Web3 is often criticized for poor UX, and for good reason.
How can we expect to onboard new users to our apps if, all at once, they need to understand seed phrase security, transaction fees, signing and confirmation times, and all of the other arcane practices that come with web3?
If web3 is really a step forward from web2, we should be building user experiences that are as good, if not better, than web2.
So, to help make your project as easy as possible to engage with, we’ve just launched Gas Sponsorship.
Here’s why it matters:
Signing and fees = less users
Imagine this:
You’re hosting an IRL event where you’re onboarding new users into your ecosystem.
You’re setting them up with wallets and dropping them governance tokens, giving them everything they need to start engaging with your project.
Except, it’s not everything they need.
If they’re committed and want to vote, they’ll also need $ETH or the relevant network token in their wallet to pay the transaction fees for any proposals they want to vote on.
Not only is this an annoying point of attrition for less-engaged web3 natives, it’s a prohibitive barrier for newcomers — they can’t just use a fresh wallet and start voting, they’ll first need to figure out how to buy $ETH and get it into their new wallet.
Then, they need to get used to the fact that they’re spending money every time they want to participate and make their voice heard.
And, as you’re likely familiar with if you’re trying to increase user engagement, every additional button to click increases drop-off. So signing transactions is yet another unfamiliar UX step that increases mental load and decreases engagement.
Gas sponsorship = more users
That’s where gas sponsorship comes in.
By maintaining a pool of tokens dedicated specifically to voter engagement, you can give your community the power to bypass fees entirely.
Just enable Sponsored Votes on a proposal, and fees will be drawn from a token pool you create called a Paymaster, so voters won’t have to pay to vote — a big step toward increasing turnout.
Gas sponsorship is just the beginning. We’re working on an entire collection of features designed to make web3 experiences better than web2, so your growth isn’t limited to web3 natives.
As we launch new features, we’ll make announcements about them here and on social media, so you can keep up with us as we build in public.
You can try them all in the Decent app.
