Smoothed Gas Price Service

What is a Draft Project Idea?

A Draft Project Idea is a concept for a project within the Optimism ecosystem that is generally considered valuable but has not yet been fleshed out into a clearly defined product. Draft Project Ideas may be converted into Ecosystem Project Ideas as they are explored further and more thoroughly specified.

Summary

Transaction fees on L2 are highly variable due to L1 gas price volatility. For instance, before EIP-4844, about 99% of a user's transaction fee on OP Mainnet comes from L1 data costs. Some L2s build a system of fee smoothing natively into the protocol (e.g., Arbitrum).

Although native fee smoothing is an excellent addition to any L2, we could further improve the user experience by creating a consumer product that provides a "smoothed" fee experience. In this system, the product could use some combination of membership fees, gas price derivatives, and identity/reputation (or other things) to allow users to get predictable fees. In essence, the provider of the product is responsible for hedging on behalf of users in exchange for a fee, where users are trading off slightly more expensive transactions for predictability.

Possible Features

• Address opts-in to a service that provides a smoothed gas fee option
• Address may pay a membership fee, opt-in via token, or some reputation/identity model, etc.
• Could be similar to Amazon Prime, Movie Pass, real-world commodity markets
• Smoothing provider can trade gas price derivatives to try to be profitable

Impact

• Better consumer user experience since gas fees are predictable
• Creates a new playground of DeFi innovation around gas price derivatives