The single biggest reason blockchain payments fail at the till is that the customer needs a second currency to pay the fee for the first. EmpoorioChain removes that at the protocol level: a business can sponsor its users' transaction fees, and the chain validates the sponsorship so it cannot be drained.
Two pallets
pallet-account-abstraction (index 80) implements user operations natively — the concept ERC-4337 defines on Ethereum through contracts and an off-chain bundler market. Here a user operation is a runtime object: the intent, the signer, optional session keys, and a reference to who pays.
pallet-paymaster (index 70) is who pays. A sponsor funds a paymaster account and attaches a policy:
- which accounts (or which credential holders) it will sponsor;
- a per-operation fee limit;
- which pallets and calls are allowed (
stablecoins.transferandescrow.lock, say, but notstaking.bond).
Validation before execution
The PaymasterValidator checks the policy at the entry point, before the operation runs. An operation outside the policy is rejected without charging anyone. This is what makes sponsorship safe: a paymaster for a café cannot be used to pay for someone's DEX trades, and a whitelisted customer cannot burn through the sponsor's balance with a loop of transfers above the cap.
Sponsor funds are custodied in the pallet's own account, which avoids a transfer per sponsored operation and keeps the accounting in one place indexers can read.
What it looks like for a café
- The café (through Empoorio Manager, once wired) funds a paymaster with a few DMS — at 0.000025 DMS per transfer, a single DMS covers tens of thousands of payments.
- Policy: sponsor any customer, calls limited to DUSD transfers and escrow, cap per operation.
- A customer with only DUSD pays. The fee comes from the café's paymaster. The customer never sees DMS.
The café can go further: combined with KryptoOS's proof-of-unique-humanity credential, pallet-creator-studio-fees grants up to a 50 % fee discount to verified humans — so the sponsor's DMS goes even further and bots get no subsidy.
Why not a bundler network
On Ethereum, account abstraction lives outside the protocol: bundlers collect user operations, paymaster contracts approve them, and every wallet must integrate the whole stack. The result is fragmented support and a market of intermediaries. On EmpoorioChain the entry point is the runtime, every wallet that speaks the chain speaks account abstraction, and the paymaster is a policy in state rather than a contract to audit per deployment.
Status
Both pallets are in the live runtime (spec 220). No Empoorio app sponsors customer fees yet — the apps settle in fiat. The first sponsored purchase on the live chain will be the proof; until then this is the mechanism, wired and waiting.
Based on FEE_MODEL_AND_LOW_COST_STRATEGY.md §1B–C, EIP_COVERAGE.md and ARCHITECTURE.md.