GasHawk

GM, GM! Welcome everybody to what's going to be another great DevNTell. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they are passionate about or have been building in web3. This can be an awesome project you've been working on, testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community here. And this week, we're in for a treat again. We're going to have Dan and Daniel from GasHawk who are going to be giving us an overview of their product, how it works, how you can set it up, and how it can save you a bundle of cash when you're working with the Ethereum blockchain. But before we get into that, let's watch a little ad by our guest today. [Video Advertisement: GasHawk makes on-chain interactions more efficient, safe, and secure by providing a service that saves both retail and institutional users up to 95% on transaction fees. Users can simply set a time preference for their transactions and GasHawk will hunt for the best possible execution in that timeframe. GasHawk intelligently submits your transactions in the best possible block over the course of your timeframe. Using GasHawk is easy: just add GasHawk to your favorite wallet and start saving on TX fees today!]

Hey, GM GM everybody! Welcome Dan, welcome Daniel! It's a pleasure to have you on the show and we saw just a brief teaser of what we're in for today. But before we get into the meat of those details, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourselves for the audience?

Sure, yeah, thanks for having us. My name's Dan, CEO here at GasHawk. I also have with me my partner and CTO Daniel. We're super excited about the opportunity to present GasHawk in front of the Developer DAO community. The plan is to walk everyone through a quick demo of how to sign up, begin using GasHawk, and actually go through a transaction. So, really excited about the opportunity.

Awesome. What about yourself, Daniel?

Great, yeah, I'm Daniel. I'm from Germany, I'm CTO of GasHawk and I'm excited to demo it later in the show here.

Excellent. And today, it's a first on DevNTell: we are live streaming from both YouTube and Twitter. So, gang, if you're watching on either platform, please don't be afraid to leave any questions you may have for Dan and Daniel during the show. But I guess in the interest of time, let's get right into it. Let's see what GasHawk is all about.

Yeah, yeah, happy to dive in. You know, it was cool that we actually are the sponsor as well, so I think everyone has a brief understanding. But yeah, we've started our company a little over a year ago with the mission of making on-chain interactions more efficient, safe, and secure. Our initial target market into that section is really focused on making transaction fees up to 95% cheaper for both retail and institutional clients. For retail, we're a one-click add-to-wallet solution, so you can add us to your favorite wallet. We're also DApp agnostic, so you can use us on whatever DApp platform protocol that you'd like and simply adjust your time preference for that transaction. So, as you may imagine, some things like swaps or trades, you may only want seconds of delay or minutes, versus a contract deployment or registering an ENS domain, which may be more of an hour or days category. So, essentially what we've built is proprietary algorithms that allow us to model, predict, and execute at the lowest base fee over any time interval. For the retail audience, as mentioned, it's a one-click add to wallet and then you can begin using your wallet like you normally would. So we're a completely non-custodial platform; we have no ability to sign transactions, move your funds, anything like that. Essentially, you sign your transaction in your wallet, GasHawk will intercept or be a buffer between that transaction and the mempool and find the best execution depending on your timeframe. In addition to our retail audience, we also work with institutional clients as well. So you can imagine things like Layer 2s, custodians, exchanges, DAOs, DeFi protocols, fiat on-and-off ramps, relayers, paymasters. The types of enterprises are pretty much limitless but are spending a lot of money transacting on-chain. And so on the enterprise side, we also have our API and SDK available for enterprise clients. And so essentially what we've built is the ability to take these signed transactions and then find the best possible timing for that transaction depending on what you're doing on-chain. And thought that it would be really helpful if we kind of walked the audience through both how to sign up and add GasHawk to your wallet and then actually doing a live transaction as well just to show how easy it is. So with that in mind, super excited to pass it over to Daniel that will walk us through both adding GasHawk to MetaMask and then actually a live transaction for the audience as well.

Sure, happy to do that now. So let me share the screen and I will demo. So when you visit gashawk.io, you are on our landing page, brand new by the way. And you can find out your own personal savings potential for your past transactions. And you can launch the app in the top right. So I do that now and our sign-up flow will guide you through the actual sign-up and your wallet setup that you have to go through. So I should connect my wallet here.

Sorry Daniel, could you zoom in maybe like one or two, one or two X?

