General Meta Transaction Wrapper Contract for ERC20

Wrapper contract offering meta-transaction methods to any token compliant with the ERC-20 standard.

Installation

Run npm install erc20-meta-wrapper or yarn add erc20-meta-wrapper

Usage

To write your custom contracts, import ours and extend them through inheritance.

pragma solidity ^0.5.0;

import 'erc20-meta-wrapper/contracts/interfaces/IMetaERC20Wrapper.sol';

contract ContractA {
  //...
  function f(address wrapperAddress, address ERC20tokenAddress, uint256 amount) public {
    IMetaERC20Wrapper(wrapperAddress).deposit(ERC20tokenAddress, amount);
  }
}

Dev / running the tests

1. Install node v11, yarn (npm install -g yarn) and truffle (npm install -g truffle)
2. yarn install
3. truffle compile
4. yarn ganache
5. in another terminal run, yarn test - executes test suite

How does it work?

When you deposit ERC-20 tokens (e.g. DAI) in the wrapper contract, it will give you back metaTokens (e.g. MetaDAI) with a 1:1 ratio. These metaToken have native meta-transaction functionalities, which allow you to transfer tokens without doing an on-chain transaction yourself, but by simply signing a message and broadcasting this message to "executors". You can also "approve" addresses to transfer tokens on your behalf with a signed message instead of calling the ERC-20 approve() function.

If you want to transfer some metaTokens, you simply need to call safeTransferFrom(sender, recipient, ERC20tokenAddress, amount, metaTransactionData) where token address is the address of the ERC-20 token you want to transfer. Obtaining the balance is similar; balanceOf(user, ERC20tokenAddress).

You can, at anytime, convert back these metaTokens back to their original tokens by calling the withdraw() method.

Gas Fee Abstraction

When transferring metaTokens, like metaDAI, you can specify in which currency you want the transaction fee to be paid in. By default, ERC20 token transfers require users to pay the fee in ETH, but with metaTokens, users can pay directly in any ERC20 token they wish. Hence, at a high level, users could transfer DAI by paying the transaction fee in DAI as well, never needing to possess ETH.

Why use the ERC-1155 Interface?

There are a few reasons why the ERC-1155 standard interface was chosen for this contract. First of all, since bytecode needs to be passed to the contract, supporting the ERC-20 interface for these metaTokens would not be possible (at least not without adding significant complexity). Secondly, having a single contract for all ERC-20s is simpler for developers and third parties. Indeed, you don't need to deploy a contract for every ERC-20 token contract users want to augment with meta transaction functionality and third parties don't need to maintain a list of which ERC20 token address maps with which wrapper contract address.

In addition, it becomes a lot easier to have multiple version of wrapper contracts. Indeed, if 5 versions exists, you only need 5 contracts to support all ERC20s in the five different versions, compared for 5N contracts, where N is the number of ERC-20 contracts.