Recurring meta transactions to power l33t subscriptions! by Austin Griffith (Devcon4)
Devcon 4 · 11 Dec 2018 · 5:07
Ethereum developer Austin Griffith demonstrates recurring meta transactions at Devcon4, showing how gasless, signature-based transactions can power subscription-style payments without users holding ETH for gas. The talk explores meta-transaction relayers as a path toward smoother onboarding for everyday dapp users.
Speakers
Topics
From Devcon 4, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.
Transcript
hi I'm Weston Griffiths so probably a couple months ago I started learning like what meta transactions were and how they worked and we we created something called a bouncer proxy that kind of lets you pay the gas for your users and then there was kind of this moment where we were thinking what like how could we make these things replayable there there's a replay nonce right in there to keep basically keep you protected from replay and we were like wait a minute what if we what if we use that like as a timestamp that we could set as a period that you could play over and over again so we kind of put together a contract and set up a subscription system where you sign a meta transaction that says I
would like to send like five died to this person every month and died is pretty good for every month right going back to the maker guys in the POA guys it's like gonna stay stable it's gonna you know it's gonna be five dollars a year from now right there's no price fluctuation so we basically set up you sign one meta transaction that says I want to send five died from this person to this person and I wanted to replay and I put that on a secondary relay network and then I can approve some kind of upper bound like maybe maybe I'm gonna give Netflix like a year's worth of money right so so I'll send you five dollars a month and then you know I'll
allow some upper bound of like forty fifty dollars and you do that with just the ERC 20 tokens standard so so then that transaction just gets submitted again and again and the relayer network pays for it and you you have an incentive wrapped up in that meta transaction also kind of like an atomic swap where when they submit the when they submit the transaction and they pay the gas they get rewarded with something that you set up for them so you kind of have this incentive layer packed into your your transaction for them and so it's kind of like just set it and forget it right you you sign that transaction you send it out the the relayer network and then you approve that upper bound and it just replays over and over again
and so that was kind of like what led to a RC 133 seven which is the lead standard but well it's basically about how to how do we set up a standard for subscriptions on the blockchain and and it's a lot more flexible so the this first reference implementation we won the Wyoming hackathon with and then it's kind of like evolved from there into like a grant system to firstly I think grants could use a little work right now you kind of either get a bunch of money up front or you get like I'm sorry money at the end we think it would be way cooler if we could do it in a recurring sense and a subscription system would really work really well with that you
could kind of just say I want to give this you know multi stick wallet or this this organization you know a small amount and like a bunch of us could chip in right like a patreon of token subscriptions or something like that and it that's coming soon but that's basically all I have if anybody has any questions or anything about meta transactions hit me up I would love to talk about it more the the main thesis is it's all about abstracting the UX away from our extra abstracting like the 12 word seed phrase away from the user at first and then showing it to them like once they provided value so when you get to adapt you want to dive in and
use that the depth first right like you should be able to see the heart of the content first if it's a music service you should get in and you should be posting songs and will pay your gas while you post those songs like it's worth it to us for user acquisition to bring people in but as you get into the app and you use the app you're gonna so say you post a song and someone likes it or since you've taken or something you're gonna accrue a little bit of value and then that's it's so much easier to sell someone on a 12 word seed phrase once they've accrued that value right like like if you try to give someone the 12 word seat phrase upfront it's like this big nasty thing right but if you try to give them a 12 word seed phrase that is protecting something
they've earned like protecting this like narrative behind its account or even value then it's a lot easier to sell to them so word yeah hit me up the lead standard is coming out soon subscriptions on the blockchain meta transactions better ux ooh word thank you [Applause] you