CHIPs discussion phase: Use staked ATOM for gas on every Cosmos chain

Just wanted to write up an idea that me and @Noam brainstormed. Not sure if it’s been thought of before. TLDR: Use your staked ATOM on any Cosmos chain to pay for gas. No transferring tokens over IBC for gas either. Just do stuff on other chains, and then your gas fees are deducted from your staked ATOM balance on the Hub. Even as an experienced Cosmos user, managing gas on a lot of different chains can be a headache. You’ve got to transfer it over, make sure its in the right token, and then you can sometimes run out and be stuck if, for example, you staked or locked all your tokens. An oft-requested feature for the Cosmos would be for users to only have to worry about one gas token, no matter what chain they are on. This is the UX in monolithic ecosystems such as Ethereum and Solana, and it is what users mostly prefer. There have been initiatives to encourage chains to use ATOM as gas token before, based on talking to chain’s dev teams and convincing or inducing them to add ATOM as a gas token option by upgrading their chain’s code. These efforts never really made a big impact since it is a very slow process to do this outreach. Also, even if a chain supports ATOM as a gas…

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Love this idea, I’d advocate for some sort of accelerated mvp or pilot to prove out this idea. Solid grant idea.

The Cosmos Hub focusing on solving gas UX for cosmos users is a powerful idea. Seems like all the tools are here between feegrant and ICA, they just need to be stitched together. I am also curious what the UI/UX for someone opted in on this would look & feel like. Wallets would for sure be key integrators of this.

One idea for the initial allocations would be to predefine multiple different sets that could be opted into. Not sure how they could be broken down, but perhaps the users could help self identify the broad set of chains they are interested in having covered without much UX friction. Rebalancing mechanism needs a lot of thought too.

Overall, clever idea. Pumped to hear other folks give feedback on the idea.

for the GTM of Cosmos，this is useful

I think it’s a good initiative for the hub, however, maybe I’m wrong but letting an ICA account manage stake on another channel still seems risky. I think it’s important to remember that Atom should remain a blocked capital, utility cases and modules should be limited to the bare minimum, maybe this sounds like a more conservative political idea, but in my opinion, these risks should be taken by a consumer chain.

I think we need to remove the lsm

• Remove the liquidity staking module from the cosmos hub

I have no idea why anybody would want to more deeply in bed Israeli pagers into the ecosystem. It’s insane! The fact that people like me who worked on the LSM were not told that it was built by North Koreans is insane. I would have deleted every single line of code.

This is brilliant! I have been chatting about this with friends in ATOM OG Price chat, and one of them told me that we can’t really tax IBC since it’s open source, else other new tax less versions will pop up

I like the idea, that would bring back and accrue value to ATOM holders, stakers, developers, validators and I believe if ATOM is rich, whole cosmos will be richer!

jtremback:

No transferring tokens over IBC for gas either

This is very important, to limit points of interaction for users, the conversion of random Cosmos coins to ATOM for gas fee must be automatic definitely

I would love to see this idea come to fruition

I have no idea technically how this going to be implemented, but make this happen guys !!!

jtremback:

Use your staked ATOM

Hello,

first: great UX improvement!

My question may sound simple: How would staked ATOM be involved here?
The reason I’m asking is that I haven’t read anything about the unstaking period so I am not fully clear on how this could be approached with staked ATOM other than involving the LSM ?

This has nothing to do with the LSM

Quentin: I think it’s a good initiative for the hub, however, maybe I’m wrong but letting an ICA account manage stake on another channel still seems risky. I think it’s important to remember that Atom should remain a blocked capital, utility cases and modules should be limited to the bare minimum, maybe this sounds like a more conservative political idea, but in my opinion, these risks should be taken by a consumer chain. This is a valid concern, but I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll go into more detail on what happens to the staked ATOM. Let’s call the this module UniversalATOMGas for the sake of this discussion. • UniversalATOMGas lives on the Hub, and creates an ICA account on Kujira. • These ICA accounts give gas allowances to user accounts on these chains, in Kujira’s gas tokens. • A user uses this gas on Kujira, and UniversalATOMGas sees this with an interchain query, and deducts from their staked ATOM balance on the Hub. • The UniveralATOMGas module would need an integration with the staking module to accomplish this. In my mind, a lot of the concern around doing stuff with staking is that someone can get around the unbonding period. For example…

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I’ve seen too many cases of people staking all of their assets, so they won’t have enough tokens to pay fees for (un|re)delegating if their validator gets jailed, so I think having this would be quite useful.
I’d suggest allowing the user to choose between paying with staked or liquid ATOM, but generally I am all in.

