What are metatransactions?
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What is a metatransaction?
Metatransaction is a term that, simply put, describes a transaction that you instruct a third party to complete on your behalf.
On-chain transactions
Before we describe what metatransactions are and how they work, it's necessary to recap what we mean by signing a transaction.
When you interact with Ethereum mainnet and similarly designed networks, most of your activity will be determined by simple transactions. At a basic level, if you want to send funds to another address, you need to sign a transaction on-chain. Signing a transaction means that:
- You are the legitimate originator of the transaction, i.e. verification.
- You irreversibly consent to a given amount of an asset being transferred to another address — referred to academically as non-repudiation.
- The data in the transaction cannot be modified after you've signed, i.e. integrity.
Metatransactions — essentially just signed messages — share these same characteristics. However, they differ from standard transactions in the extent to which they are processed on-chain. A regular transaction — such as moving funds from one address to another — is computed and recorded on the blockchain.