Payment giant Visa recently published an article titled "Rethinking Digital Transactions with Account Abstraction". The article states that in order to better understand Ethereum's account abstraction proposal ERC-4337, the Visa team has deployed two sets of experimental Visa Paymaster contracts on the Ethereum Goerli testnet, demonstrating how to redesign gas fees on the blockchain to improve user convenience.
Both sets of tests used the startup code provided by the Ethereum Foundation and the ERC-4337 core team. Through the first set of Visa Paymaster contracts, Visa explored whether users can pay transaction fees with other tokens, such as US dollar stablecoins or even central bank digital currencies. In this case, the payer pays the transaction fee in ETH by receiving the same amount of universal ERC-20 tokens paid by the user. The test setup includes deploying a smart contract wallet and sending user operations.
Visa also used another set of Visa Paymaster contracts to explore how to fully sponsor transaction fees for users. In this test, Visa added a whitelist that only allowed authorized users to interact with the Visa Paymaster contract and successfully sponsored transaction fees for operations of users on the whitelist.
