Paymaster with AVNU

Chris Lexmond:
Yeah. I’m the founder at Unstoppable Games. We’re building Influence. We’ve been building on Starknet since very early on. Originally we were on L1 and made the jump to Starknet as the best scaling solution for what we were trying to build. And in particular, Influence is a space strategy MMO. It’s a very strategically paced game that takes place in an asteroid belt that actually involves real time orbiting, dynamically changing asteroids. We have this, I think, really exciting strategic landscape that is constantly changing as all of these quarter million asteroids are orbiting independently of each other.
We’ve gone through several public tests. Our most recent one, which we’re calling pre-release wrapped up, although the game is still playable on Testnet, on Sepolia, on Starknet. We’re gearing up for our launch of Exploitation, which is our first fully playable release in the very near future. We’re really excited to partnering also with AVNU on implementing Paymaster. I think it’s going to really add a pretty great experience to Influence and it opens up a ton of opportunities including gasless transactions as well as fee abstraction with our native token, which is SWEAT. Really excited to talk more about that.

Louis Guthman:
Amazing. Mentor seems to have managed to join us.

Mentor Reka:
Hi, everybody.

Louis Guthman:
Finally. Mentor, if you can briefly introduce yourself and what AVNU is and what you guys are cooking with Paymaster today. And what does it bring to blockchain and to UX development?

Mentor Reka:
Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Mentor. I am the co-founder and the CEO of AVNU. In a nutshell, AVNU is a DEX aggregator on Starknet with the aim to always deliver you the best execution for any kind of trade. And because of this mission, we had recently to work on some very important stuff on the infrastructure layer. And today we are here to speak about and to discuss about the Paymaster, which is we believe a very great unlocker for new use cases and also trying to abstract this gas thing that is a true pain in the ass for end users.

Louis Guthman:
Definitely get what you’re saying. My question to you then is first one, so maybe everyone here note about how the internet of crypto and blockchain works. Can you explain in a nutshell what Paymaster is and what does it provide for an end user?

Mentor Reka:
Yeah. Maybe I can even start by the story of why we decided to build the Paymaster, but in a nutshell today when you try to transact unchained, so sending a transaction, you always need to hold some assets on your wallet. And now the pain point is that you need to hold a specific asset. On the L1s or on Ethereum, you need to hold the ETH. On Starknet, you need to hold ETH or Stark.
But at the end it’s always a pain because I mean you need to make sure to have enough of that asset to cover any kind of fee, any kind of transaction. And the role of the Paymaster is to abstract completely the gas fees in the sense that you want someone else to take care of sending the transaction and managing the gas fees for you. Now how they do that, you have many technical ways to deal with that, but at the end you just want to do one thing, which is minting your NFT, trading your Memecoin or whatever. And you don’t want to be blocked or slowed because you don’t have enough Stark or ETH token on your crypto wallet. That’s the basic use case.
And if you think, for example, imagine you have a Visa card and I don’t know, you are based in Europe and you go in a trip in South Africa, but you don’t have the local currency. Imagine if in that specific scenario you first had to load your Visa account with the specific local currency and then pay your bill. That’s a nightmare. I mean you cannot onboard people this way. And that’s exactly the issue we had on blockchain today, meaning that you have to pay on Starknet with this on start.
And the idea here is to abstract the same way a Visa or MasterCard abstract the conversion to local currency for you. In South Africa when you pay, I don’t know, a beer and you have a Euro account, you don’t know, but under the hood your financial service provider is converting some Euro to the local currency without you knowing or taking some time to think about it.
And that was the basic use case of the Paymaster. But we can do way more than that. And I think that Chris was just teasing the tip of the iceberg. Maybe Louis, I can start by just explaining the story and why we decided as AVNU to be that a year ago. Quickly, long story short, a year ago we wanted to have a support for native meta transaction on Starknet. What is meta transaction? It’s a standard, an Ethereum that allows users to not sign a transaction but sign a payload. And the true power of this is that it enables you to build different platform and products. For example, if you want to have a intent-centric platform on Starknet, you have to support meta transaction.
And so, we started a year ago this job in close collaboration with Argent, Braavos and StarkWare. We did this SNIP-9, which is called execute from outside, where the main idea is to basically drop some logic, so a payload, and allow a user to sign that payload and allow a third party to execute that payload in behalf of the user.
And everything started from there. Thanks to this SNIP-9 we have today, the Paymaster live on AVNU and soon an Influence and a bunch of other great teams building there. And you can think of any kind of use case around gas fees. I don’t know, you want to build the next PayPal and want to subsidize new accounts, you could do that with the Paymaster we have built. You want to do a marketing campaign to, I don’t know, let your users try some new features in your game or some new features on whatever it is, you can subsidize that marketing more. And that’s a bit the story of why the Paymaster.

