Moving Beyond Paymasters: Why UGF is the Future of Cross-Chain Infrastructure

ERC-4337 introduced a useful primitive: paymasters. Smart contracts that sponsor gas fees on behalf of users, so the user can interact with a dApp without holding the chain's native gas token. It works. It is in production. Major teams — Coinbase, Particle, Biconomy, ZeroDev — have built solid paymaster infrastructure.

But paymasters carry an assumption that becomes expensive at multi-chain scale. They are deployed and operated per chain. Every chain a team wants to support, they need a paymaster contract, a bundler relationship, a sponsorship policy, monitoring, and security audits. The cost grows linearly with chain count.

The Universal Gas Framework is built differently. This post explains the difference and when each model wins.

How paymasters work

A user wants to interact with a dApp on Polygon but holds no MATIC. Under ERC-4337:

1. The user constructs a UserOperation (a smart-account transaction).
2. The bundler picks it up and submits it to the EntryPoint contract.
3. The paymaster contract (deployed on Polygon) decides whether to sponsor the gas.
4. If sponsored, the paymaster pays MATIC to the bundler and the EntryPoint executes the user's operation.

This is elegant for single-chain interactions. The user pays no MATIC. The dApp eats the cost via the paymaster contract. The infrastructure is well-understood.

The cost of "per chain"

The model breaks down the moment you want to scale across many chains. Concretely, every chain you add requires:

• A new paymaster contract deployment.
• A new bundler relationship (or a self-hosted bundler).
• A new sponsorship policy and gas reserve.
• New monitoring and alerting.
• A new security review.

Across twelve chains, that is twelve of everything. For a team trying to ship cross-chain UX, the operational burden is real. Most teams pick three chains, ship paymasters on those, and ignore the rest.

There is also a deeper issue: users have to be on smart wallets. ERC-4337 is built around smart accounts. Adopting it means migrating users from EOAs to smart-contract wallets, which is a non-trivial UX shift.

How UGF differs

UGF doesn't solve "sponsor gas on this chain." It solves a different problem: let value on one chain trigger an action on another.

The user's gas problem on the destination chain is a side effect, not the focal point. UGF holds reserves on every supported chain. When the user pays USDC on Base, UGF authorizes a relayer on the destination chain to execute using its own reserve. From the outside, it looks like gasless execution. Internally, the user paid in stablecoins and the destination side was funded by Tychi's reserve.

A few consequences of that architecture:

• One integration, many chains. Adding a new chain means standing up a relayer, not deploying a paymaster + bundler + monitoring stack.
• No smart-wallet requirement. UGF works with EOAs. Users do not need to migrate.
• No bundler dependency. The user signs the destination transaction normally. The relayer executes it with its own gas.
• Cross-chain by default. The framework was designed for cross-chain action from the start, not adapted from a single-chain primitive.

When paymasters win

Paymasters are still the right answer in some cases.

Single-chain dApps. If your product is Polygon-only or Base-only, ERC-4337 paymasters are mature, well-supported, and the right fit.

Custom sponsorship logic. Paymaster contracts can implement arbitrary on-chain rules — rate limits, per-user quotas, whitelists, time windows. UGF's model is simpler and doesn't expose that level of policy customization.

Accounting-first sponsorship. If you need an on-chain audit trail of every sponsored transaction with strict EVM semantics, paymasters give you that. UGF settlement happens off the destination chain's gas accounting.

When UGF wins

UGF is the right call when:

You want to ship cross-chain UX without operating per-chain infra. One integration covers EVM + non-EVM.

Your users hold stablecoins. UGF expects the source side to pay in USDC, EURC, or $U. If your users are stable-denominated, the framework matches that natively.

Your users are on EOAs. No migration to smart wallets required.

You are building for AI agents. Agents operating across many chains can't realistically maintain native gas balances on each one. UGF's single-source-of-funds model is built for that.

The voice from the field

JZ on the BNB Chain tech team gave us this read on the comparison:

The concept of UGF is interesting and could be another option besides paymasters. Paymasters need each chain to support, which is more complex. UGF can be a sidecar for multiple chains with a more elegant design.

That is roughly how we'd put it. Paymasters are not wrong. They are right for the case they were designed for. UGF is right for a case that paymaster architecture wasn't built to handle: cross-chain execution at multi-chain scale.

Pick the tool that fits the problem.