[DAO: QmYy8tU] Keep Polygon transactions free

Governance
1

by 0xa87d168717538e86d71ac48baccaeb84162de602 (cryptonico#e602)

Abstract

This is a follow-up from this past proposal, where a Grant was given by the DAO to keep Polygon transactions in Decentraland free for all its users. Free transactions mean that Decentraland users do not have to pay gas for each meta-transaction they perform (in Polygon) while using the product. This leads to a better UX and lowers the barrier of entry since we subsidize the costs and reduce the number of interactions with the wallet for day-to-day activities such as listing and buying wearables, placing bids and accepting them, publishing wearables, etcetera.

Decentraland has been using Biconomy, a meta-transaction relayer, to provide free transactions in Polygon since the launch of user-generated collections in Polygon on June 1, 2021. Biconomy works by providing us with a personalized gas tank that we need to fill to cover the cost of the meta-transactions.

Solution

Up until now, the gas tank was filled with funds coming from different Grants asked from the community and provided by the DAO. This time, the proposal is to establish an ongoing mechanism to maintain the gas tank full over time. As the community is growing and more transactions are taking place, it’s important to keep it full in favor of the whole community and for the sake of Decentraland’s growth.

It’s important to consider that there is an economically sustainable model behind this proposal, the fees extracted from transactions in the Marketplace, Builder, and other dApps are the second most important source of income for the DAO. The numbers are public and can be seen in the Income dashboard on the Transparency section in the DAO Governance dApp.

The Decentraland Marketplace generates around USD 250,000 per month in profits, this income would cover the cost of the meta-transactions and keep the flywheel spinning: better UX > more transactions > more income for the DAO. If the DAO stops covering the costs of the meta-transactions, then users will need to pay for them to perform almost any action in the dApps, this would discourage people from uploading wearables, bidding, and making transactions in the marketplace. In the end, it would result in less income for the DAO that could be redistributed in the form of Grants and a worse user experience for the Decentraland community.

If this proposal closes and the result is “YES”, it will be promoted to a Draft proposing the DAO Committee to be in charge of swapping Mana for Matic to fill the gas tank in the Biconomy platform, making sure it has always enough Matic to support free meta-transactions in Decentraland.

  • Yes: Authorize the DAO Committee to continuously refund the meta-transactions gas tank
  • No: Do not continuously refund the meta-transactions gas tank
  • Invalid question/options

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

Voting YES since having free meta transactions is crucial to a good experience while exploring and trading in Decentraland and using the Community Grants program as it is right now is not the right approach for this kind of operation. Hope to see this becoming a Draft and a solid Governance proposal.

3

While I support this for now, I think from a dev perspective we really need to consider switching off the need to be connected to Ethereum while in Decentraland. There is no particular reason the ephemeral signature has to be network specific, and this forces the need for meta transactions/relayers. While this builds a moat around developers who know how to integrate custom smart contracts/relayers, this does not help the growth of Decentraland. We should trend to making blockchain integration easier and not more complicated. Its okay for users to pay gas in Matic on polygon, as costs are trivial on a per user basis. I recognize it may not be so easy to get coin on the polygon network for a newcomer but lets focus on making that process easier, rather than over complicating the development needs for scenes to work with different blockchains.

4

@MorrisMustang I would like to understand better your point of view. Are you saying that Decentraland should allow anyone to be connected to any network? can you provide some use cases?

5

Keep Polygon transactions free

This proposal is now in status: FINISHED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes: authorize the dao committee to continuously refund the meta-transactions gas tank 100% 957,396 VP (80 votes)
  • No: do not continuously refund the meta-transactions gas tank 0% 0 VP (0 votes)
  • Invalid question/options 0% 0 VP (0 votes)
6

Thanks for responding on this topic. I recognize there may be breaking changes throughout many of the libraries and scenes if this were to be implemented but I think the discussion is worth having.

Here are some already built examples that would have benefitted from being able to connect directly to Polygon:

  • NFTWorld MTVRS Wearable Marketplace
    This marketplace contract allows for the purchase, exchange, and return of DCL wearables for a custom ERC20 coin handed out for event attendance. Initially, this smart contract was intended solely for a dApp implementation, but the scope expanded to include a DCL scene implementation as well. I worked with @HPrivakos to make that marketplace contract compatible with the format in which Decentraland uses for relaying transactions, but this contract is not included in the approved list of contracts for which the DCL servers will relay transactions.

This means the scene owner now needs to operate additional infrastructure or pay a service provider just to work on Poly where gas is affordable (and the DCL contracts are hosted), regardless of if the scene owner desired to pay the gas on behalf of the users.

In addition, the Decentraland meta transactions implementation is rather custom, with nonce tracking on each individual contract. When researching meta-transactions, my default was to follow the patterns presented by Open Zeppelin which is distinctly different and easier to understand.

  • Vogu Head Wearable Claim / Sale Marketplace
    A bunch of teams throughout the DCL community worked on this project. The smart contract for this project acts as an approved minter on the DCL collection contract. Currently, that contract does not have meta transactions integrated as it was developed to be a dApp. As we build out more for that ecosystem, a scene dev is unable to introduce interactions with this contract in Decentraland unless it is relaunched.

  • Aquarium Casino / Holy Ones Lotto
    In a world where gas costs could make or break a business model, having the user pay their own gas when they want to game is important. I recognize there are meta transaction patterns that can include user funded accounts for gas, but speaking to my original point, that increases complexity even more. The HolyOnes DAO is building a bunch of different games on Polygon using Mana and Chainlink and integrating them into scenes in Decentraland. With the Mana contract following a different meta-transaction pattern than the gaming contracts, the scene complexity is even higher because it deals with multiple relayers with different message types. If the user could connect directly to Poly, this would be orders of magnitude easier to integrate.

From what I can tell, most scenes don’t require a signer on Ethereum, especially since we’ve transitioned wearables to L2. Scene devs mostly use the ETH network to reference token ownership in other projects, which can be queried using a provider URL rather than a signer/wallet. This assumes the user has signed the ephemeral message to prove their wallet ownership, which could be executed when connected to any network thats EVM compatible using the same private keys.

It is common place if not expected that dApp developers check the network/chainId of the user. I think the same pattern could be applied to scenes that need blockchain chain interactions.

7

Thanks for the feedback, Morris. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks ago and I totally agree that if the network is EVM compatible, you should be able to be connected to Decentraland.

I would love to get back to you shortly about this topic once I have something more concrete!

2 Likes
8

Keep Polygon transactions free

This proposal has been PASSED by a DAO Committee Member (0xbef99f5f55cf7cdb3a70998c57061b7e1386a9b0)