Louis Guthman:
It’s super interesting. And the question then to you and then we jump to Chris because I think it’s relevant, can you explain to the people in the audience why this is not already the case on AVNU chain and why you had to build it on Starknet?

Mentor Reka:
Is this a question for me?

Louis Guthman:
Yes, for you, Mentor.

Mentor Reka:
Yeah. Why on Starknet? What is cool is that we really leverage the power of account abstraction here. Because if you look at the SNIP-9, technically speaking it’s like, what, five lines of changes on the account specification. And the SNIP-9 allows you to basically execute something in behalf of the user. But because we have only native account abstraction on Starknet, you can do that. You can’t do that on the L1 and have this kind of logic. Even if we have seen some EIPs here and there are a lot of debate and Vitalik recently sending the 7701 and other stuff like that. But you can do what we did on Starknet because we have true native account abstraction.
Louis Guthman:
That’s amazing. Thank you. That’s very cool. And I guess, Chris, I want to hear from your perspective as a game developer, what have you built make Paymaster so attractive and how do you guys leverage it?

Chris Lexmond:
Yeah, good question. I mean I think that when it comes to gaming, of course we know that the universe of people who are interested in playing games is very large, much, much larger than the current set of people who play “Web 3.0 games”. And I think that attracting them has been difficult for a variety of reasons, which we could go into and talk at great length about. But one of those reasons is that the experience is very different. And especially when it comes to fully on-chain games like Influence and like some others on Starknet including Loot Realms and Dope Wars and so on.
Fully on-chain games are actually needing to update stay on-chain very regularly. They’re having to process transactions. And so, therefore they’re requiring gas to be spent. And interrupting the user to request that very crypto-native flow is not something that new users that are coming into a game for the first time are really very comfortable with. It’s not something that they want to see. It breaks immersion, it’s certainly not fun.
And I think with Paymaster and with account abstraction in general and the other functionality that has been developed around it, including the sessions that we’re using from Argent and furthermore, integrating Paymaster with sessions, I think we can get really, really close to a traditional experience where you come into a game, an account is deployed for you very transparently. And you get involved in the game, you get some of the game’s in-game currency, in our case it’s SWAY. And then you’re paying for gas in that in-game currency really without ever realizing it. And potentially including the game itself, paying for those fees without you even knowing it.
And I think that’s really, really exciting because it pushes to the background the blockchain interaction, the crypto interaction and just allows the game itself, the fun part of the game to come to the service. And so I mean we’re really, really excited about it. We’re implementing it now. It’s going to be available when we launch with Exploitation. I think it’s going to really change the game, especially for these fully on-chain games that are really just starting to you’re starting to really see them be deployed now.

Louis Guthman:
That’s super cool. And so the question then is for you, the perspective is to allow a user, whenever they play the game to just use its own assets, its own in-game asset to pay for the fees. Is that correct? That’s the right way to think about it?

Chris Lexmond:
Yeah, absolutely.

Louis Guthman:
Is there an analogy? Is there a game existing in the market today that’s requiring you to consume your own resources every time you play the game? It’s something that’s common?

Chris Lexmond:
Well, I think especially in MMOs, it is a very common concept. You talk World of Warcraft or EVE Online, all of these games have in-game currencies and you are regularly spending them. In a lot of cases the economics of it is abstracted to where you are paying fees, but they’re in-game and they’re couched in terms of being in-game fees.
In EVE Online for example, when you interact with the market, you pay fees. When you look at how CCP talks about those fees, they describe them as a sink. But ultimately that sink is removing in-game currency from their game and therefore, driving players to go out and buy more of that currency from CCP. Ultimately, I think it’s the same economic effect. In our case, we can basically get that interaction further and further abstracted to the point where it feels like a fully immersive part of playing Influence.

