After months of low Ethereum gas fees, the XEN minters have been hit with minting and claiming costs never seen before. This was predicted in time by the DBXen team, Starfish Technologies. Their XENON protocol brings gasless transactions that help reduce the number of unclaimed mints and facilitate onboarding.
What is XENON
XENON is a protocol that lets users claim their XEN mints without needing any ETH in the wallet. These gasless transactions are possible thanks to Starfish Technologies working as a relay server and the Ethereum Gas Station (GSN) providing gas for the transactions. The cost of the transaction, together with the service fee, is paid back from the sale of the claimed XEN. By becoming the relay server, the XENON team manages to lower GSN’s 30% fee on each transaction to 20% and effectively charge 10% lower fees on XEN minters.
The contract will be deployed first on Polygen, then on Ethereum and other networks supporting GSN.
XENON is available to XENFT owners only, and single mints or mints from other batch minters are not yet supported.
How does XENON work
When a XENFT reaches maturity, the user needs to sign a transaction to claim XEN. This transaction costs gas.
With XENON, it’s different because the user checks first if the total mint is enough to cover the transaction cost. He’s presented with a recipe. If the mint covers the cost, then the user signs a message with the information about that transaction and sends it to the relayer server. Signing a message doesn’t require any gas. The relay server signs a native Ethereum transaction, submits it to the mempool, and returns a signed transaction to the client for validation. When the transaction is confirmed, the user gets his XEN minus the cost. On the other side, the paymaster contract reimburses the relayer.The paymaster is the contract maintaining an ETH balance and guiding the logic behind the refunds.
Almost ready to deploy this 👇. We enjoyed creating it. Now we really hope you'll enjoy using it! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/kEVUuomWSk
— Starfish Technologies 🟡⭐️ (@StarfishTechs) May 8, 2023
Advantages and disadvantages of XENON
Gasless transactions have their advantages and disadvantages for the user and for the larger XEN ecosystem. It’s obvious that for each XENFT claim going through the XENON contract, a sale of XEN will need to occur, which exerts downward pressure on the price of XEN. The impact on the price depends largely on the price of gas and XEN.
When gas costs are high and the price of XEN is low, the sale of XEN will have a bigger impact, as a larger part of XEN from the mint will need to be sold to cover the transaction cost. When the price of gas is low and the price of XEN is high, the cost of the service and the total transaction will be minimal.
The advent of XENON may lead users to mint more XEN as they will have more available ETH in their wallet. This will increase the total supply. More XEN in users’ hands may fuel burning in protocols like DBXen, Fenix, DBXENFTs, Xendoge, Apex and Limited XENFTS.
One of the main objectives of XEN is adoption by providing the lowest barriers to entry, and transactions abstracting away gas are fulfilling this goal by lowering the friction of needing ETH or another native coin.
The cost of XENON
The cost of using XENON is not tied to the total value of the minted XEN but is rather applied on top of the cost of gas required for the transaction. When a XENFT is claimed and the gas fee is calculated, XENON applies a 10% fee that goes to GSN and another 10% that goes to the creators of XENON. When the team compared the total cost of a XENON transaction to the total value of XEN from a Xenturion XENFT, it resulted in less than 1%. This 1% may be the ultimate factor in the protocol’s adoption.
