While working on creating The Sandbox as the truly decentralized gaming platform we envision, our lead blockchain architect, Ronan Sandford, has written a proposal for web3 browsers and wallets to display native meta transactions. The main benefits of meta transactions are that users will not need to own ether to perform actions on Ethereum. As such, by using our SAND token users will be able to interact with Ethereum without needing to know about ether.

This proposed standard would benefit any other projects that can implement similar ideas with their ERC-20 tokens.

Why is this important for The Sandbox and other blockchain games?

We understand that mass-adoption of blockchain technology will not come until we, as game developers and platform builders, eliminate all steps that create friction for non-crypto users who are looking for very simple and accessible user-experiences. We want to close the gap between traditional games and blockchain-based games.

The Sandbox uses its own ERC-20 utility token, SAND, to allow players to trade items created by the community. We are working hard to make such experience seamless for non-crypto users. (The SAND token will have other utilities as well but we won’t describe them in this article.)

One of the aspects we have been working on is the use of meta transactions to allow our players that own SAND to perform operations on the Ethereum network without needing to own ether themselves. This is facilitated by allowing us to execute a transaction on the Ethereum network carrying the desired operations (the so-called meta transaction) in exchange for a SAND reward to cover our gas cost.

What issue are we trying to solve?

This type of meta transaction is actually already achievable using the current web3 API and existing wallets. What is lacking, though, is a standard for wallets to provide a meaningful display to the user. For this reason, we created an EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal): ERC-1776 to start the discussion and hopefully get wallets to adopt our proposal to provide a better user experience. The EIP is available for anyone to review, comment, and contribute at the following URL: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/1776

We based the EIP on ERC-712, which allows existing wallets to show such popup:

This is less than ideal, though, and with ERC-1776 we could have wallet show something more akin to a traditional ETH transfer that can display gas cost as well as the function being called.

What’s next?

With the feedback from the community we hope to finalize the ERC and get implementation shipped in web3 browsers hopefully soon after.

If you are interested in providing feedback, the link is here: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/1776

As always, if you want to know more about The Sandbox, visit our website at https://www.sandbox.game

You can also follow us on Telegram (https://t.me/sandboxgame) and Discord (https://discord.gg/vAe4zvY) to ask any questions to our team and community. Thanks for reading!