RSK users won’t have to pay transaction fees with new integration

Bitcoin’s smart contract-enabled sidechain RSK is introducing the concept of meta-transactions, which allows third parties to pay for a user’s transaction fees.

Announced on Thursday, the “RIF Enveloping” solution enables wallet providers to pay for their users’ transactions. Paying transaction fees is currently a major adoption bottleneck in adoption for smart contract platforms. Users wishing to trade tokens must always have some units of the blockchain’s native currency, for example Ether (ETH) for Ethereum and SmartBitcoin (RBTC) for RSK.

RIF Enveloping introduces meta-transactions to enable greater flexibility for DApp developers. Smart contracts using the technology can choose to subsidize the user’s gas fee completely, or request payment with tokens. The technology will be integrated with Beexo Wallet, one of the main wallet providers for RSK.

Similar solutions exist on Ethereum as well, using OpenZeppelin’s Gas Station Network. Wallets that use it include Argent, which uses smart contracts to store the user’s tokens. While the company used to subsidize gas costs completely, the skyrocketing prices on Ethereum led them to discontinue the program. Nonetheless, despite their apparent benefits, meta-transactions have yet to achieve significant adoption on Ethereum.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, co-founder of RSK, told Cointelegraph that RIF Enveloping can be more impactful to RSK’s ecosystem:

"One of the main reasons why RIF Enveloping can have broader adoption than similar solutions in the Ethereum ecosystem is that the solution was jointly designed with wallet providers such as Beexo, Defiant, Money on Chain, RSK Swap and large communities of users like Taringa, to maximize efficiency.”

He also explained that RSK’s solution has a technological advantage. Meta-transactions on Ethereum require redeploying contracts or using proxies, while RIF Enveloping can work with any existing token or contract.

RSK features a growing ecosystem for decentralized finance. The recent launch of Sovryn brought a full suite of trading and lending products, while existing platforms like Money on Chain or RSK Swap recreated core DeFi projects on Ethereum like MakerDAO or Uniswap.