Who pays the transaction fee? Building sponsored execution on Midnight

Ura Labs — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:13:07 +0000

A user arrives at your app to do something useful. Before they can finish, they discover that they need another balance to pay the network fee.

If you build on Solana or another blockchain, that onboarding problem may feel familiar. The implementation below is specific to Midnight. Ura Relay Club does not currently offer Solana or multi-chain integration.

I’m Press from Ura Labs. We’re building Ura Relay Club, a Midnight Preprod pilot that sponsors DUST fees for supported application transactions through an API. The aim is to let an application offer sponsored actions without requiring each user to supply their own DUST.

Separate application logic from fee sponsorship

The responsibility boundary matters:

Your application	Ura Relay Club
Contract logic and wallet experience	Sponsorship eligibility and configured limits
Transaction preparation and proving	DUST fee sponsorship and submission
Checking the intended application result	Request tracking and chain-confirmation receipt

An API key does not create a contract or prove a transaction. A chain confirmation also does not replace checking that the intended application action actually happened.

Where to start

Read the environment and prerequisites before adapting a transaction.
Follow project access and key setup. Keep the API key on your backend, outside browser code and public repositories.
Request Preprod sponsorship access. A valid key alone does not enable sponsorship. The pilot requires project approval and operates within configured limits.
Use the client-helper guide and API reference to understand transaction preparation, submission and status lookup. Include confirmation and application-result checks in your test plan.

The public docs also cover retry and recovery. A timeout is a reason to check the request's status before deciding whether another submission is appropriate.

Here is a 30-second tour of the website and developer setup. It is a walkthrough, not a recording of a completed transaction:

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Watch the walkthrough on X.

What we want to learn from builders

Broader developer integration testing is ongoing. This is not a mainnet service or a claim that every application transaction is compatible. Ura's separate Preprod bridge has not been demonstrated through Relay Club's public API.

For your application, which action would benefit most from sponsorship? What would you need to see in a receipt, quota response or recovery flow before trusting the integration?

Explore Relay Club and the docs. For the longer development story and future capacity direction, read Ura Is Building the Workflow Layer for Midnight.

Press, Ura Labs

DEV Community: Ura Labs

Who pays the transaction fee? Building sponsored execution on Midnight

Separate application logic from fee sponsorship

Where to start

What we want to learn from builders