What Is Gas Token?
Also known as: GasToken, GST2, Native Gas Token, Native Token
In short
Gas token is used in two senses: generally, the native token a blockchain uses to pay transaction fees (such as ETH on Ethereum), and historically, GasToken contracts on Ethereum that saved on fees by being stored when gas was cheap and used when it was expensive.
In its common present-day sense, a gas token is the asset the network accepts to pay transaction fees. On the Ethereum mainnet and many layer 2 networks, this asset is ETH; other EVM-compatible networks use their own native tokens. To be able to transfer a token on a network, you need to hold a balance of that network's gas token as well, separate from the token being sent. Account abstraction and “paymaster” solutions can relax this requirement by allowing fees to be paid in other tokens.
GasToken in its historical sense (GST1 and GST2) was a contract that took advantage of Ethereum giving a gas refund to transactions that free up storage space. Users minted tokens by writing data to storage or creating contracts when the gas price was low, and when fees rose, they burned these tokens to receive the refund and lower their transaction cost. Arbitrage bots used this method heavily.
The mechanism was criticized because it bloated the network's state size and used block capacity inefficiently. EIP-3529, implemented with the London upgrade in 2021, largely reduced gas refunds and rendered GasToken ineffective.
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