I think I have to share my screen, I mean change my screen sharing settings for that. I can, but maybe then you can't see my wallet. I do a different thing, wait a second. [Brief delay while screen settings are adjusted] Oh, this is good. This is better, right? Better. So I connect my wallet, MetaMask. Then afterwards, MetaMask is sometimes a bit slow. I connect the wallet with it and then I have a one-click button to add the GasHawk RPC to MetaMask. Shows the normal warnings that this is not the standard RPC for the mainnet. I can approve that and then I can switch to that newly added RPC server. So, and then I simply sign only the welcome message and I'm in. Sign that. This is free, by the way, this is only a signature. And then I can proceed and see my transaction dashboard of GasHawk. That's how easy it is. And whenever I wanted to add another of my wallets, I can simply do that, go through the same process with another wallet and I can start saving on that wallet too, then. So, it is important to understand that you have to go through that process with the wallet you want to use with GasHawk and if you have done that, I can simply show what you can do here. So you can have an overview about the savings of your past transactions if you have already done some. You can show the savings chart of one of those, for instance. So GasHawk got a transaction here at this price, it submitted here. And you get some facts, you can share your successes with GasHawk with Twitter, copy that and share what you like about GasHawk. And also you can of course change your settings. So I have a default deadline set up and I can change that from 30 seconds all the way up to 24 hours. And I can also send my transactions by default only through Flashbots in order to protect myself from MEV exploitation. Or I can choose a variety of different other protection mechanisms that GasHawk offers to the users. So, let me go through one transaction that I can make. I'm going to do a very simple thing: I send some ETH to myself, gashawk.eth. Hit next, confirm. I've made sure that I'm connected with the GasHawk RPC, by the way. And here in the background, you already see that the transaction is in my transaction dashboard of GasHawk. It shows me that it anticipates a savings potential of 77% in this case when I wait for up to 24 hours. I can also change this transaction's individual settings here. So I can lower the deadline to whatever I like if it's getting urgent or not. I can manually for that transaction activate the Flashbots option and then I can also simulate that transaction. So, the prediction is minus 78%. I can see what would happen with that, how much gas would be used. It's an actual Tenderly simulation and I can also visit Tenderly in order to see the actual effects and the outcomes. Every log, more for the techy people, but this is a feature that many of our power users really, really like. So, I think that's basically it, what I can show you. Don't forget to share your referral link with others, so that we can associate others that go through your link with your account and you might be eligible for premium features or like preview features and happy to have you on GasHawk.

Excellent! And will the transaction automatically execute whenever it finds the optimal gas savings or do you still have to do it?

No, right now what has happened is that I have sent the transaction from my wallet. It is a signed transaction that is currently in the server queue, on our server, waiting to be sent out or submitted by our algorithm that decides about the point in time within the set deadline. And whenever the fees go low to a minimum in that timeframe, we will send it out for you, you don't have to do anything else. You can watch your progress of the transaction in this dashboard, but soon you will find a GasHawk Chrome extension in the Chrome web store that helps you getting this much closer to your wallet and makes this even easier. So stay tuned for that, we will tweet about that for sure.

Love it! Love the alpha on the DevNTell! Excellent. And in terms of, say I've submitted it with GasHawk, but for whatever reason I'm in a rush and I really need to send this transaction immediately regardless of gas savings or not. Am I able to override the algorithm and submit?

Yes, of course. You can go to your transaction dashboard and publish the transaction right now. Click that button and it will be directly submitted to the mempool or Flashbots if you have selected that. And you will also of course be able to do that from the extension, so you don't have to visit the GasHawk app anymore, you can simply use the GasHawk extension for that.

And as Daniel showed earlier as well, sometimes it may not be "Hey I need it exactly now" but I set it for an hour and now I need it in a minute or five minutes. So as Daniel showed in that hamburger menu, you can simply just edit that transaction in question and adjust that to a minute or 30 seconds or 5 minutes. So yeah, you can either do instantly or just adjust the timeframe once you've already submitted that transaction. And then as Daniel mentioned, you'll have full access to manage your transaction queue, add on security settings or safety settings directly next to your MetaMask or Rabby or Rainbow or favorite wallet of choice. So we're really excited about the browser extension so that you don't have to have the GasHawk web app open and can manage your queue a little bit more efficiently.

Another feature that many people seem to like, it's very simple, but it is the descriptions. So you can add a description to any transaction you have made. I generate an encryption key by simply signing a message. It's free, of course. And then I can add some description. This description is only stored encrypted on our servers. Only you can decrypt it with your wallet and the key that was just generated never leaves your browser. So this is a very neat feature so I can keep a kind of books about what I did on-chain and it really helps me keep track of everything.

Awesome. Yeah, we actually have some great questions in the crowd that I'd like to bring up now if you don't mind. So Konstantin asks, "When I send a transaction through GasHawk, does it estimate gas accurately?" I guess this is a question towards the algorithm and how optimally it does estimate the gas. What would you say?

