How Friendzone Uses Gas Sponsorship to Increase Transactions by 300%

Friendzone is a decentralized social platform built on the Polygon blockchain that allows creators to monetize their social media presence. Users can invest in their favorite creator’s communities through a mobile app.

Onchain assets serve as requirements to access features like private groups and pay-per-view content, and create monetary incentives for creators to contribute to the platform.

User friction to pay gas fees 

Friendzone had a problem: after a seamless signup experience using email or Google authentication, users were stuck without funds to pay gas for their first transaction and couldn’t experience Friendzone’s product.

While users are able to connect an Externally Owned Account and add funds to their wallet at any time, taking these extra steps added a high barrier for entry. For mainstream users who are less crypto native, setting up a wallet and depositing funds was too steep of a requirement. 

Dropoff during user onboarding posed a challenge for Friendzone’s new social network to scale.

Increasing user activation with gas sponsorship

To solve this problem, Friendzone is using ERC-4337 smart accounts with gas abstraction to let users make their first transaction on the platform for free.   

Smart Contract Accounts (SCAs) are a new form of user accounts (‘wallets’) that are programmable, like a smart contract. This allows them to support functionalities like gas sponsorship, automated recurring actions, and custom recovery mechanisms which user-friendly experiences not natively possible with EOAs.

When a new user goes through the checkout process to claim their profile, users are shown that the gas required to pay for their transaction has been 100% covered by Friendzone as part of their ongoing promotion.

300% increase in user transactions with gas sponsorship

As a result of sponsoring gas for new users, Friendzone has seen a 300% increase in the number of transactions in their app. Over 6000+ unique users have taken advantage and sent a gasless transaction, allowing Friendzone to onboard more users to their platform and help them reach their ‘aha moment’.

How to get started

Alchemy’s Account Abstraction infra powered this experience for Friendzone with a scalable and reliable solution that handled high throughput and volatile gas network fees.

Alchemy’s Bundler APIs enabled Friendzone to send UserOps onchain that power transactions for their users’ Smart Contract Accounts. You can get started with our Bundler API Quickstart.

Alchemy’s Gas Manager APIs are ERC-4337-compliant paymasters that enable users to claim their profile for free, without paying for gas. You can get started in our Gas Manager API Quickstart.

Friendzone is innovating with smart account technology at scale. Alchemy’s Account Abstraction infra enabled a frictionless onboarding experience where other providers weren’t able to.