3 Most Compelling Use Cases for Meta Transactions
If you read my last article, you are now an expert on Meta Transactions. Congratulations! But you may have walked away with one question still largely unanswered: what is this useful for? All Meta Transactions essentially do is take the burden of gas fees off of the user and place them onto the company or developer. What’s so great about that? We will get to the bottom of that question today by listing out some of the most compelling use cases for Meta Transactions.
1. Free NFT Mints
Free mints have been popular in the NFT space for a while now. One notable example that comes to mind is Stickmen Toys. Warner Records UK and Bose partnered to offer these musical NFTs for free. Rare members of the collection also won their owners a free Bose speaker modeled after their NFT. Pretty good deal for something that’s free! But many may mutter about how the NFT itself is free, but the gas fee to mint them is not. Perhaps there were some who went to the mint page excited to get their free NFT only to realize they didn’t have enough ETH to cover the gas costs. If the smart contract were developed in a way that allowed Meta Transactions, an issue like that would be impossible. So why weren’t the smart contracts developed to be EIP-2771 compatible?! Well, as the person who developed the smart contracts for Stickmen Toys, I can answer bluntly: I didn’t know about Meta Transactions at the time! If I had, it would have been a no brainer. Meta Transactions allow ‘free mints’ to actually be free.
2. Blockchain for Non Web3 Natives
We all know that the key to mass adoption of Web3 technology is making it easier to get average people onboard. A huge barrier to that is gas fees. Imagine you know nothing about blockchain and someone says “Hey you can interact with this amazing ecosystem of decentralized applications, all you have to do is download MetaMask, buy Ethereum on Coinbase, send that Ethereum to your MetaMask wallet, and you’re good to go!” Say those exact words to someone and you’re likely to be met with a blank stare, or left on read.
The truth is, it doesn’t make sense for people to have to always have a certain amount of ETH in their wallets to pay for transactions. Especially if we want Web3 technology to be used for everyday things, we need to make things easier and not expect people to pay $5 each time they want to interact with a smart contract.
Take Starbucks’ new loyalty program for example. I’m not sure if they are using Meta Transactions for their blockchain based rewards program, but they should. The average person is going to completely avoid it otherwise. Imagine Starbucks telling you, “thank you for your latte purchase, spend another $6 in gas fees to claim your NFT as a reward!” Yeah, right. There are instances where it just makes more sense for a company to take on that gas fee, and this is clearly one of those instances.
3. Web3 Games
2022 saw the explosion of Web3 gaming. The concept of Web3 gaming is powerful. Imagine if your items in your favorite video game were tradeable outside of the game in exchange for real currency. Or if you could earn currency with real value for being good at a game. This is exactly what Web3 gaming aims to offer. But there is one hurdle to overcome on the way to that goal.
If you’ve ever played a video game, you know that items are often accumulated mid game as the action is ongoing. If these items are now NFTs, then collecting each item requires a blockchain transaction. Not only is that expensive, but it’s dreadfully slow. Picture you picking up a block in Minecraft and each block requires you to pay a $2 gas fee and wait ~1 minute for the transaction to complete. Yikes!
Meta Transactions offer an elegant solution to this. Instead of sending a transaction for each item, the user could sign a message at the end of their session (think of saving a game before exiting) which will allow the items to be sent on the blockchain at no cost to the player.
See an example of a Web3 game with Meta Transactions here.
The Bottom Line
Web3 technology has immense potential to upend current infrastructure for popular services. Powerful as it is, though, onboarding your average person from Web2 to Web3 is a massive headache. Meta Transactions can significantly ease this painful transition by taking the burden of gas fees off of the end user.
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