Zero Network New Layer 2 With NO FEES?

We're making crypto transactions feel like magic—no more gas fees! 🚀✨

Nine months ago, we convened with the team members of Zeran and started strategizing about the next big thing we could do to improve the user experience. We've always been passionate about Zeran, starting with the idea that it has to be useful and easy to interact with DeFi protocols, allowing users to know where their money is. This core principle led us to realize that without influencing the direction of the underlying chain, making meaningful UX improvements is challenging. As a wallet, we only control the signing and custody flow, which is relatively little because most interactions happen on-chain, and the capabilities that dApps can leverage are limited to what the chain provides.

The situation started to change with 4337, but the gas market remains a significant UX blocker, especially with the emergence of layer 2 solutions. Different tokens as gas and the need to bridge every time you transact on a new layer 2 have made fragmentation a big issue. Although costs have gone down, which is amazing and has allowed more applications to emerge, the existence of gas fees for the end user remains a major blocker of on-chain adoption. We decided to solve this issue, leading to the origin of the Zerion Network.

When asked if we could subsidize gas on other layer twos, we acknowledged that while possible, it presents issues. There's no elegant solution because we would need to send money directly to users' wallets to subsidize fees, and account abstraction in its current form hasn't gained traction outside of specific applications. Most users still use EA wallets for a composable experience across different networks, making it difficult to subsidize fees effectively. Additionally, subsidizing actions on networks where we don't have any upside means bearing the cost of transactions, which is high due to the margins taken by layer 2 networks like Coinbase or Optimism.

In the future, 3074 might make this process more seamless on other chains, but we wanted to start with Zerion and make it the best user experience possible by verticalizing it with the Zerion experience. On a side note, regarding account abstraction, it hasn't taken off much due to several reasons. On Zerion, every EA is an account abstraction wallet, a major upgrade in terms of UX that allows us to offer free transactions. However, 4337 as a standard isn't composable in the same way across all layer 2s, requiring a contract deployment every time.

Making on-chain experiences enjoyable and rewarding by subsidizing fees and innovating beyond Ethereum's gas model! 🚀💸

Would this be something that the layer twos themselves have to do? No, that would be the wallet's job to maintain all of that. There have been attempts like the Avocado Wallet and now the Smart Wallet by Coinbase, which is a great attempt to address this. However, it's a big lift on the wallet side to maintain access to the same experience as you get with EOA. EOAs are very simple and work the same way for dApps, allowing them to deploy on any chain with the expectation that it will work. 4337 fragments the experience further, and you need to make people migrate over, which they are often reluctant to do. This standard is only targeting new users, but there's another problem: most account abstraction wallets require users to sponsor or pay upfront for creating the wallet. You need to deposit funds before the wallet is even deployed, posing challenges with the cost. EOAs are free, and you can create as many as you want. Initially, users care more about the content they want to buy, mint, or the game they want to play rather than the wallet setup.

The overall experience of converting users into active users of Web3 is more challenging, which is why many stick to centralized exchanges. The main reason for creating our own layer two is to improve the user experience (UX) for users, easily abstract fees, and subsidize fees for them. This is just the first step in the journey. We aim to make the on-chain experience enjoyable and rewarding. Not many have experimented with this to date. The gas model has seen little innovation, with most networks copying Ethereum's approach, charging gas fees for any action. This isn't directly related to the value created for the network.

Too many weird NFTs and promotions are ruining user experience! 🚫👎

The whole experience for end users worsens because you see a bunch of weird NFTs with promotions coming to your feed. All of that is not useful for the network. While some actions directly benefit the quality of the network, there is a lot more innovation that we can do in that capacity while still maintaining the permissionless nature of it. We are not removing the gas, so if you do want to transact, you are able to transact on zero. It is fully permissionless while some actions will be able to subsidize, which we think are benefiting the user experience and the quality of the network. Initially, it is going to be us, but we would want to expand that further so others can do similar beneficial actions to the network, allowing it to grow together.