User not only need to be able to opt in but also control how much they’re willing to delegate to UniversalATOMGas. I wouldn’t risk my entire staked balance for this but there are situations where I need 1-2 cent worth of another chains gas token. It just happened to be recently when I went to add dATOM on Mars and needed Neutron, I had to go trade OSMO and then transfer via IBC, very frustrating and time consuming. I think the proper way to handle this situation is for every chain to use the token/coin being used to pay for gas though. If I’m on Osmosis trying to trade TRX then it should automatically use the TRX I have if I don’t have OSMO. The next best thing would be having a token called GAS that is chain agnostic, You mint it with any native token, every chain accepts it, and they can burn or trade it for their native token. Having ICA accounts on every chain that constantly have to be replenished, tokens having to be transferred out of staking, gas paying gas to be used in a transaction with the users wallet, etc all sounds like 3x-4x more gas being used. The only way that works is if the person pays a premium to use it which in a pinch may be okay but will never see…

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I share the same view about LSM, not the biggest fan of exposing my stack to leverage or additional risk on top of smart contracts and wallet maintenance

slacker1979:

It just happened to be recently when I went to add dATOM on Mars and needed Neutron, I had to go trade OSMO and then transfer via IBC, very frustrating and time consuming.

Polaris is actually solving this issue

slacker1979:

The next best thing would be having a token called GAS that is chain agnostic

Also having another coin to make gas payments further dilutes and fragmentizes demand and/or focus from ATOM, so what Jehan is suggesting is best of two worlds - accrue value to ATOM through the technology we have in Cosmos

I like the idea to have opt in choice of how much ATOM we risk to gas payments, instead of exposing full stack, we can choose 5 to 10 to 20 ATOM that can be utilized for gas payments with further increase of the cap in future if necessary

This wouldn’t add any demand to $ATOM IMO b/c it uses staked $ATOM that people don’t want to liquidate. The only time it would be useful would be in a pinch, it’s not like people would use it as their main gas option. People generally only use a few chains in IBC and usually keep the native token for the ones they use, this would be one of those tools for chains you rarely use or if you screwed up and staked 100% without leaving gas money. I could be completely off in my assessment though. If this is meant to be something people would choose to use for every transaction then I would need to hear how it would be cheaper than just having native tokens for common chains already in my wallet.

slacker1979:

Having ICA accounts on every chain that constantly have to be replenished, tokens having to be transferred out of staking, gas paying gas to be used in a transaction with the users wallet, etc all sounds like 3x-4x more gas being used. The only way that works is if the person pays a premium to use it which in a pinch may be okay but will never see widespread usage.

This is an important point. The gas involved would be the cost of one feegrant transaction for a user on every covered chain to start. Since we’d want popular chains to be covered without the user having to take an action, this could add up. However, gas on Cosmos chains tends to be very cheap (<$0.01 per tx) and the UX benefit is pretty good, it might be worth it.

The other option would be to have the user visit a dashboard to initiate, and maybe autoselect the top 20 chains, plus let them select others. This is a little bit less of an elegant UX and requires the user to do some work so I don’t like it as much.

slacker1979:

The only time it would be useful would be in a pinch, it’s not like people would use it as their main gas option. People generally only use a few chains in IBC and usually keep the native token for the ones they use, this would be one of those tools for chains you rarely use or if you screwed up and staked 100% without leaving gas money. I could be completely off in my assessment though

This is fair. Given that chains are already trying to get their users to use their token for something else, there’s a good chance that a user would already have the token if they were using the chain at all. For example, bidding in STARS on Stargaze, etc., or just staking on that chain.

Hi @jtremback , thanks for initiating the discussion. I see few issues that I would like to address, and potentially offer a solution: • Using staked ATOM I personally would not be comfortable with having any process (except slashing) able to take some ATOM from my stake. I see it like a savings account, and I prefer any debit to happen from my current account, where I keep less money, for day-to-day use. I suppose I’m not the only one feeling this way, so my suggestion will be to take from the liquid ATOM (though I understand I would need a bit more care to keep it from being empty) • Complexity of rebalancing, capital inefficiency The above described process requires the Cosmos Hub module to send tokens to chains even if they are not actually used, so that it’s ready to pay for fees when needed. It’s largely inefficient and complex as there needs to be an on-chain process to identify where tokens need to be replenished, then need to swap tokens from one chain to another, etc. Also, it requires the Cosmos Hub to initiate ICA on multiple chains. My suggestion here is to do the opposite: • all chains who want to offer this service need to accept ATOM as gas,…

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Improve user experience while simultaneously giving incentive to stake and creating more demand for ATOM? YES VOTE FROM US.

