Glossary
Meta-Transaction
A signed off-chain message that lets a relayer submit a user's on-chain action and pay the gas on their behalf — the primitive behind gasless dApp onboarding.
A meta-transaction lets a user sign the intent of a transaction off-chain and have a third party — a relayer — submit it on-chain and pay the gas in ETH. A contract verifies the user's signature, so their address remains the logical sender even though they never held the native token or touched the mempool directly.
This is the pattern behind gasless onboarding: a dApp sponsors gas so newcomers can act before ever buying ETH. Standards like ERC-2771 formalize how a trusted forwarder appends the original sender to calldata, and account abstraction (ERC-4337) generalizes the same idea natively at the protocol level.