, not the chain's.

What's next

Tier 1.4, Hyperlane cross-chain messaging. Replaces our current 1-of-1 federated bridge with the standard permissionless cross-chain protocol used by 200+ chains. Users on Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum, Solana, and elsewhere will be able to bring assets to AERE in ~30 seconds, then immediately use them gaslessly via the paymaster stack we just shipped.

The chain layer becomes invisible. The app layer is where the work continues.

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