We are going to have an important upgrade for ArcBlock's blockchain, and some new features are coming with this upcoming upgrade.
For those who already actively develop on ArcBlock may already notice changes in our beta chain's block explorer.
Gas Fee#
ArcBlock's blockchain has been gas fee free since we launched the first version in 2019, however after the new upgrade the gas fee will be enforced for every transaction.
The purpose for the gas fee in ArcBlock is different than Ethereum or those blockchains architected after Ethereum, on Ethereum, the gas mechanism is used for preventing infinite loops or extremely complex code login in the smart-contract, it is protection mechanism to prevent the blockchain being take down by bad actors or malicious code. On Ethereum, the allowance of the gas fee is also a factor for ordering the transactions, usually the miners will pick transactions with higher gas fees to include in the blocks. Part of miners' revenue comes from the gas included in the block, that's why miners want to pick some transactions over others (which create a lot of disadvantages and cause the high gas fee problem in Ethereum ecosystem).
ArcBlock's gas mechanism is very different, we don't need to depend on it to prevent the blockchain performance issue, and we do NOT allow blockchain node operators (equivalent to miners in Ethereum) to order the transactions based on gas instead they have no control of it and can't take any advantage from that. There is no such thing as MEV (Miner Extractable Value) in ArcBlock Ecosystem. Since ArcBlock's blockchain is acting as a Billing and Operation Support System (BOSS) in a larger ecosystem, blockchain node operators do NOT directly benefit from the gas fee.
ArcBlock's gas fee is mostly designed for preventing system misuse, e.g. sending large amount of transactions to block others from using the system, or application error/malfunction which causing sending large volume of transactions, or some bots or spammers who trying to take advantage of the ecosystem's various rewards or promotions. By enforcing the gas fee, it makes bad actors (including bots, spammers) no longer economically viable to do so, and protecting the application malfunction impacts like a circuit breaker.
Hate Gas Fee? We have a perfect solution!#
Hate gas fee? No a surprise, we hate it too. 🙂Could we have the benefit of the gas mechanism and also not need the gas fee? Yes, we have a solution for that. Actually ArcBlock is again the industry first "one of its kind" design to solve this problem in an elegant way.
We have two important features that come along with our gas mechanism: "Pay for another account" and "Staking for Gas-free", we'll explain in detail below.
Pay for another account
Something really inconvenient for Ethereum family blockchain is, the gas fee always needs to come from the account who is executing the transaction. If you need to transfer a token from account A, you need that account to have enough Ether(ETH) to pay the gas, so you end up having to transfer some ETH from another account which also costs some gas fee to do so. If you have some small amount of token in one account, you might find it's not worth it to transfer them since the cost of the gas might have a much higher value than the remaining balance of the token in that account. This caused a lot of Ethereum accounts to be left behind with dust of tokens.
ArcBlock's blockchain allows the gas fee paid from another account. That is to say, if one account has enough balance for the gas fee, you can execute transactions from any other accounts you have. The common problem in Ethereum will never happen to ArcBlock.
Additionally, the gas fee could be paid by an account you do NOT own, as long as the owner is willing to pay it for you. This enabled a lot of scenarios for applications, applications usually will be happy to pay the gas fee for their customers to give them a smooth user experience and without worry about the gas fee. Gas fee is a relatively new concept, many users have been frustrated with this concept when they are new to blockchain, and it also stopped a lot of people from discovering dApps, because they have to spend some token before they can do anything. ArcBlock makes this problem disappear, and on-boarding new users has never been this easy.
Can you pay for the gas for your friends or your other wallets? Technically yes, however you will have to provide crypto signatures with your private key to pay gas for friends which is not practically to do. The applications who pay the gas for their users have a dedicated private key to sign those transactions for their customers.
Staking for Gas-free
But you are still paying for it, right? Can we get completely gas free? The answer is YES!
As we explained before, ArcBlock's gas fee is a mechanism to prevent blockchain misuse, so if you don't misuse it, there is no reason you have to pay the gas fee! To enable this, we introduced "Staking for Gas-free".
By staking a small amount of ABT token (it will be 1 ABT at this time, and the requirement of the staking amount can be changed by blockchain governance), the gas fee will be completely waived. The gas fee will still be calculated and displayed but it will show with a crossed out line to let you know the fee has been waived.
Even better, "Staking for Gas-free" works together with "Pay for another account", that means, if you stake and get gas-free, it covers all your other accounts in the same wallet! It's even better news for application developers and operators, since they can stake for gas-free and then offer to help their customers with these features, so essentially no one needs to pay the gas.
What's catch?
Then what's catch? There are indeed some catches here, when you hear "staking", another word "slashing" should always come to mind -- staked token always have some risk that get slashed. If you want to under ArcBlock's staking and slashing design, please reference to another articles we published on this topic. In simple terms, if you stake the token and you break some rules, your token could be partly or completely forfeit by the blockchain, and once your staked token is gone, you also lose the privilege from the staking.
That said, after you stake the token and get gas-free privilege, if you try to spam the blockchain, or use this to fund some bot program, quickly you will lose the stake and no longer have gas-free feature, the gas fee will be paid from your account, and if there is no balance, the transaction will fail. Similarly if a malfunction application tries to send large volume transactions with staking for gas-free it will only find it lost the staking and not be able to affect the system. Usually it's way more expensive to get the staking token forfeit than using that amount to pay gas fee for each transaction. The staking for gas-free helps good behavior users with best user experience while keeping as a circuit breaker to protect the blockchain.
Users can decide to unstable the token anytime, however they will need to wait for a period to claim back the token, before they claim back the token they still have the "gas-free" privilege. The current waiting period is 365 days and this can be changed by blockchain governance.
What do I need to do to have it?#
We will upgrade the ArcBlock blockchain and this upgrade will be transparent to all users, you should feel any difference except the gas mechanism will be enabled. You will need to update the latest DID Wallet, so you can see the gas fee and use all the new features we described. The blockchain explorer will be upgraded at the same time, so you will be able to see the latest information with gas fee enforced in the new upgrade block explorers.
Any application developers need to update the framework and SDK to the latest version, so you can take advantage of the new features and ensure your application will not break with the new upgrades.