Proposal to Promote Astar Usage Instead of Ether for Transactions in the Soneium Network
Rationale: The Soneium network currently operates with Ether (ETH) as the primary transactional currency. However, to strengthen the adoption and utility of Astar (ASTR) within the ecosystem, it is imperative to encourage and incentivize the use of ASTR over ETH. This shift can bolster the network’s alignment with Astar’s native assets, drive user engagement, and increase overall community benefits.
Key Incentive Proposal: To address potential cost differentials arising from the transition to ASTR, we propose a mechanism to subsidize these differences through the Astar Community Treasury. This will ensure that the additional costs incurred by users who opt for ASTR over ETH are adequately offset, making the transition economically viable and appealing.
I understand your suggestion to make Soneium’s gas costs ASTR, but honestly, I think this would make little sense to discuss in Astar’s Forum. This is because it is for Soneium to decide what to do with Soneium.
Also, changing the reserve currency from ETH to ASTR is not realistic because the technical and financial burden is very large. Instead, it is more practical to make arbitrary ERC-20 tokens available as gas fee using account abstractions and encourage the development of wallet apps that encourage this.
This would be worth supporting as Astar.
I fully support this, as a user I know that sometimes we are a few cents short of tokens to be able to execute a transaction. However, what seems really powerful to me would be to be able to include the $ASTR token in wallets like Zerion, Rainbow or Rabby which would bring a lot of value to the ecosystem as they are products that do this underneath.
For me, our actions should be directed towards the exclusive use of $ASTR to use the Soneium network.
This is indeed something we can support with the Community Treasury if we can create a proposal where ASTR is one of the assets to be used inside an AA solution. At Startale, we are currently developing inside Startale Cloud Services a way to utilize ASTR in their AA solution for Soneium.
Astar can push its network of enterprises that are looking for AA solutions on Soneium to utilize the AA of Startale and invest in ASTR as a gas token by first subsidizing the initial gas from the Community Treasury. In the next phase, they would need to top up the ASTR coming from the market.
What do you mean with this? Isn’t this already possible to add any ERC20 token?
Personally, I don’t think this change will impact anything at the moment. Soneium and Astar fees are relatively low (most often less than $0.01 or even more) and I would prefer to see some efforts from the team and community in actions that can improve the visibility and adoption of dApps.
What I mean by my comment is that, the $ASTR token is still not seen as a “secure” or “easy” token to trade in the EVM ecosystem despite having been introduced with Astar zkEVM since last year.
This is what it looks like in Zerion, my favorite wallet app due to its tons of integrations and ease of swaps, bridges and more. Unfortunately I get this and, unlike other tokens, I can’t make any swaps.
So, what I’m saying is, wallets are our main point of contact with any ecosystem and if a wallet as good as Zerion employs facilities for $ASTR it will allow retail users to spend less time going to other apps or digging into which one is better to use.