Louis Guthman:
That’s amazing. And then I’m going to go back to Mentor. My question, then to you is what justifies your perspective for you guys, from an AVNU perspective to go and build investor? What’s the rationale behind it as a business and the company?

Mentor Reka:
Two points. The first one, our beloved StarkWare colleagues promised us to deliver the Paymaster, but we saw that there are some other priorities on the roadmap. And for us, user experience has always been the number one priority. Amongst any other, it has always been the number one priority.
And not having the Paymaster sooner rather than later was important. And that’s why we started this to roll the ball a year ago. And that’s the first point. The second point, AVNU has way more infrastructure stuff than things that you see. For us it was a very natural move to continue to deep dive on the infrastructure level. And it was not something out of the scope. A natural move combined with an urgency to have something that just let us show the true power of account absorption.
Today for example, you can use the Paymaster in AVNU and enjoy gasless trading. But you can also have a meta transaction. You sign up a load and that’s it. On the other one you have a very bad design because most of the time on competitive solution you first need to do a transaction and give the limited approvals to the relayer of the said solution and then you can enjoy gasless trading. Here that’s not the case. On AVNU, there is no limited approval and shitty stuff like that.

Louis Guthman:
Wow.

Mentor Reka:
You see, there was three main points, but user experience and the urgency to provide something great was the biggest one.

Louis Guthman:
No. And that makes a lot of sense to me. To me, account abstraction is, I mean Paymaster is definitely something that an RFQ, a DEX aggregator are the right entity to build it up. The fact that you guys decide to go afterwards is just an exciting move. And so maybe you can tell us a bit more about where you guys stand right now. Where is Paymaster in production? How many people have been using it? Have you embedded? Can we now try? What’s going on? Tell me more.

Mentor Reka:
You want numbers. Okay.

Louis Guthman:
I want numbers, throw the numbers.

Mentor Reka:
We opened the Paymaster in beta mode more than a month ago. The idea was to eat the food we were producing. And so we opened it to the top 10,000 traders on AVNU. And we stress test the whole infrastructure lots. We did some campaign with Argent in stealth as well. And so far everything is holding right and scaling right.
Last week we opened it to everyone. And we have around eight to 9% of the daily trades go using the Paymaster. It’s basically users opting in on the Paymaster and deciding to pay with USDC, with DT for instance. And today, we only support stable coins assets for paying the gas fees. But we aim to support any liquid assets, so Memecoins as well and any native token on Starknet. Chris just spoke about Influence token. And that’s the goal.
As for the integration part, this week as well, I think Monday we release a documentation and SDK and OpenAPI so anyone can already play on Sepulia and Testnet to integrate AVNU. It only takes 10 minutes to integrate it in your current flow. And yeah, the goal is to open source everything this year. For us, the vision here is that the more people provide to their users a way to abstract the gas and make the experience better, the better it is for the whole ecosystem. We are in the middle of a phase to onboard new dApps. We have something like eight or nine current integration of the Paymaster. Influence being one of the biggest one. And yeah, very exciting.

Louis Guthman:
Sorry. Sorry I was muted for a second. I was asking. That’s amazing. Thank you so much, Mentor, for sharing all the infos. And maybe, Chris, can you explain where you guys stand also in this integration? Is it production ready? I mean people have been using it? Where do you stand?

Chris Lexmond:
Yeah. We’re deep into integration. We’re talking frequently with AVNU about integrating SWAY as one of those tokens that can be used for paying fees. And our expectation is that it will be live with Exploitation. We’re also working quite a bit with Argent. We’ve leaned in quite heavily to using their web wallet and their sessions to bring users in and give them a very familiar email login-based experience, and an experience that doesn’t require signing transactions constantly throughout your gameplay. And so integrating those sessions as well with Paymaster is a major, major focus of ours.

Louis Guthman:
That’s super exciting. And so, maybe also Mentor can share a bit more about the technical challenges there at the moment and what are coming next to improve the system and what will it enable?

