Solana's ecosystem account abstraction first step, Neon EVM will support multiple assets as gas fees

The first Solana EVM-compatible project Neon announced the launch of Account Abstraction (AA) feature, allowing users to choose from a variety of tokens as gas fees, further enhancing user experience. It is expected to go live on the mainnet in the first quarter of 2024.

What is Neon EVM

Neon EVM is a solution that reduces friction between Solana and Ethereum ecosystems, providing a platform compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Developers can use Ethereum's programming languages to build protocols in the Solana ecosystem, allowing Ethereum developers to easily extend their protocols to Solana.

Neon EVM was established as a project in 2021 and officially launched its mainnet in July of this year.

Neon EVM offers developers familiar programming languages such as Solidity, Vyper, Ethereum ecosystem tools like MetaMask, Remix, Truffle, RPC API, and all Ethereum protocol standards such as ERC-20, ERC-721, etc., while also benefiting from Solana's high performance and new market advantages.

Essentially, for developers, it only requires forking the protocol to the Neon mainnet for deployment without any additional actions. Therefore, based on these advantages, it is expected to be quite attractive for developers.

Neon Introduces Alternative Fee Payment Feature

Original Design: Inconvenient Circulation of NEON Tokens

Although Neon is compatible with EVM, the current mechanism is still not "convenient" enough and poses a barrier for users.

Similar to using other blockchains that require gas fees, using the Neon mainnet requires using their own NEON tokens as gas fees. When the Proxy Operator receives the user's NEON tokens, they submit the transaction information to Solana mainnet validators and pay SOL as the on-chain gas fee, while also submitting a portion of the fee to the Neon EVM treasury.

For users, using NEON tokens as gas fees instead of SOL or ETH is not very convenient, and for Proxy Operators, converting NEON to SOL is also inefficient.

Furthermore, these actions increase the price volatility of NEON tokens, making it difficult for participants to accurately assess the required gas fees.

New Account Abstraction Design: Offering Multiple Payment Options

In response to the above issues, Neon EVM recently announced an adjustment to the network gas fee payment rules, introducing an alternative fee payments feature that supports multiple tokens as payment for gas fees.

When users transact with supported tokens like USDC or SOL, they can choose to use these supported tokens as gas fees, not limited to NEON tokens. For example, when sending SOL to another account, users can pay the gas fees using SOL tokens.

Additionally, this feature allows protocol developers to choose to subsidize user gas fees to attract users.

The alternative fee payment feature is expected to go live on the Neon testnet in the coming weeks and complete mainnet updates in the first quarter of next year.

Account Abstraction Becoming Mainstream

Although not all community members agree with this update, as in some ways NEON tokens almost lose their utility, the team considers improving user experience to be a more important goal than capturing token value, especially in projects that emphasize seamless integration of ecosystems.

It is expected that in the future, more projects will aim to enhance user experience, introduce more innovative features, including private key recovery, batch transactions, customizable gas fee payment rules, and more AA designs in their products.