Turnkey’s Gas Sponsorship in production: How EarnOS and Mural Pay are making onchain fees invisible

Before users can claim rewards, move stablecoins, or complete transactions, they usually need the network’s native token to pay its required transaction fees. These fees are often called gas in crypto. The term originated on Ethereum but is now commonly used to describe fees required to finalize transactions across many chains.

For non-crypto-native users, gas adds friction at the worst possible moment. It forces people to understand, acquire, and manage a token when they’re just getting started. That creates confusion, slows down onboarding, and often leads to drop-off.

Turnkey offers native Gas Sponsorship so applications can cover those fees on behalf of their users. 

Instead of asking users to fund a wallet with gas tokens, the application pays the network fee in the background. Users can claim rewards, send stablecoins, and complete transactions without ever needing to think about gas.

EarnOS and Mural Pay already use Turnkey Gas Sponsorship in production, alongside teams building across consumer apps, payment orchestration, and agentic payments. The use cases are different, but the challenge is the same: make blockchain infrastructure disappear so the product experience feels simple from the start.

What is gas sponsorship (and why does it matter)?

Every transaction on a blockchain network requires a fee paid in the chain's native token. On Ethereum, that's ETH. On Solana, it's SOL. These fees pay the network participants who process transactions, and they can change as network activity rises or falls.

For crypto-native users, managing gas is second nature. For everyone else, which is most of the market, it's a confusing, friction-heavy requirement that has nothing to do with what they're actually trying to accomplish.

Currently available for EVM chains (Base, Polygon, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Tempo, BNB Chain) and Solana, Gas Sponsorship lets an application absorb that cost on behalf of its users. The application pays the fees, the user never sees them, and the experience feels like any other fintech or consumer app. 

What types of crypto applications benefit the most?

Gas Sponsorship is especially valuable for applications where:

Users are non-crypto-native. If your target audience doesn't hold native gas tokens, asking them to acquire these  before they can use your product adds a hard prerequisite that kills conversion. Sponsorship removes this burden.

Transaction frequency is high. Consumer reward programs, recurring payments, and automated settlement flows generate lots of small transactions. Sponsoring those fees keeps costs predictable for the application while keeping the experience seamless for users.

The wallet is meant to be invisible. Embedded wallet products work best when users don't think about wallets at all. Gas sponsorship is a key part of that abstraction. If users see a fee prompt or get stuck because they don't have native tokens, the illusion breaks.

Fee unpredictability is a business liability. For products like cross-border payments, surprise transaction costs can undermine trust and add operational overhead. Sponsorship makes the cost structure cleaner for everyone.

EarnOS: abstracting fees for millions of reward users

EarnOS is a consumer discovery and engagement platform that rewards users with stablecoins for interacting with partner brands. Backed by EV3, Animoca Brands, and GD1, EarnOS describes itself as the internet's reward program, a decentralized advertising network where users earn real value for their attention. 

Why EarnOS’s gas sponsorship was non-negotiable

As a consumer discovery platform, EarnOS’s users are anyone who engages with brand content and wants to be paid for it. 

Requiring those users to acquire SOL, ETH, or another gas token before claiming a reward would create unnecessary friction. It would be like telling someone they earned a loyalty reward, but they need to go buy stamps before the reward can be mailed to them.

The integration of Turnkey’s Transaction Management and Gas Sponsorship gave EarnOS exactly what they needed: transactions are executed within Turnkey's infrastructure, and users never touched a fee.

What EarnOS built with Turnkey

Every EarnOS user gets a non-custodial embedded wallet provisioned at onboarding, through familiar flows like email authentication or passkeys. There are no seed phrases, no private key management, no network selection. When a user earns a reward, the stablecoin distribution is an onchain transaction that happens in the background and the user sees a balance change in an app.

