SuperPaymaster: Eliminating Centralized Signer Authority via Asset-Oriented Abstraction to Reconcile Usability and Decentralization in Account Abstraction

TL;DR

SuperPaymaster introduces Asset-Oriented Abstraction to replace centralized signers in ERC-4337, enhancing decentralization and reducing gas costs by anchoring sponsorship validity on-chain.

Contribution

It proposes and implements Asset-Oriented Abstraction (AOA) with a user-owned on-chain asset, eliminating off-chain signers in Paymasters.

Findings

SuperPaymaster reduces gas costs by approximately 32k gas compared to traditional methods.

It demonstrates that non-cooperative relayers can be bypassed with alternative relayers.

AOA can improve decentralization without significantly increasing total gas costs.

Abstract

Most production ERC-4337 Paymasters rely on Process-Oriented Abstraction (POA): a centralized off-chain server signs each sponsorship request and therefore acts as a potential censorship bottleneck. We propose Asset-Oriented Abstraction (AOA), which encapsulates payment capability in a persistent, user-owned on-chain asset -- the ``Gas Card'' -- rather than in an off-chain signing process. Following Design Science Research, we implement SuperPaymaster on Optimism Mainnet. Its sponsorship validity is anchored in on-chain Soulbound Token state and deterministic policy rules, removing the off-chain signer as a hard validity gate. We evaluate gas cost on Optimism Mainnet using single-UserOp ERC-20 transfers ($n{=}50$ per system). Trace-level decomposition isolates an approximately 32k-gas delta as the execution cost of eliminating centralized signing. In pure L2 execution gas, SuperPaymaster (167,830) is lower than both vendor-as-deployed commercial samples, including a 49\% reduction against the DEX-routed ERC-20 baseline (328,937), because it replaces an on-chain liquidation path with an internal balance update. In total billed gas, the remaining gap to the cheapest baseline is explained primarily by bundler pricing rather than paymaster architecture. A failover simulation shows that non-cooperative relayers can be bypassed when an alternative relayer is available. These findings suggest that AOA can reduce the tension among usability, sponsorship decentralization, and economic efficiency.