Mentor Reka:
Yes. There are two main topic we are looking at right now. The first one being onboarding as much dApp as we can. Here the challenge is to make sure that our infrastructure scale as it should. And so, we are in the middle of that phase. But I’m pretty confident we might see some issues and stuff to fix and improve. But as far as now, I think we are on the right track to be able to onboard anyone in a couple of days and let them do whatever they want.
And a second track, there is this logic that dApps are asking AVNUs to implement for the Paymaster. Right now as we said, the whole infrastructure is not open sourced for many reasons and we aim to open source it by end of this year. And the goal here is to allow people to choose to leverage your own infrastructure. So AVNU infrastructure.
And they can see it as a service they consume because they don’t want to manage infrastructure, relayers, rebalancing the gas fees and stuff like that. But they want to trust us and let us do or job basically. Or they might by end of this year be able to run in a standalone mode on their side the whole infra and manage everything from point to point. On the second track, the challenges ahead are the logic that dApps want to have.
For example, we have some interesting marketing campaigns that some dudes want to run, which is I want to onboard new users, deploy their accounts and subsidize their first transaction. And so, that’s a logic very specific to a dApp, to specific dApp because they want to do so only if a user met some requirements. For example, only if he holds a specific NFT or if he did some transaction on chain.
And so far, the main challenge here for us is to understand how we can build a system where people wanting to integrate with AVNU can provide their logic via an API, via some piece of code. And basically let us run everything around the Paymaster but they take care of the logic of a specific campaign. But both tracks should be almost finished if not completely finished by Q3.

Louis Guthman:
Super exciting. Yes?

Mentor Reka:
I see a question here. Is it possible to implement cross-chain transaction? For now specifically to have AVNU, no. And specifically to the Paymaster, the response is no. But you can imagine a world where you are managing the cross aspect of things. And so yeah, you could totally for example provide, I don’t know, cross-chain swaps. And on Starknet side you’ll leverage both AVNU for the best execution and the Paymaster for managing the trade.

Louis Guthman:
Yeah. I mean I can even expand a bit more on this because very often what you have in various network is that the base token is different. And so, if we used to use the technology-packed sockets that allow you to cross-chain transaction, then Paymaster is almost a must. And actually very often under by the hood by the provider. And so what that is building is just one of the building block for cross-chain interaction.
I mean I did have another question for you, Mentor, on top of this, which is there are existing tentative to do Paymaster in the ecosystem, like the economy and other attempts to sponsor gas. How is that complementary? How do you see the complementary with the registration of Paymaster tokens?

Mentor Reka:
There are so many different designs that have been shared on the crypto Twitter around Paymaster. For example, zkSync has its own design, which is naturally integrated at the protocol level. And you have some companies that are leveraging those entry points to themselves build a layer as a Paymaster. I think they are complementary in many sense. For example, if tomorrow StarkWare decide to build the Paymaster natively in the protocol, what we did is still complementary.
First, we did a part of their job. Welcome, guys. And second, it’s complementary because you don’t want to overload the core protocol with logics and different kind of entry door to allow you to do some spicy stuff. For example, people, even if tomorrow StarkWare has its own Paymaster, people might decide to still work with us because they could put some logic I just showed, explained before. And you will not be able to do so on a traditional implementation of the Paymaster.

Chris Lexmond:
I have a question for you, Mentor. Let’s say in the absence of a traditional Paymaster, what does the decentralization of the Paymaster that you’ve built look like? What would it look like over time? Would we expect to see it become a more decentralized system where there are multiple operators? I’m just curious to get your thoughts on that.

Mentor Reka:
Yeah. That’s a very good question. On our side, while we very value this part of the spectrum, which is how we can give to other hands the ability to be an operator in the system. Right now the best transfer we have is to open source the whole stack. And anyone should be able with a Docker image to run the infrastructure we have by end of this year in a matter of minutes.
But we don’t plan to build a consensus mechanism between the operators or let’s say the relayers of the system because there is not that much value. Users money is not at risk at all. The worst thing you could have is a censorship. By leveraging a Paymaster that is centralized, like we do, the biggest risk you are taking is that AVNU might decide to censor your transaction. But of course, that’s not in your plan at all.
And the response to that censorship property that is lost, is to open source the whole stack. You are a builder, let’s say Influence is having a million daily user. And you guys, for business reasons and strategic reasons, you prefer to manage that critical infrastructure piece by you all. You will be able to do so. And it won’t take months. It’ll take maybe a day or two to set up everything, have auto-scaling in place. And we’ll of course share the best practices in term of scaling and what we observed. That’s basically today the approach we have.