Yeah, I would say that the gas estimation mechanism is up to the wallet you use. So we are not able to replace, for instance, MetaMask's gas estimation. But of course you probably know that you will only actually use the gas that is needed for the transaction on-chain, but the gas limit setting is up to the wallet and we cannot influence that currently with the current standards we have.

Be very similar for the priority fee as well, which is kind of just another element of that gas setting. But as Daniel mentioned, the total gas used will obviously be updated depending on the transaction. And then essentially how GasHawk works as far as how do we calculate the savings is we can actually see the gas used, the block height of the transaction, and when we actually received it and then see when we actually submitted it. So we can say, you know, hey we received it at $3, we submitted it at $1, we saved you $2. So pretty easy to calculate what the savings difference is and those things are all also verifiable on-chain. So it's not GasHawk just coming up with numbers out of nowhere, we can actually see on-chain exactly when we received it, the block height, and the gas used. And then as Daniel showed in the dashboard and then soon to be in the browser extension, you'll have your list of all these transactions: I saved 40% here, 80% here, 60% here. And I don't think we've directly mentioned this, but all of this for retail is completely free. So you can simply sign up with GasHawk today, add it to your favorite wallet as Daniel showed in one or two clicks and then begin using us on whatever DApp platform protocol you want. And all this saving, security, efficiency is all built in directly for free for retail and then we have our enterprise clients in which we do take a percentage of what we save for them, but retail and individual usage is completely free.

That's awesome to hear and that was a great question Konstantin. And I guess you did show it briefly, but there's a referral link for people to share amongst their friends. What is the process? If I were to share it with my friends, would I get some sort of extra gas saving bonus or what's the incentive for people to do that?

Yeah, great question. So we, probably about maybe nine months ago-ish, created what we like to call the Hawks Nest. And the Hawks Nest is a list of our users that have referred and had users that have made at least one transaction that qualify for this Hawks Nest. Within the Hawks Nest, we have early access to different features. So that might be our browser extension, that might be a few other things that we're working on that can't share that alpha just yet. But essentially access to new features, new products and I think people can intuitively see where that type of program may lead in the future with potentially points or potentially some type of token in the future. So the referral program is just a great way for us to be able to kind of track and see how many people you have sent and then once you hit that five count you're now in the Hawks Nest which provides both some of the features we talked about as well as a private channel in our Discord that has just a little bit quicker support and a little bit more alpha in that channel as well. So just kind of our initial way to set up a referral program and also provide a little bit of alpha and benefits for those that enjoy using GasHawk and want to tell their friends about what we're doing.

So it's literally only benefits to using GasHawk for retail here. I mean save money and you get access to alpha before anybody else so, why not? Right! Exactly. And there was actually another comment from Konstantin around switching chains and whatnot, so it's promising to hear that multi-chain support will be coming soon. Also another great question from Konstantin. Thank you Konstantin, keep them coming! "What would happen if it's not enough ETH for gas on the sender address? Will you notify about that later or right away?"

I mean you are signing the transaction with your wallet and the wallet would also warn you if you cannot actually pay for the transaction and the set gas limit and the current base fee estimation. So that is one stage of warning. On the GasHawk side, we have that check, that pre-submission check. We are probing a transaction before we actually send it to find out whether it would actually succeed on-chain in order to keep or to protect the user or the sender from costly on-chain reversals that you all probably know and don't like. So that is one protection feature and we are kind of dependent on the wallet's decision whether that transaction is sent out and payable or paid for. But the pre-submission check would just before the submission protect you from that transaction being sent out.

The other item that I'll add there real quick as well, which is not necessarily a GasHawk feature but you know our audience may be familiar with like account abstraction EIP-4337, 3074 etc. There are ways now that wallets are including with paymasters where you can pay that fee in a different token. So maybe you don't have enough ETH in your wallet but you have USDC or USDT and you could also pay that fee directly via a stablecoin or another token. So I think that's the really exciting thing not only for GasHawk users but just users in general is that fees are, we believe, going to continue to be abstracted away from individual users and into paymasters and into DApps and protocols sponsoring those fees which gives a little bit more flexibility to kind of topping off your account balance on different chains. I've experienced it way too often, I'm sure we both have, of you want to go to a different chain but you don't have the native token on the chain so then it's like how do I use it? Now I have to go buy it, etc. So I think there are things outside of GasHawk that's making that process better, but that GasHawk can add efficiency to directly with those paymasters or with those relayers, etc.

Excellent, excellent answer. And I guess just before we conclude today, I want to get kind of the origin story here of how you two met and like what kind of brought you to creating GasHawk. I'm sure there was an experience here where somebody paid too much in gas and they're like, I can't take this anymore. So would love to hear kind of the origin there.

