A wallet can hold hundreds of dollars in stablecoins and still be unable to move them. That’s because the Ethereum blockchain charges a fee, in ether $ETH$2,499.30, for every transaction, and a wallet without ether cannot pay it.
A proposal meant to fix that is now a committed part of the blockchain’s next major upgrade. Core developers moved EIP-8141, called Frame Transactions, to Scheduled for Inclusion at their Aug. 27 call, marking the feature as part of a broader network update rather than just a candidate for one.
Changes to Ethereum are bundled into upgrades every year or so, each with a codename. Glamsterdam is due later this year; Hegotá, which will include the Frame Transactions enhancement, follows it in 2027.
“A lot of important progress on Frames (EIP-8141) has been quietly happening over the last few months,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, one of the proposal’s 10 authors, wrote on X late Sunday.
Frames breaks a transaction into separate steps. One checks that the user authorized it, one establishes who is paying the fee and the rest carry out the required instructions. The account sending the money and the account paying to move it no longer have to be the same.
Under the proposal, a payments app, for example, could cover the fee itself, or take stablecoins from the user and settle the $ETH bill on their behalf. Ethereum still gets paid in ether, and the user never has to buy any.
Some wallets already offer this capability through separate services that bundle transactions and submit them. Frames would let it happen through Ethereum’s ordinary transaction flow, without involving a third party.
The proposal also groups steps that only make sense together. Trading a token today often means approving an app to spend it, then submitting the trade. Frames bundles the two processes so that if the trade fails, the permission granted alongside it is withdrawn rather than left sitting there.
Every Ethereum account is controlled by one private key, a long, secret alphanumeric string that proves ownership and cannot be changed. Lose it, and the funds are gone, because the math behind the key is so complex that while a powerful quantum computer might, in theory, eventually be able to crack it, current technology cannot.