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Introducing Gelato Relay | What is Relaying in Web3?

5 minutes 30 seconds

Speaker 1

00:00:06 - 00:00:17

Hello and welcome back. It feels good to be sitting down and kind of filming something. I feel like it's been kind of a minute, maybe not really, I don't know. But I've made a couple of vlogs. I'm in Amsterdam right now for a DevConnect.

Speaker 1

00:00:17 - 00:00:43

As many of you are aware by this point, I'm a developer advocate for Gelato Network and I'm going to be meeting up with some of the team here. Super excited to be doing that. But naturally, I've been having the opportunity to kind of dig into some more of Gelato's products and what they're doing. And they're actually about to introduce something that I think is super, super fascinating, which is their Relay API. So I wanted to make a video kind of introducing what this is for all of you, because I think this is gonna be a super valuable tool.

Speaker 1

00:00:43 - 00:01:06

And I've really enjoyed digging into the documentation and kind of learning more about this. Making videos about things always helps me to learn them even better. So here we are. In a very small nutshell, Gelato Relay is a way to send meta transactions to an EVM compatible chain using Gelato infrastructure. It allows users to transact on chain while having a third party's account pay for their gas fee.

Speaker 1

00:01:06 - 00:01:35

So why does this matter? Well we know that the current internet, web 2.0 whatever, basically relies on centralized systems, right? So in web 3 the goal is to kind of mitigate this or decentralize things by having all activities rely on on-chain interactions. So this means buying and selling, but also NFTs, gaming, more complex stuff. Currently, the user experience for a lot of these more complex things in particular in Web3 is highly convoluted to say the least.

Speaker 1

00:01:35 - 00:02:09

It's clunky and it kind of requires still a lot of knowledge in technology and even cryptography. Basically the way things are at now with EUX, we're not in a state where we're going to reach critical mass. Actually, I was recently at a, it was an NFT event, actually, and I was chatting with some of the other developers there and we were kind of joking that Decentraland is like a video game, but worse. And I would say it's basically true for a lot of metaverse things right now. 1 kind of major area of this clunkiness at the moment is the steps that a user has to take to get a transaction confirmed.

Speaker 1

00:02:09 - 00:02:30

There's kind of a complicated onboarding process. If you're in-game, it really takes you out of it. Gelato relay is stepping in to kind of make some of this process smoother. To really understand this, we need to kind of identify quickly some of the major issues with existing transaction flow. The 1 is obviously users needing to pay a gas fee every time they use the application.

Speaker 1

00:02:30 - 00:02:53

That's a big deterrent, not something people really want to do. Then there's the issue of gas fees needing to be paid with the native token of the network. So not being able to pay with like USDC or something, that can be really inconvenient. There's a long onboarding process, right? You may have to pass KYC, you might need to download a wallet, you might need to go buy some tokens from an exchange and do all those steps before you can even use the app.

Speaker 1

00:02:53 - 00:03:36

Unfortunately it's still very common to have pending and stuck transactions due to nonce management issues. So again, a pretty painful user experience compared to what we would consider Web 2.0 standards. So the goal of Gelato Relay is to allow Web 3.0 developers to integrate meta-transactions in your apps with minimum effort up front. We're going to look at some more direct, kind of really practical tutorial type examples in some upcoming videos for this. But just to give you kind of an introduction of what this is actually doing, the goal is to provide a smooth onboarding process with gasless transactions, being able to pay gas with a broad range of tokens, not just a network's native token, so you could use ETH or a stable coin or something.

Speaker 1

00:03:36 - 00:03:57

Reduce knowledge requirements of Web3 and get transactions confirmed faster and more securely. So how are they doing all this? Like why use Gelato Relay specifically? Well the basic logic of how transactions are handled is different. So if a transaction fails, Gelato is going to wait for the next block and keep trying for like 8 hours, say, or however long a time you set for it.

Speaker 1

00:03:57 - 00:04:26

And the cool thing about Gelato infrastructure is that it's decentralized. So bridges usually have to rely on a centralized component for this, but Gelato mines the transactions and the node passes the call to the target chain. It can also help you really optimize your gas fees by estimating gas from the last 5 to 10 blocks. Basically a relayer with a gas tank option. And this means that the developers deposit tokens into a smart contract first and then balances can be deducted from that smart contract asynchronously.

Speaker 1

00:04:27 - 00:04:54

You can top off the balance in that Treasury smart contract and then fees can just be paid directly by the platform. The actual users never have to see it. So this is really, really cool. Obviously really nice for gaming, also for NFT projects that want to offer really good, really nice UX to their communities, kind of bring things up to the web 2 standards. Also really nice for protocols that were designed without relayer components in mind but now want to upgrade their UX to having gasless meta transactions.

Speaker 1

00:04:54 - 00:05:18

So once again we'll be taking some more in-depth looks at this and actually going through some examples But I hope this helped to kind of introduce what this is and kind of introduce the concept of relaying a little bit. As always, links will be down below. I appreciate all my friends at Gelato Network and I hope you all are excited to see some more content about this. So that's all for today. I'm going to head to DevConnect now and I'll see you in the next 1.

Speaker 1

00:05:18 - 00:05:18

♪♪♪ Bye!