The Problem: Unpredictable Costs

Most people reading this have experienced pain from high gas fees at some point. Veterans of the trenches have figured out how to navigate the economics of congestion pricing, but these dynamics can often deter new onchain users.

It’s natural for builders in crypto to attempt to design applications in such a way that the user never has to interact with gas fees (or ideally not even aware of their existence). Account abstraction tooling has come a long way over the last several years in that regard. Solutions like EIP-7701 and ERC-4447 also help at the consensus level, but only simplify sponsorship of course.

AA service providers and sponsorship mechanisms suffer from the same underlying challenge in that they simply kick the can down the road to relayers, who are faced with the choice of either taking significant financial risk or passing costs through to end users.

Ultimately it’s difficult to avoid the economics of gas fee volatility. The reality for onchain consumer applications is figuring out how to manage highly volatile market-driven costs without compromising on user acquisition and retention.

What We’ve Built: Foil V1

Foil aims to mitigate these challenges by creating an on-chain marketplace for all onchain fee markets. Currently there is no liquid marketplace pairing consumers and producers of blockspace that can offload price volatility from bulk gas buyers.

Foil v1 will initially support ETH-settled markets tracking average prices for Ethereum L1 gas, enabling users to open subscription-like agreements for Ethereum L1 gas. This can help users smooth out their gas costs by opening up access to an over $3B USD per annum market.

At the base of Foil v1 is a two-sided market utilizing Uniswap for price discovery. This enables maximal modularity, reusability, and composability of Foil markets to create tools like liquidity automation vaults, gas subscriptions, and more.

Foil gas subscriptions offer a simple interface for users just looking to cover gas costs, while LPs and more advanced users can interact with a more familiar trading UI. This initial version is likely to be most attractive to large scale consumers of L1 gas like solvers, oracle node operators, relayer networks, centralized exchanges, etc.

Due to the modular design of Foil v1, more exotic markets such as Celestia and Ethereum DA, catered to a wider range of participants, like L2s, AppChains and RaaS providers can also be supported. New markets can be seamlessly spun up for any resource on any chain, as simple as deploying a Foil v1 instance configured with the desired UMA oracle.

Foil: What Comes Next

The ultimate goal for Foil is to offer a series of products aimed at fully mitigating gas and transactional pain points for consumer apps. Foil v1 is a significant first step in this direction, but there’s lots of work still to be done. Removing some of the constraints of the Ethereum L1 opens up a number of compelling design options for Foil that can more efficiently eliminate pain points for users transacting on other chains like Layer 2 networks.

Foil aims to reimagine blockspace as a resource with its own dynamic market. We see Foil as a critical piece of infrastructure sitting alongside adoption of tools for chain and account abstraction, creating a future where using onchain applications is as seamless as the web2 today.