We propose to enable $BOBA as the gas token for usage on Boba Network. We believe that this change will have a number of benefits:
Increases utility of the BOBA token.
Unifies usage of BOBA as the fee token for all Boba services. Currently, BOBA is used for voting and delegating votes in the BobaDAO, invoking Turing within Boba smart contracts, and payment for Boba straw. Having two fee tokens with differential usage across the same chain creates a confusing developer and user experience.
Increases trading volume for BOBA, since ultimately the network will need to pay ETH for economic security.
Increases user choice on the network.
Makes it easier to incentivize bridging since we can airdrop BOBA. It will also prevent the need to bridge both ETH and BOBA for network usage.
Changes in user experience
$ETH will be the default gas token but all users will have the option to change to $BOBA. Don’t like paying with $BOBA? Users will be able to switch between $BOBA and $ETH as the fee token.
Technical Details
Adding a second fee token to a live Mainnet is a major technical lift with many ramifications for security, convenience, documentation, message-relay, fraud-detection, block-explorers, The Graph indexing, wallets, the gateway, and overall developer and user experience. We are proposing an opt-in strategy where users can, if they wish, pay for fees in BOBA. This fee choice will be recorded in an L2 contract. Changing the fee token will require interacting with this feeChoice contract. To reduce friction points for new users, a second system of contracts will be built that allows users without ETH on L2 to change their fee setting to BOBA, using a MetaTransaction, in which Boba Network pays the ETH to change their fee token setting in return for BOBA from the user. This means that for new users, they will only need to bridge BOBA to Boba to then use its full range of services, contracts, and DAPS.
What would this change mean for you?
If you have ETH and want to use it to pay for transactions on Boba, you do not have to do anything.
If you would like to pay for transactions in BOBA, and have both ETH and BOBA on the Boba L2, just select “Switch FeeToken” and approve the MetaMask transaction. After that, all future transactions will be charged in BOBA.
If you would like to pay for transactions in BOBA, and do not have ETH on Boba, like many of our users who “get stuck” due to lack of ETH, just select “Switch FeeToken” and the gateway will propose the MetaTransaction approach to you. After that, all future transactions will be charged in BOBA.
You can change your fee choice selection at any time, by selecting “Switch FeeToken”.
Great Proposal! Giving people the option to switch between fee’s. I wonder if it’s technically possible to incentivice people to switch to boba as fee. For example, paying fees in boba will give the user a 10% discount on the transaction fee. Food for thought, anyhow awesome proposal.
I think Boba will be heading in the right direction allowing users to swap between which token they want to use of gas. It’s also an incentive for people to hold onto the boba they get from the wagmi program instead of just selling it off.
How will fees be shared under this proposal with stakers?
I do not see anything about how ETH or BOBA network fees will be distributed… will users be able to opt for staking fees to be paid in BOBA or ETH, now?
Will this proposal require liquidity pools to be created since it seems like we still need ETH to secure the network… and swapping of BOBA to ETH needs to occur, right? Will you offer ranged liquidity for this pool, if created (honestly traditional broad range liquidity is just inefficient…)?
If you are not going to offer a BOBA/ETH liquidity pool, how will ETH be earned by the network for security purposes? Perhaps, BOBA will stake a % of ETH in ETH’s PoS…?
Please note, I prefer using BOBA as the network token… and I do not see many folks really wanting to use ETH as staking comes online.
This sounds really good - if we can get more use cases/utility to the BOBA token, this will in general strengthen the network and provide more stability to the whole ecosystem.
Great questions. We’ll work out how fees are shared in the future. Currently $ETH is used to buy back $BOBA, so with $BOBA as the fee token it works out elegantly to share revenue in $BOBA (or burn it).
You’re right - we do still need $ETH ultimately to pay transaction costs on Ethereum. Additional details forthcoming.
