GasLiteAA: Optimizing ERC-4337 for Efficient and Secure Gas Sponsorship

TL;DR

GasLiteAA enhances ERC-4337 by offloading paymaster logic to Trusted Execution Environments, reducing gas costs and improving scalability without compromising security or decentralization.

Contribution

It introduces a TEE-based offloading framework for ERC-4337, significantly lowering on-chain costs while maintaining security and compatibility.

Findings

Substantially reduces transaction fees in experiments.

Maintains full compatibility with Ethereum Layer 1.

Balances security, efficiency, and deployability effectively.

Abstract

ERC-4337, the Ethereum account abstraction standard, simplifies account management and transaction fee payment in decentralized applications by introducing programmable smart contract wallets and gas sponsorship via paymasters. However, its heavy reliance on on-chain validation and frequent state updates incurs substantial gas overhead, leading to performance bottlenecks and limiting scalability in large-scale deployments. To mitigate these issues, we propose GasLiteAA, a framework that optimize ERC-4337 by offloading paymaster logic to Trusted Execution Environments (TEE). GasLiteAA delegates the secure execution of stateful gas sponsorship logic and user quota management to TEE, enforcing validation rules off-chain while anchoring their integrity on-chain via lightweight cryptographic attestations. This verifiable offloading architecture significantly reduces on-chain computation and storage costs without sacrificing verifiability or decentralization. Experimental results demonstrate that GasLiteAA substantially lowers transaction fees, while remaining fully compatible with Ethereum Layer 1. By balancing security, efficiency, and deployability, GasLiteAA provides a practical and scalable approach to gas sponsorship for account-abstraction-based decentralized applications.