Gasless transactions: the next step in TON Connect

In a standart flow, a user tops up their wallet with USDT, opens app, tries to make a purchase and gets stuck. Gas requires TON, which they don’t have. For the developer, this results in a drop in conversion at the final step: the user has already clicked “buy” but runs into a network requirement.

Gasless already exists in TON, but it currently lives at the wallet level. The W5 contract supports delegated fee payment, but only for transactions initiated from within the wallet. In TON Connect, applications have no mechanism to sponsor gas for the user.

We are integrating gasless into the standard TON Connect flow. The application requests a fee estimate from a gas provider, builds the transaction paid in USDT, and sends it to the user for signing. The signed transaction is then passed to the provider, which submits it to the network. For easier integration, this will be available via AppKit.

As a result, the user sees a single amount in the wallet, for example 100 USDT, signs one transaction (99.9 USDT for the purchase and 0.1 USDT to the gas provider), and completes the purchase. For the developer, this means preserving conversion at the final step.