Yeah, yeah, we have in my opinion a pretty unique origin story and funny enough I actually was not part of the origin. So I'll pass it over to Daniel to give a little bit more information on how GasHawk kind of started, the origins within Corpus Ventures, the venture studio that we initially started off, and can add you know any details that Daniel doesn't cover.

Of course, of course. So GasHawk is a spin-out of the venture studio Corpus, Corpus Ventures, and this is founded by Christoph Jentzsch and another bunch of OGs of Ethereum. And there was an idea, a rough idea that many transactions, if not most of transactions are actually not as urgent as wallets may suggest. So there must be kind of a possibility to actually time that intelligently or more intelligently than setting an alarm in the middle of the night to get up and deploy my smart contract, which is very painful. So there must be a service around that. And yeah, my brother, one of the co-founders of Corpus, called me and said, "Hey can you look at that data? I have a data science background and I did look at the data." Found there is indeed an opportunity to build a service around that and we started building. Four months later we were live and in the first version of course and got very well reception. Very soon after that, we found Dan as a CEO for the spin-out and I think Dan you can take it from here.

Yeah, no, it was a unique story. But yeah, previous to GasHawk, I was the COO of a company called ZenLedger, which is a crypto tax and accounting platform. And so built that business from 2018 through 2022. And then after 2022, was kind of looking for my next adventure and got connected to Christoph. He mentioned that they had this really amazing product and service with the goal of spinning out from the venture studio and bringing on kind of a CEO or founder that could take this product into a business. And that's essentially what Daniel and I have been doing for the last year or so: really going through the spin-out phase where, you know, GasHawk the US company now owns the IP, patents, etc. But now, you know, we've been able to expand our team, been very fortunate enough to get some grants from Ethereum Foundation, ENS, Gitcoin, Giveth, DAO Drops, Optimism, etc. which allowed us to kind of expand our team and continue to build and ship. So yeah, kind of a unique finding story but one that's worked very well both for us and Corpus and you know, hopefully for the ecosystem. You know, we believe that we're providing really valuable services for anyone that's interacting on-chain and as mentioned with retail completely free. So like you said, you know, we haven't been able to really find too many reasons why you wouldn't want to use this and you know, if there are reasons that's part of our kind of shipping cadence is to try to unlock them and figure out how to continue to add value. But yeah, interesting kind of founding story but super excited to be working with Daniel and think what we're building here is really valuable.

Yeah, 100% and thank you so much for sharing. I always love to hear these origin stories. I feel every company kind of has their own unique one to share. So thank you for doing that. And of course, like why wouldn't anybody want to save money? So definitely want to check out GasHawk if you can. On that topic, if people have questions for you or GasHawk or have some sort of feature request, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Yeah, I think we're both pretty available and open both on Twitter, Discord, Telegram and so, you know, more than happy to connect with anyone anytime if you have comments, questions, feature ideas, etc. Obviously, you know, we hope that you can see this demo, see kind of the value what we're doing, see how easy it is to add to your wallet and begin saving. And so if you do that and start to add your friends then you know, could be part of the Hawks Nest, which is really kind of our core focus group of you know kind of the things that we're bouncing ideas off of whether that's the browser extension or our multi-chain support etc. So yeah, I think we're both open and available. I'm pretty active on Twitter and so feel free to drop me a DM. But yeah, you know, we're still early enough in that phase of like most startups: there's a million things to get done and a lot of work to do, both on like UI, UX, onboarding, sign-up flow, etc. and so would love people to try us out. Probably a decent place for us to kind of shill the browser extension as well: we're doing a closed beta for a browser extension. So if you're interested in what we're building and would like to participate in that we'd love to have you. The whole goal of that like any kind of beta is to get in there, click around, you know, rip the initial kind of V1 to shreds so that we can kind of launch publicly with a little bit more enhanced version. But yeah, if you are interested in trying that out please feel free to shoot me a DM. We just need your email and then we can get you access to the browser extension. So yeah, would love for you to try us out and if you have any feedback, positive or negative, you know we're always all ears.

Awesome. Love to hear that and the details on how to get in touch with Dan and Daniel are in the YouTube description below, as well as the link for you to visit GasHawk and get started today if you so choose. Unfortunately, that brings us to time today. Thank you so much to the both of you for coming on the show and sharing this wonderful work that you've both done and really looking forward to seeing the browser extension come out eventually and all the other cool little features to help us save some money on the Ethereum network and beyond. Happy to wish everybody a happy Thursday, a happy weekend, and we'll catch you back here next week for another episode of DevNTell. Right on, have a good one!