What's included?

This guide summarizes of the benefits of sponsoring transactions with Shinami's Gas Station. It shows you an image of the entire sponsorship flow, from setting up a fund in your Shinami web dashboard all the way through executing a sponsored transaction. Finally, it summarizes our developer resources for getting started with Gas Station.

Why sponsor transactions?

If you don't sponsor transactions, users need a wallet with an APT balance to pay gas fees. This is a lot friction for Web2-native users: downloading a wallet app, completing KYC checks to purchase APT, transferring APT to their wallet, and then connecting their wallet to your app. You won't convert many Web2 users this way. Instead, you can use Shinami's Gas Station to sponsor their transactions. This allows for a great UX, improving sign-up conversion and user retention.

Even apps that target Web3-natives, who are used to managing a self-custody wallet, can have friction from gas fees. For example, when DeFi users who trade non-APT tokens have no APT and don't want to buy it just to pay a tiny gas fee. This annoyance could lead to fewer actions you want to promote, like deposits and swaps. Sponsoring these actions can increase both your MAU and your revenue per user.

Apps on Aptos can sponsor their end user's transactions to remove this friction, improving onboarding conversion and user retention. You deposit APT in a fund in your Shinami account, and then our Gas Station handles the management and optimization of gas credits (APT) to facilitate sponsored transactions.

Integrating Shinami's Gas Station with your app is very simple, and we have comprehensive API documentation coming very soon!

End-to-end flow

Diagram

Summary of steps

App creates a Gas Station fund in the Shinami dashboard.
App sends APT to the fund to pay for upcoming sponsorships.
An end user interaction with the app initiates a transaction. For example the user could ask to mint an NFT or the app could give the user a free NFT for accomplishing a task.
App constructs the mint NFT transaction without fee payer information. The transaction expiration must be set to 1 hour or less.
App sends the raw transaction to Shinami's Gas Station for sponsorship, along with any secondary signer addresses.
Gas Station sponsors the transaction from the app's fund and returns the fee payer account address and signature.
App gets the sender signature (and any secondary signer signatures).
App submits the transaction with all signatures to the Aptos blockchain.

Developer resources

Coming soon!