Client-Owned Paymaster Contracts: A New Ownership Model for Gas Sponsorship

Gas sponsorship has always been treated as a feature you plug into your application, not infrastructure you own. Once sponsorship starts mattering to an application's economics, though, the paymaster stops being a minor UX detail and becomes a control surface: it decides which transactions get subsidized, how much gets spent, and who holds the money behind it. Almost every provider on the market keeps that surface for itself.

Trustware built the opposite model. Every client deploys and owns their own paymaster contract.

What client-owned actually means

Under Trustware's system, a client deploys their paymaster through Trustware's factory. The deploying wallet becomes the sole owner and controller of that contract. Sponsorship funds sit in the paymaster's own EntryPoint deposit, which is withdrawable by the owner at any time. Upgrades to the contract are owner-initiated. Trustware provides the factory, the dashboard, the policy engine, sponsorship authorization, and the routing and settlement integration, but cannot move, withdraw, or redirect the client's funds.

This is a meaningful departure from how the rest of the paymaster market works. In most productized models, the provider owns the paymaster and the funding relationship, while the application gets a dashboard and an API on top of infrastructure it doesn't control. Client-owned flips that: the application owns the actual onchain contract, and the provider supplies everything around it.

Why no one else has productized this

Client-deployable paymaster contracts aren't new on their own; they exist in certain user-pays ERC-20 setups and custom infrastructure builds. What hasn't been offered as a product is the full combination: a paymaster deployed per client through a client-owned factory, with sponsorship funds under the client's sole control, full owner-gated funding and withdrawals, policy and dashboard tooling built for application teams, and integration into a broader routing and settlement layer.

That combination is what Trustware's paymaster system delivers, live on Avalanche and Base, built on ERC-4337 and EntryPoint v0.7.

What this changes for application teams

A client-owned paymaster means an application never has to hand over the infrastructure that decides whether a user's transaction gets confirmed. Funding, policy, and withdrawal rights all stay with the team that built the product. The provider's job shifts from holding the money to making ownership usable: deployment, dashboards, policy rules, and the routing layer sponsorship plugs into.

Gas sponsorship as a rented feature is the default today. Gas sponsorship as owned infrastructure is what client-owned paymasters make possible.