EarnOS uses Turnkey's Transaction Management and Gas Sponsorship to handle the full transaction lifecycle. Transactions are constructed and signed within Turnkey's secure enclave infrastructure, and gas fees are sponsored by EarnOS at the application layer. Users transact across Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum without ever selecting a chain or holding a native token.

Case study

Discover how Turnkey powers EarnOS's wallet infrastructure for millions of users

"Turnkey is the one piece of our infrastructure we don't have to worry about. It's secure, reliable, and scalable, which is crucial when you have millions of active users on your platform."

— Phil George, Founder of EarnOS

Read the case study →

Mural Pay: eliminating gas friction in cross-border payments

Mural Pay is a payments platform and API for pay-ins, payouts, invoicing, and virtual accounts all powered by stablecoins. Global businesses, fintechs, and banks use Mural to hold Global Stablecoin Accounts (GSAs) and manage cross-border payment operations. 

Why gas sponsorship matters in payments

Cross-border payments are already complex. Adding a requirement that recipients hold native blockchain tokens to receive funds compounds that complexity in ways that push business buyers away.

Earlier versions of Mural Pay required some baseline crypto familiarity: users needed to understand wallets, navigate redirects, and be comfortable with stablecoins. That narrowed their addressable market to organizations that were already crypto-literate.

The goal was to make the platform feel like any other fintech application. 

What Mural Pay built with Turnkey

With gas sponsorship active, Mural Pay now offers stablecoin-powered payment flows across Ethereum, Polygon, and Base that require nothing of the recipient beyond an account. The experience is calibrated for business finance teams and fintech operators, not blockchain developers.

Users can send and receive stablecoin payments without managing private keys, switching networks, or holding the native token required to pay fees. Transactions are handled as part of the payment flow, so the product feels closer to a modern banking or treasury platform than a crypto wallet.

For Mural Pay’s customers, the result is simple: stablecoin payments that move onchain, with any underlying complexity abstracted away..

Case study

Learn how Turnkey powers Mural Pay's cross-border stablecoin payments

"We have users making stablecoin payments leveraging the latest in blockchain technology, and it feels as normal as any fintech app on their end. That's the special unlock that Turnkey delivers."

— Chris Fernandes, Co-founder and CTO at Mural Pay

Read the case study →

What both examples of gas sponsorship have in common

EarnOS and Mural Pay operate in completely different verticals – consumer rewards and B2B cross-border payments – but they arrived at the same architectural decision.

Both companies are building for wide audiences that don’t have to understand blockchain infrastructure, and prefer not to have onboarding flows that require it. In those contexts, asking users to hold gas tokens isn't just friction, it's a blocker. The product said "this is simple," and then the blockchain said "but first, buy ETH."

Gas sponsorship is how you keep that simplicity. The application absorbs the fee. The user completes the action. The blockchain executes the transaction.

Gas Sponsorship isn't just a convenience feature, it's what makes these products viable for their target user.

Get started with Turnkey’s Gas Sponsorship

EarnOS and Mural Pay show how broadly Gas Sponsorship can apply. One uses it to make consumer rewards feel instant and accessible. The other uses it to make stablecoin payments feel like familiar financial infrastructure. The use cases are different, but the product requirement is the same: users should be able to complete the action without first understanding how blockchain fees work.

That’s where Turnkey’s Gas Sponsorship becomes more than a fee abstraction tool. It helps teams build crypto-powered products that do not feel crypto-heavy. Whether the user is claiming a reward, receiving a payout, or moving stablecoins across borders, the transaction can happen in the background while the product experience stays simple.

Combined with Turnkey’s Transaction Management which covers construction, signing, and broadcast across EVM chains and Solana, teams can execute transactions and provide a seamless user experience with a single API.

Gas Sponsorship is available on Enterprise plans, and is supported on Base, Polygon, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Tempo, and BNB Chain across EVM, and on Solana.

If you’re building a consumer application, a payment product, or any flow where end users should not have to think about gas, explore Turnkey’s Transaction Management documentation and get started with Turnkey today.‍

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