Jehan, thank you for all you’ve done for the Hub and for going out strong with another great idea.

I hope whatever team steps in for Informal continues to scour all of crypto to find clever ideas to implement on the Hub. MESSAGE!

would not be comfortable with having any process (except slashing) able to take some ATOM from my stake. I see it like a savings account, and I prefer any debit to happen from my current account, where I keep less money, for day-to-day use.

Fully agree with this ;

I find arlai-mk design much more elegant in every ways.

First off: HELL YEAH

I agree with @arlai-mk regarding the use of a staked balance – I’d be somewhat uncomfortable with that as well.

His solution also seems indeed more efficient from the capital perspective, with a couple caveats:

• might be a little complicated for the users if they need to enable each chain, vs a “blanket” activation of this universal gas system for all supported chains.
• it would actually depend on the other chains upgrading to add this module and basically allowing the Hub to provide this service, whereas with @jtremback’s implementation they just need to support ICA and implementing the solution does not require their approval. This might lead to a fragmented support / delayed adoption, as some chains don’t upgrade often.
  Nevertheless it might be best that the Hub provides this as an opt-in service instead of just imposing it to everyone. That’s up for debate I guess.

Great idea @jtremback , thanks for putting this together. A few questions & thoughts to consider: • What would be an optimal period to deduct $ATOM for gas used from users? How quickly after is this $ATOM converted to the chains’ gas token? Depending on the length, the Hub could end up losing ( or making) money if ATOM depreciates ( appreciates) against used gas tokens, when replenishing ICA accounts. Obviously this is a very low risk if the periods are short, but worth it regardless to enable such a use case. • At a first stage, integrating this at the staking module level seems unnecessary and could get a lot of justifiable pushback, similarly to the lsm which should have been opt-in by default. Instead, UniversalATOMGas could just deduct from staked $ATOM via the LSM. Another upside for this would be hedging against ATOM/gas-assets price decrease until next replenishment by earning staking rewards. • Deducting payment from UniversalATOMGas users after they have used gas could enable some, unlikely but still risky, attack vectors. Why not make users pay from their staked balance when they opt-in? For ex, set a minimum to opt-in. After which we extend a credit to…

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jtremback:

ICA

the issue that i see is that ICA is in 1/4 of chains only and also in the chains that it’s live it’s not fully enabled or does not work as expected, so it’s not very viable, a lot of chains are not really into ICA stuff yet, the upgrade might conflict with their roadmap because there is other issues around this, for example Hyperlane uses TIA and afaik some of the chains built on it still depend on TIA, so some moduler/appchains built on TIA are off the table too.

@jtremback Thank you for bringing this idea to the forum.

This may be viable if opt-in only. Agreed with @arlai-mk that users would feel uncomfortable for any process, aside from slashing, to take their staked ATOM.

Looking forward to seeing this thread develop further.

This feature probably needs to ask the user whether the staked or unstaked ATOM should be used. I personally wouldn’t want my staked ATOM touched in any way. I like to spend on gas using the unstaked amounts. I would even say that the feature really should be built using unstaked ATOM as source of funds. I would imagine most people view their staked ATOM as an untouchable savings account. The unstaked ATOM is the checking account.

vixcontango:

I would imagine most people view their staked ATOM as an untouchable savings account. The unstaked ATOM is the checking account

So true! Lliterally how I feel about my investments - and therefore I am not using LSM in any way

Do we have any update on this ?

jtremback: TLDR: Use your staked ATOM on any Cosmos chain to pay for gas. No transferring tokens over IBC for gas either. Just do stuff on other chains, and then your gas fees are deducted from your staked ATOM balance on the Hub. We believe this feature holds significant potential for enhancing both usability and the value proposition of the Cosmos ecosystem. Allowing users to pay for gas across Cosmos chains with staked ATOM, without the need to transfer tokens over IBC, will streamline interactions and reduce friction. This capability would notably simplify the user experience, reduce operational costs, and ultimately drive more engagement across the Cosmos ecosystem. To ensure the successful implementation and long-term scalability of this feature, we propose a phased, strategic approach as follows: • Develop Comprehensive Specifications for Scalability Begin by creating the necessary technical specifications to enable this system to operate at scale. A well-defined set of standards will ensure that the architecture is robust and adaptable, allowing for the secure integration of multiple chains and future expansions. This initial step is essential to prevent…

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We at GATA HUB fully support this initiative to enable staked ATOM as gas across Cosmos chains. Such functionality would streamline user interactions, enhance ATOM’s versatility, and encourage broader adoption by removing the need for all/liquid tokens for transactions. This approach aligns well with Cosmos’ vision for interoperability and user-friendliness across ecosystems. Implementing staked ATOM as a gas token could significantly boost ATOM’s utility and drive ecosystem growth. We look forward to contributing to the proposal’s development and successful adoption.

