Gas sponsorship

If you've used another crypto wallet, you've probably met the moment where a small transfer fails because you don't hold some third currency to pay the fee. MozaikPay doesn't have that moment. This page explains what gas is, how we pay it for you, and what does and doesn't depend on us continuing to.

What gas is

A public network like Base is run by thousands of computers that each execute every transaction, and gas is the fee that pays for that work. It's charged in the network's own coin, which on Base is ETH, and it scales with computation rather than amount, so sending a million dollars costs the same as sending five. On Base, a typical transfer costs a fraction of a cent.

The problem with it

The fee itself is tiny. The experience around it is the problem. In a classic wallet, the account that moves the money must also hold the ETH that pays for the move. Before a new user can send a single dollar, they have to buy a small amount of a volatile cryptocurrency, keep it topped up, and learn what "out of gas" means. For an app whose whole point is digital dollars, we didn't consider that acceptable.

How we pay it instead

Smart accounts separate who authorizes a payment from who pays its fee. The network recognizes paymasters, contracts that offer to cover gas on behalf of others. We run one, and we keep it funded with ETH.

Every time you do something onchain, our servers sign a short-lived approval for that one specific operation, and our paymaster presents it to the network. The approval is bound to the operation's exact contents, so it can't be reused, redirected, or attached to anything you didn't sign. The network then takes the fee out of our deposit instead of asking you for ETH. You authorize the payment, and the gas bill is ours.

The arrangement covers everything you do in the app, transfers, payment links, withdrawals, and key changes alike. It's why the word gas appears nowhere in MozaikPay. There's nothing you need to do about it.

Sponsored fees and real fees

Gas is the network's fee, and it's always on us. It isn't the only fee in the world of moving funds, though. Deposits and cash-outs run through licensed local partners, and the partners' costs are real and shown upfront before you confirm. Sending digital dollars to another MozaikPay user costs nothing.

If we ever stopped

Sponsorship is a service we run, so it's fair to ask what happens if it stops. Your money doesn't depend on it. Your account and your digital dollars sit on Base, and your keys sign whether we exist or not. If MozaikPay disappeared tomorrow, you would pay gas yourself, or route through another paymaster, the way every other smart-account user on the network already does. Losing us would cost you convenience. It wouldn't cost you a cent of your money.