Any DApp can sponsor transactions. Initially, for Zerion users, it is going to be us doing all of that job, but we do not want to limit that to just ourselves. In the future, we want other players to be sponsoring the transactions for the users, maintaining the continuity of user experience without putting all of the costs on just ourselves. The reason for other developers to subsidize users is that they would be making money in other ways. This is how most of the web two products work. For example, you do not pay for AWS as a user directly; you pay your subscription fee to Netflix, and Netflix does all of the infrastructure work. This is how it should be, but due to the eroded nature of crypto incentives, users are paying the infrastructure cost, DApps are not paying pretty much anything, and they are getting grants primarily from the chains to operate. There is no incentive for DApps to build a sustainable business model, and no one is focusing on actual users. Everyone is okay with having millions of farmers just reap their rewards, distribute them, recycle something again, and get a grant. That is a dead end, and we need to get out of that somehow.

Users will be able to bring value via the Zerion to the DApps if they can figure out how, and we will be doing all we can to make content creators and people deploying apps benefit from that the most. That is the rewarding part of the Zerion Network. We want them to earn, not just from grants and such, but by contributing to the network, bringing more activity, and bringing more users, and they will get rewarded for that.

For the Zerion wallet to work in this layer two, will DApps need to deploy on Zerion as well for those transactions to work? Yes, it is a separate network, so you would need to deploy on Zerion as well. We are not going to restrict people just to Zerion. If a DApp exists on another network, that is completely okay. We do not need to build like most chains approach, where they come in and say, "Here is our ecosystem." We want to focus on why users are actually coming. Users are not coming after DApps. People do not come after OpenSea; OpenSea is a tool. They are coming after a certain NFT collection that someone told them about, or they are not going after Zora; they just happen to find a mint that someone shared with them. Similarly, with games, there are certain distinctions that matter. Most chains try to focus on the DApps, whereas we want to focus on the end creators of unique experiences and content. We want to make sure that Zerion helps these users actually get the rewards.

People don't come for the tools, they come for the unique experiences and content! 🚀✨

Users are not coming after DBS, and that's how we see the world happening. People don't come after OpenSea; OpenSea is a tool. They are coming after a certain NFT collection that someone told them about. Similarly, they are not going after Zora; they just happen to find a mint that someone shared with them. This distinction matters because most of the chains try to focus on the dApps, whereas we want to focus on the end creators of unique experiences and unique content. We want to make sure that Zerion helps these users actually get the rewards. We are building the whole ecosystem to direct all the users on Zerion to mint stuff happening on the Zerion Network. This way, more users would come in, and more rewards can be generated by the creators.

For example, if the action a user wants to do is buy a meme coin, we will need to have a DEX launch on Zero to facilitate that. We definitely will need to have the DEX, and we believe that's just going to happen. Every time there's a new Layer Two, we already have a lot of people coming to us saying they want to deploy and be the first DEX on Zero. We obviously want to support as many of them as possible. Smaller teams are able to fork a lot of the stuff and deploy as well to be the first. We believe that the DEX system is going to happen, but the important bit is what is going to be traded on this DEX, such as the NFTs that users want to have. This makes the DEX more useful, as the first DEX with everyone creating new meme coins will get more trading volume, which is how a dApp actually earns.

Regarding the potential friction of adding another layer to the user experience, we believe there is no additional friction at this point. The experience is already very fragmented. We care about our users, and it's similar to when we were launching a wallet. People asked why we needed another one, but with Layer Twos, it's the same. Many layers are not going to make it, but we believe this is a long-term project. It's an important part of verticalizing the user experience and creating a better experience. That's why we're in it, and we believe people will love using it. We will be onboarding users, and over time, it will show the rewards.

Currently, we are in the testnet stage with over 250,000 transactions. People are starting to do something there, but we are not incentivizing anything yet. This is mainly for our infrastructure partners to start deploying and testing out the flows. We are still missing a few components that we want to add before the mainnet launch, which is planned for early fall. We plan to have a loyalty campaign focused on the rewards users get along the way, rather than just distributing airdrop points.

Regarding the dApps lined up for launch, we have a few like Dodo and 1inch, which are basically DEX infrastructure. We have been working on RPC providers, oracles, and other infrastructure that enables others to deploy. We also have questing campaigns like Galaxy and Layer Three. On the NFT side, we are working on a few minting platforms, although these are not confirmed yet.

Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=FmnXvbg60wg