[Proposal] Gas Token and/or Gas Price Mitigation Techniques

NEAR needs a “gas token” that can arbitrage, hedge against, and/or autopay fees (DevEx).

Context: Web2 businesses and APIs that leverage NEAR under the hood and abstract this usage from their users e.g. business pays gas in NEAR.

Problems:

Broad Issues:
Running a business on NEAR, but NEAR price/USD goes up, while my application is exponentially growing… not good. There is no way to deliver clear and transparent pricing. There is no way to accept payments in FIAT/CC or even stable coins without issues of regulation or price fluctuation.
Regulation:
I don’t want to be a money transmitter/exchanger.
API credits as NEAR:
If I offer customer A different pricing vs. customer B (buying NEAR) then I’m setting market rates for my API credits, and people could speculate … broker dealer, etc…
API credits as Stable Coin:
If my API credits fluctuate based on how much work they can do… I’ve just nullified payment agreements with my customers if I promised them execution, or the burden is back on them to watch the market.

OFC there is sharding and voting to lower fees, but this is all retroactive.

Seeking discussion for a proactive solution.

Idea #1:

Business pre-purchases NEAR and occupies storage with it. Contracts with “gas token” call this contract and burn gas tokens for releasing storage bytes, getting the NEAR refunded for subsequent execution. I believe this is how gas tokens on Ethereum operate.

Can we come up with something a bit less… cumbersome? This still burdens the business with hedging against NEAR price going up.

@illia @evgenykuzyakov @zavodil @kendall

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From my perspective the need is to change in the economics to use stable price for both gas floor and storage costs.

There needs to be economic modeling done and proper proposal created that will be reviewed by the community.

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