How Tonkeeper Brings Gasless Transactions to TON

Tonkeeper Battery and Gasless solve one of the most common friction points in crypto onboarding: users who receive tokens or NFTs on TON but can't do anything with them because they have no Toncoin for gas. This article explains precisely how both features work technically, what the tradeoffs are, and how the W5 wallet standard enables the most efficient implementation.

The Problem: Gas Tokens as an Onboarding Barrier

TON is a multi-asset blockchain. Alongside its native Toncoin, it supports fungible tokens (USDT, tsTON, Notcoin, and many others), NFTs, tokenized usernames, and DNS names. Every transaction on TON — regardless of which asset is being moved — consumes computational resources measured in units of "gas," and that gas is paid in Toncoin.

This creates a structural problem for new users. Someone who receives USDT as a payment, wins an NFT in a Telegram contest, or is gifted a TON domain cannot do anything with those assets until they acquire Toncoin first. Gasless and Battery are two complementary approaches that eliminate this requirement.

Gasless does not mean free. Fees still exist and are still paid. What changes is who pays them and in what currency — the user no longer needs to hold Toncoin specifically.

Gasless: How It Works

With Gasless, the transaction fee is deducted from the token being transferred, not from a separate Toncoin balance. When a user sends USDT, a small USDT amount is taken as the fee and forwarded to a relay service, which pays the actual Toncoin gas on the blockchain. From the user's perspective, the transaction just works — no gas token required, no setup, no Battery to charge.

The tradeoff is scope. Gasless only works with fungible tokens that have well-known behavior and low volatility relative to TON — primarily stablecoins like USDT. It cannot be used for NFT transfers, smart contract interactions, staking operations, or tokens with unpredictable value. For those, Battery is required.

Tonkeeper Battery: How It Works

Battery is an off-chain account within Tonkeeper, denominated in "charges." One charge equals the fee for a simple Toncoin transfer. More complex operations cost proportionally more:

• Simple TON transfer: 1 charge
• Token or NFT transfer: 5–10 charges
• Swap or complex smart contract: more charges depending on complexity

Battery can be loaded using:

• Bank card via in-app purchase (iOS and Android)
• USDT
• Notcoin and other supported tokens

To charge Battery with tokens, the user signs a transfer to battery.ton. Tonkeeper intercepts this before broadcasting it to the TON network and routes it to the Tonkeeper Relay Service instead. The Relay verifies that the payment covers a minimum number of charges, credits the Battery account, then broadcasts the original transaction while covering the gas itself. The Battery balance increases, and subsequent transactions draw from it automatically.

Unlike Gasless, Battery works with all transaction types: any token, NFTs, staking pool operations, DNS record changes, and arbitrary smart contract interactions.

The W5 Wallet Standard: Why It Matters

The efficiency of both Battery and Gasless depends heavily on the wallet smart contract version. TON wallets are not passive address containers — they are smart contracts with their own logic. The previous standard, Wallet V4 revision 2 (still the most common in the ecosystem), supports up to 4 simultaneous outgoing messages and extensibility via plugins, but it cannot natively relay signed messages through an intermediary contract.

W5 — Wallet version 5 — was standardized via TEP-89, finalized by the TON Core team together with Tonkeeper in July 2024. The key architectural change: W5 allows a user's signed message to be wrapped into an internal message and passed through a relay contract. The relay contract pays the Toncoin gas; the user's wallet receives the wrapped message as an internal message and processes it. This eliminates the need for the workaround required with V4.

The difference matters for performance. With V4, Battery must first send Toncoin to the user's wallet, wait for confirmation (~20 seconds), and then the user's transaction can proceed. With W5, the relay wraps the user's signed message directly — a single step, ~15 seconds, no pre-funding required.

All new Tonkeeper accounts are created on W5 by default. Users can switch between V4 and W5 accounts within the app.

Battery + V4 vs. Battery + W5: The Technical Comparison

For reference: the comparison below assumes the user has no Toncoin available. Fees are calculated at $7.00 per TON.

Mode	Fee equivalent	Latency
Battery + W5	~$0.10	~15 sec
Gasless + W5	~$0.14	~15 sec
Battery + V4	~$0.10	~30 sec
Gasless + V4	$0.15–$0.25	30+ sec

The Gasless + V4 combination (implemented by some other wallets) is the least efficient: it applies the Battery V4 workaround on every transaction individually rather than charging Battery once. Some implementations of this mode required mandatory Telegram login to prevent abuse — specifically, the risk of a user withdrawing their Toncoin pre-funding before the USDT transaction completes. Tonkeeper chose not to implement this mode and migrated to W5 instead.

Tonkeeper Battery processed over 2 million transactions by mid-June 2024.

The Relay Architecture: Preventing Abuse

The Relay Service is a critical component. When Tonkeeper intercepts a transaction destined for battery.ton (or processes a W5 relay request), it routes it to a backend service that:

1. Verifies the signed message is valid and not expired
2. Checks the token value covers the minimum charge threshold
3. Credits the Battery (for Battery top-ups) or processes the fee deduction (for Gasless)
4. Broadcasts the transaction to TON, paying Toncoin gas from its own reserves

The relay is the entity that holds and spends Toncoin on behalf of users. This is a centralized component — the relay is operated by Tonkeeper. The user's private keys and custody of assets remain entirely on-device; only fee payment is intermediated.

Sources & further reading:
TEP-89: W5 Wallet Standard — TON Enhancement Proposals
TON Wallet Contracts — official documentation
Tonkeeper Battery announcement — Telegram channel
Tonkeeper GitHub — open-source wallet code

Download Tonkeeper: tonkeeper.com
Download Tonkeeper Pro: tonkeeper.com/pro
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