SuperPaymaster: Eliminating Centralized Signer Authority via Asset-Oriented Abstraction to Reconcile Usability and Decentralization in Account Abstraction
About
Most production ERC-4337 Paymasters rely on Process-Oriented Abstraction (POA): a centralized off-chain server signs each sponsorship request, acting as a potential censorship bottleneck. We propose Asset-Oriented Abstraction (AOA), encapsulating payment capability in a persistent, user-owned on-chain asset -- the Gas Card -- rather than an off-chain signing process. Following the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, we implement SuperPaymaster on Optimism Mainnet, anchoring sponsorship validity in on-chain Soulbound Token state and deterministic policy rules, removing the off-chain signer as a validity gate. We evaluate gas costs via single-UserOp ERC-20 transfers on Optimism Mainnet (n = 50 per system). In pure L2 execution gas (txGasUsed; actualGasUsed = txGasUsed + PVG), SuperPaymaster (167,830) is lower than both evaluated POA baselines: Alchemy Gas Manager (205,951) and Pimlico ERC-20 paymaster (328,937). It still pays a ~32,000-gas on-chain verification overhead versus Alchemy, but reduces gas by 49% versus Pimlico by replacing on-chain token liquidation with an internal balance update. In total billed gas, SuperPaymaster (286,818) exceeds Alchemy (257,299) due to higher bundler PVG overhead, not paymaster architecture. Code structural analysis and on-chain Mainnet evidence confirm that sponsorship validity requires no off-chain signing server: validatePaymasterUserOp reads only on-chain state. These findings suggest that AOA can mitigate the usability-decentralization-efficiency trade-offs in gas payment.