– GATA HUB

Validators who help maintain Cosmos Hub security have all the right to support this newly proposed feature.

Equally, if they are so inclined to push this forward, have it clearly, and explicitly, available to enable and affect ONLY participating Validator’s portion of staked ATOM as a gas token, hard stop. Validators should not cross over the line to enforce their personal beliefs, such as this proposed feature, unto users in the system.

Other users/members, in this thread, have clearly voiced their disapproval to have their soverign staked ATOM utilized. Arguably, seems a new “minority interest” is forming.

Looks like a great useful idea, but can you answer a few questions for better understanding?

If implemented what will be the default fee? will users have the flexibility to choose between staked or liquid Atom?
Can you tell me how much Atom was used last year as a gas fee?
If delegators have multiple delegations which delegation will be used as the fee first?
Why not go for unclaimed rewards? because if there is staked there will be unclaimed rewards as well.

If I am not wrong, Nomic BTC already implements this where if a user doesn’t have the fee to claim the rewards the fee will be deducted from the rewards.

It seems a very good idea, will the use of staked ATOMs be a mandatory for every chain?

Example: will Osmosis (or other chain) able to use OSMO to pay gas?

Can we at least let different possibilities for the users ?

• Picking from staked atom like proposed

• Picking from available balance, in this case, API propose something like 0,1 atom but we can manually change this to max 0,5 ATOM. On the background the 0,1 atom are LSM and send away to pay for gas. When deposit reach almost zero, the APY could warn you and ask you to repeat process.

Seems like a good compromise for the user, like me, who would rather use available balance rather than staked ATOM.

If I staked 1000 ATOM, I don’t want to wake up everyday and see that number skrinking…

Though appreciative of the idea to try something new, let us keep this simple. Do not overreach to affect users’ balance, let alone their stake.

Are we trying to recreate how traditional finance operates here? Allow users to manually utilize the required gas token.

I think the recent, and very welcome, price increase of ATOM and some of the Cosmos chains (ex. Akash, …) is going to cause many users to sell ATOM as they do not see any revenue coming from all the chains not included in the partial set security in Cosmos.

If ATOM is the only gas to be paid is a good step and I guess sovereign chains like Akash would not feel bad to contribute slightly

Tagu: Can we at least let different possibilities for the users ? • Picking from staked atom like proposed • Picking from available balance, This is an intriguing perspective; however, we believe it is more appropriate to address this functionality at the wallet level. Essentially, it would be a UX feature enabling users to select their preferred source for gas payments. The options could include using the native token of the local chain (if available) or ATOM, sourced either from their liquid balance or staked balance, as suggested by @Tagu . Tagu: If I staked 1000 ATOM, I don’t want to wake up everyday and see that number skrinking… Regarding the concern about seeing a staked balance shrink daily: Users opting to use staked tokens as the primary source for gas payments are likely those inclined toward utilizing restaking features. In such cases, their balance would fluctuate based on the equilibrium between the stake’s compounding effects and gas consumption. This approach strikes a particularly elegant balance—it effectively offers free access to the entire Cosmos ecosystem as long as the rewards generated by their ATOM stake are sufficient…

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Simple. Vote against this proposal.

FHZ:

Equally, if they are so inclined to push this forward, have it clearly, and explicitly, available to enable and affect ONLY participating Validator’s portion of staked ATOM as a gas token, hard stop.

*Note: Validators should not have increased voting power based off their delegations.

Hello Cosmonauts!

Do we have any update on this matter?

In my opinion, this is one of the brightest ideas out there, and I hope Skip team will implement it
@Mag

@Zuko It was an idea I (and @Noam) thought of and wrote up one afternoon. As far as I know, nobody is working on implementing it.

If you refer back to the first post in the thread, you’ll see it says

jtremback:

When a user opted into the universal ATOM gas system

There was never any idea that users would somehow be forced to use this, even if it ever moves past the stage of being a random idea on a forum