For Ethereum users who hold stablecoins, even if their wallets contain assets worth hundreds of dollars, they may still be unable to transfer funds if they do not have ETH. The reason is that the Ethereum network currently requires transaction fees to be paid in Ether (ETH), so wallets without an ETH balance cannot cover the corresponding gas fees.
This issue may be resolved through a new feature in Ethereum’s next major upgrade. Core developers are pushing EIP-8141, also known as “Frame Transactions.” The proposal is planned to be included in the developers’ August 27 call and has become a confirmed component of the network’s next major upgrade, rather than merely a candidate proposal.
Ethereum usually implements important network-level changes through upgrades and assigns a corresponding codename to each upgrade. Glamsterdam is expected to launch later this year, while the next upgrade in 2027 is called Hegotá, which will include the Frame Transactions enhancement.
Ethereum co-founder and one of the ten authors of EIP-8141, Vitalik Buterin, said that Frames (EIP-8141) has made several important advances over the past few months. He posted on X later Sunday to explain this progress.
From a technical mechanism perspective, the core change of Frames is to break a transaction into multiple independent steps. One step is responsible for verifying whether the transaction has received user authorization, another step is used to determine who pays the transaction fee, while the remaining steps execute the instructions that actually need to be completed.
This means that the account initiating the fund transfer and the account bearing the transaction fees no longer need to be the same account.
Under the design of EIP-8141, payment applications can choose to cover transaction fees for users, or they can receive stablecoins paid by users and then have the application settle the Ethereum network bill on behalf of the users. Although ETH is still ultimately paid to the Ethereum network, users themselves no longer need to purchase or hold ETH.
In fact, some wallets have already achieved similar ETH-free payment functions through transaction bundling and independent submission services. However, the difference with Frames is that it can complete this mechanism directly through Ethereum’s standard transaction process without requiring third-party services to intervene.
In addition to fee payment, Frames also attempts to improve coordination among multiple transaction steps, combining operations that only have practical meaning when executed together into the same transaction process.
Currently, when users conduct token transactions, they usually need to first authorize an application to use their tokens and then submit the actual transaction. Frames can integrate the authorization and transaction stages. If the subsequent transaction fails, the previously granted permission can also be revoked simultaneously, avoiding a situation in which the authorization status remains unresolved after the transaction ends.
The proposal also involves Ethereum’s account key system. Currently, every Ethereum account is controlled by a private key. A private key is a long and confidential alphanumeric combination used to prove ownership of an account, and it cannot be modified.
Once a private key is lost, the funds in the account usually cannot be recovered, and its security is based on highly complex mathematical mechanisms. Although, in theory, sufficiently powerful quantum computers in the future could potentially break existing encryption systems, current technological capabilities are not yet able to do so.
Frames allows accounts to set their own transaction approval rules. This means that the key controlling an account could be replaced with a new key in the future, and could even be replaced with a type of key that cannot be cracked even by quantum computers, without needing to migrate the assets in the account to a new address.
However, EIP-8141 is still in the draft stage, and its specific specifications and technical details may still change before the Hegotá upgrade officially arrives.
At the current stage, Frames has not yet been officially deployed, and users cannot actually use this feature at present.