Stablecoin payments that work with an empty gas tank

How does a payment work without the customer paying gas?

On EVM chains the mechanism is a transfer authorization, standardized as EIP-3009 and built into stablecoins such as USDC. At checkout, the customer's wallet shows a typed, human-readable message: the token, the recipient, the exact invoice amount, and a validity window. Signing it costs nothing and moves nothing. The signature only authorizes that one transfer, to that one recipient, for that one amount.

The NoHoldPay relay then submits the signed authorization to the token contract and pays the gas itself. The contract checks the signature and moves the exact authorized amount from the customer to the payment address. The amount the customer signs is the amount on the invoice. We never pad it with a gas surcharge, because the customer is not the one paying for gas.

Solana has no EIP-3009, so it gets the same outcome a different way. The checkout builds the transfer with the relay pre-filled as the fee payer, the customer signs their half, and the relay completes and broadcasts the transaction. The checkout tells the customer plainly that the network fee is being paid on their behalf, since most Solana wallets do not surface who the fee payer is.

Which chains and coins are gasless right now?

This table renders from the live platform, so it reflects what is actually enabled in production at the moment you read it.

Know the boundaries before you plan around them. EIP-3009 is a property of the token contract, so it covers the stablecoins that implement it and cannot be bolted onto ones that do not. USDT implements it on no EVM chain, which is why gasless USDT appears only under Solana's sponsored model. Customers who prefer to pay the ordinary way still can: gasless is an extra route at checkout, never the only one.

Who pays the network fee, and what does it cost you?

The relay pays the fee on-chain, and the real cost is then debited from your prepaid credit as its own ledger line, at exactly what the network charged. You can open your credit history and see each relay broadcast next to the payment it settled. Gas carries no percentage markup and no padded estimate in our favor, and the customer's side of the transaction is untouched. The platform fee stays 0.5% per confirmed payment, the same as every other route.

Whether gasless is worth enabling is a per-business call, and the answer depends on your ticket size. On Ethereum mainnet a relay broadcast can cost real money during fee spikes, which is noticeable on a $5 sale and irrelevant on a $500 one. On Base, Polygon, and Solana the network cost is usually a fraction of a cent, so the math almost always works. You enable gasless per wallet, so you can turn it on where it pays and leave it off where it does not.

Why is gasless rare among crypto gateways?

Running a relay means fronting gas from a funded operator wallet on every enabled chain, defending against replayed and malformed authorizations, and accounting the per-payment cost line by line. A custodial processor rarely bothers: their customers already send funds to the platform address the ordinary way, and the network fee is the customer's problem. In the gateways we track for our comparison research, none offers an equivalent, and some charge the customer an extra network fee on top of the invoice. Gasless only makes sense in a settlement model where the amount the customer authorizes is exactly what you receive, and the CoinPayments migration guide carries a worked example of the alternative, dated and sourced.

Common questions

What exactly does the customer sign in a gasless payment?

A typed transfer authorization naming the token, the payee, the exact amount due, and when it stops being valid. It authorizes one specific transfer and nothing else. It cannot be replayed, cannot be applied to a different amount, and expires with the invoice.

Does gasless change what the customer pays?

No. The customer signs the exact invoice amount and pays no network fee. The relay pays the fee, and the merchant is charged the real network cost as a separate prepaid-credit ledger line, with no markup.

Why can gasless USDT only happen on Solana here?

EIP-3009 support lives inside the token contract, and USDT does not implement it on any EVM chain, so there is no authorization for a relay to broadcast there. Solana's sponsored model does not depend on the token contract, which is how SPL USDT qualifies.

Is a gasless payment less secure than a normal one?

The settlement is a normal on-chain transfer executed by the token contract after verifying the customer's signature. The relay cannot alter the amount or recipient, because both are inside the signed message. What the relay adds is gas, and what it can fail at is broadcasting, in which case the customer can simply pay the ordinary way.

Do I need to hold ETH or SOL to receive gasless payments?

No. The relay's operator wallets hold the gas. You receive the stablecoin, and the network cost appears on your prepaid credit ledger at cost. Your wallets never need a gas float for receiving.