Chris Lexmond:
That’s amazing. Does that potentially open the possibility that you could have almost a fee market amongst operators potentially?

Mentor Reka:
Yeah. That’s a very, very interesting point again, Chris. Today we don’t have any fee market on Starknet. Maybe Louis can give us more insights about that, but the day we will have a fee market on Starknet, things will get harder. It will get harder because the whole architecture and the system for the Paymaster will have to deal with something else. Which is how we can make sure before accepting meta transactions, so un-intends, that this one will get settled.
What happened if the trade is rejected and you need to retry the transaction on behalf of the user? Who pays the fees? A lot of question that are really related to the fee market, but as for the Paymaster itself, what we build, we don’t aim to add a consensus layer or a fee layer trying to make operators compete. Right now the approach is keep it simple. And you don’t trust us, you don’t want to trust us, just fork, everything will be open source. And you will have to deal with the Starknet fee market once it’s live. But that’s today’s response.

Chris Lexmond:
Very cool.

Louis Guthman:
That’s very cool. And to answer about the fee market, its currently, it’s pretty high up in the roadmap, but the timeline has been shifted a bit, so I don’t think it’s going to be up this year and one important thing there is more a prioritized feature before the fee markets. No. Everything you just shared is very, very exciting. And so, I guess my next question is, I guess to you, Mentor. We understand how UX, it helps also security. What’s your end vision for UX and crypto? And how does AVNU allow you to get there?

Mentor Reka:
When I say that the gas is a bug, I mean I’m not saying it for marketing purpose. Is we really believe that gas is a bug. If you observe the traditional life of anyone, your father, your mother or whatever, you will see that whenever they are buying something online or purchasing physically something, they don’t have a similar concept to a gas fee, especially a gas fee limited to only one asset.
I think we need to get rid of that. That’s a priority. The Paymaster is a solution to that, but we can go many, many ways further. And I think wallets have a big role to play here in addition to tabs. But we need to start somewhere. And I think that in a foreseen future we will find a way to not have the duty to educate users about gas fees because if we have to, I think we failed. But to completely remove this gas thing, so we will find an economical strategy to subsidize onboarding, for example. At least the first transaction or the first deployment of the account. Especially post-Dencun, it’s something that can be achieved. And it doesn’t cost a lot.
But then I think that we dApps have a big role to abstract that as well. For example, you could imagine all dApps and Starknets leveraging a Paymaster, no matter if it’s AVNU one, or wallets abstracting the gas completely. And the user just do whatever he want, but he will never, ever be blocked because he doesn’t have a gas token on his wallet.

Louis Guthman:
Yeah. All right. Usually, I mean it’s also to some extent allowing more privacy because very often in the past, whenever you’re sending money from one wallet to another, you leave a very significant presence because you need to see that with the base token. And that I think is a massive, massive change that Paymaster it also helps.
Everything you’re building is so exciting to me that. Yeah, I mean what you guys have been building is super awesome and definitely the best in the market, so very exciting. I think it’s our time is getting to the end. Maybe if there is any question in the audience, we can send it through in the chat. And otherwise we’re going to wrap it up. Any question from you guys that you want to ask?

Mentor Reka:
I see people asking when Stark is going to employ Louis.

Louis Guthman:
I cannot comment.

Mentor Reka:
Come on.

Louis Guthman:
Yeah. Okay. It seems that we are done with our space today. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much, Mentor and Chris, for joining. Very exciting what both of you guys are building. And looking forward to get more and more of that activity on Starknet.

Chris Lexmond:
Thanks for having me.

Mentor Reka:
Thank you, guys. Thanks a lot, Chris, for joining us. And thanks, Louis, for organizing this. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Chris Lexmond:
Thanks. Thanks, guys.

Louis Guthman:
All right, guys. Bye-bye.