GasToken

 Basics

• Started in:
• Mainnet release:
• Based in:
• From their website (6-6-2020):

"allows users to tokenize gas on the Ethereum network, storing gas when it is cheap and using / deploying this gas when it is expensive. Using GasToken can subsidize high gas prices on transactions to do everything from arbitraging decentralized exchanges to buying into ICOs early. GasToken is also the first contract on the Ethereum network that allows users to buy and sell gas directly, enabling long-term "banking" of gas that can help shield users from rising gas prices."

History

• From their website (6-6-2020):

"GasToken was originally created in September 2017, when we were investigating two questions: what is the impact of front-running on decentralized exchanges vulnerable to it, and how should blockchain resources be priced ideally? The majority of the pre-release supply of GasToken was created by The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, the parent organization of GasToken. IC3 holds a supply of GasToken for research and on-network use, and is actively using GasToken in research projects. The above authors of GasToken did not hold any personal GasToken at release-time.

GasToken is part of a wider initiative headquartered at IC3, Project Chicago for the Study of Cryptocommodities. We believe that economically speaking, all blockchains can be viewed as a two-sided market for a set of virtual resources (block space, UTXO space) backed by digital resources (computation, network bandwidth and latency, storage) with physical costs (in power, space, and capital). Project Chicago consequently aims to understand questions of how to price such resources, the consequences of mispricing, and the new generation of financial instruments that can be created around these resources for price discovery.

This includes the study of oracle-based and in-protocol futures for Bitcoin block and UTXO space, and for Ethereum state and block space, as well as rigorous study of potential instruments covering network resources. It also includes the exploration of interesting technologies like GasToken, which are only possible due to quirks in distributed-trust based crypto-economic mechanisms on blockchains like Ethereum. Project Chicago is an academic project, and aims at releasing publications, blog posts, and code fostering a better understanding of decentralized resource pricing."

Token

Launch

• From their website (6-6-2020):

"There's no ICO, token launch, or whatever your lawyers want to call it today. Just start using GasToken, on the chain, right now."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Ethereum and ETC
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From their website (6-6-2020):

"GasToken works by taking advantage of the storage refund in Ethereum. To encourage contracts to delete storage variables (that all nodes have to store forever!), Ethereum provides a refund when a storage element is deleted. This refund can pay for up to half of the gas used by a contract transaction (simple sends are not eligible for a refund, since they already use the minimum amount of gas; batched sends to contracts, however, can benefit from GasToken).
he way GasToken works is simple: you create (or mint) GasToken tokens by saving data into the GasToken contract's storage, when gas prices are low. When gas prices are high (during an ICO, during peak hours, whatever), you spend (or free) GasToken tokens by sending them back to the GasToken contract for destruction, freeing up the data saved in an earlier step. This new transaction now gets a refund, making it much cheaper to execute than the same transaction that doesn't use GasToken. The general mechanism of banking storage at low prices and releasing it at high prices had been previously suggested for miners (a miner that encounters a non-full block has incentive to fill it up with storage-filling transactions). GasToken extends this idea to all Ethereum users (not just miners) by introducing a simple way of tokenizing stored gas. GasToken complies with the ERC20 token standard, thus allowing free exchange of gas tokens between users.
There are actually two versions of GasToken: one that uses storage to bank gas, and another one that banks gas by creating contracts. The latter takes advantage of the gas refund obtained when deleting a whole contract. The two GasToken variants have different efficiency profiles, and users should choose which is more appropriate for their use case (see: GST1 vs. GST2)."

Upgrades

• Chi is based on the original Gastoken GST2 implementation. From the announcement (5-6-2020): "The Chi token is 1% more optimized for minting, and 10% more efficient for burning."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Audits

• From their website (6-6-2020):

"None of our code has been audited for security, and we do not recommend trusting funds to it without extensive evaluation.

We are a team of experienced Solidity developers with an intimate knowledge of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. We have stared at the code for a long time and don't see any obvious vulnerabilities. Our contract is thoroughly tested, both through unit tests and through a live on-network deployment. That being said, no independent audit has been or will be commissioned. We encourage you to read the code and decide for yourself whether it's secure; it's quite simple!"

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Usage

• From Formal Verification (5-6-2020):

"We can see that during recent high gas prices, the dollar value saved by the GasToken functionality has amounted to nearly $60k in value with nearly half coming from May alone. This is merely one example of how platforms can respond and adapt to environmental challenges - in this case, high gas price volatility.

Projects that use or built on it

• 1inch

Team, Funding, Partnerships, etc.

Team

• Full team can be found [here].

• Lorenz Breidenbach (ETH Zürich, Cornell Tech, IC3)
• Phil Daian (Cornell Tech, IC3)
• Florian Tramèr (Stanford University)
• with advice, review, and support from Ari Juels (Cornell Tech, IC3, The Jacobs Institute).