ETHMagicians: MetaCartel Ring
Date: 29 October 2018
Time: 12 - 1pm
Location: National House Smíchov, Prague

***What is MetaCartel and Meta-tx***
* Meta TX for web 3 applications
* Transactions signed by the user and sent on chain to the server so users don’t have to pay for the gas costs.
* UX / glasses transaction
* dApps to pay for the users transactions
* Interesting as it abstracts the UX process
* Onboarding and activation.

***Clarity on the definition of meta-tx***
* Gas is abstracted in the transactions through Smart Contracts
* Not necessarily gas-less transactions
* Wants to make out its clear
* Language need to be correctly aligned

***People’s interests in room:***
* How do we bridge the gap for UX and make it easier for users
* Wallets and how meta-tx will play a role to interact with them
* Best practices for smart contracts and deal with meta-tx.
* What are the practices to utilise meta-tx
* Gnosis Safe, Gitcoin, Tenzorum and Universal Login and how they service Meta-tx

***Point of Today's gathering:***
* Focus for today: How can we help each other for meta-tx within the community and respective projects
(1) How do you implement
(2) How do we use it (Technical / Standards / UX)
(3) How different teams are utilising meta-tx

***Technical Overview***
* User has access to a private key with no ETH on it.
* Also is given access to a ‘proxy’ contract which can be a personal wallet or a bouncer proxy.
* User signs a message off-chain to withdraw token from this contract
* Then sends off-chain signed message to the relayer
* Relayer executes the message and puts the transactions on-chain
* User now has interacted with the Blockchain without ETH.

***Projects in the space***
* Pocket Network
* Lime Chain
* Chronologic
* Groundhog
* Gnosis Safe
* Gitcoin
* Tenzorum
* Universal Login

***Other use cases:***
* Meta-tx for subscriptions (EIP 1337) Contract which executes has a cancel function. Approve the ERC20. Message is seen as a check through the time stamp. Contract is holding value.
* Experiment with different business models. Monetise the relayer network interactions.
* Desktop mining: Newly minted token

***Challenges:***
* How can we guarantee that the relayers get rewarded.
* Use of meta-tx for the design for a decentralised relayer network
* Who pays for the gas (dApp or the user)
* Who refunds the failed transactions.
* How do we prevent the abuse of the meta-tx system
* How do we make the contracts as safe as possible.

***Suggestions:***
* Queueing up the meta-transactions and ensures one execution happens at a time. The queue may be empty. Someone may will be willing to front the gas. However may be gas-inefficient.

**User Journey for the use of Meta-tx.**

Gnosis Safe
* Centralised version of the relayer
* Gnosis - safe contract. Repo on their GitHub.

Gitcoin (1337)
* Audience: People expected to have some blockchain education knowledge
* Users go through the education experience because you have value on the other side.
* They are onboard through Gasless tx and once they are familiar. Then you can go through the normal education process

Universal Login
* Lime Chain. General meta-tx through identity. Focus more on counterfactual contract
* Universal Identity: Universal SDK. Single centralised relayer

***What is a decentralised relayer***
* Decentralised list of relayers or the mechanisms
* Single relayer server. Yourself or someone else.
* Network of relayers that conduct the tx.
* Decentralised = open participation
* Distribution rewards of the rewards
* Censorship resistance

***How decentralised does the relayer need to do***
* Does it really need to be a global network. There is the trouble of trust to these relayer networks
* Centralised networks are cheaper and easier to run. The nodes can easily be spun upby the user themselves as well as executed by the dApp / relayer. More costly to support a decentralised network
* How can users choose which relayer to trust. How ‘trustable’ are they.
* Decentralised solutions = costs more
* How do we rank reliability, trust and residences. Cost factors etc.

***Potential Business Models***
* Relayer pools
* Payment from the user themselves or the dApp
* Split the gas based on the # of transactions

***Current MetaCartel Progress:***
1. Standardisation. Creating a draft for the smart contracts
a. 1077 or create a new one (ERC)
2. Crypto-economics Research Lab
a. Focus on decentralised relay network
b. EIP 895 and how it influences meta-tx.

***Actions items / Future of the MetaCartel***
* A standard/EIP will be proposed before Devcon
* Visit: meta-tx.fun
* Join the conversation at: