Networks & fees
Supported networks
Vela ships with 12 EVM networks built in:
| Network | Native fee token |
|---|---|
| Ethereum | ETH |
| BNB Chain | BNB |
| Polygon | POL |
| Arbitrum | ETH |
| Optimism | ETH |
| Base | ETH |
| Avalanche | AVAX |
| Gnosis | xDAI |
| Unichain | ETH |
| Tempo | USD |
| Monad | MON |
| World Chain | ETH |
Your wallet has the same address on all of them, so there’s one address to share everywhere.
You can also add custom networks (Settings → Networks). Because Vela is a smart-account wallet, a network has to provide the contracts Vela relies on — the ERC-4337 EntryPoint, the Safe contracts, and the P-256 (RIP-7212) signature precompile that verifies your passkey on-chain. Vela checks this automatically before letting you add a network.
How fees work (account abstraction)
Vela uses ERC-4337 account abstraction, so a transaction isn’t broadcast by you directly — it’s a UserOperation handed to a bundler, which submits it on-chain and is reimbursed for the gas. A few things follow from that:
- Gas is paid from your own wallet’s balance in the network’s native token (ETH, BNB, xDAI…). There’s no ERC-4337 paymaster sponsoring — or gating — each transaction. (Vela may sponsor the one-time gas-account activation for new users; that’s separate, and covered below.)
- The bundler quotes the gas price — it is the single source of truth, and the wallet uses that quote rather than marking the price up on its own. You can pick a speed tier (Slow / Standard / Fast); the tier changes how fast your transaction is included, not the fee policy.
- Vela’s relayer fee is set to roughly the network fee itself — so you pay about twice the raw on-chain cost: one part to the chain’s validators, one to the relayer that runs the infrastructure.
- The confirm screen breaks the fee down honestly: the on-chain network fee, the Vela relayer fee, and what you pay in total — plus the gas limit and the amount in your display currency. As a safety check, the wallet refuses any quote above ~3× the network rate, so a misbehaving or third-party bundler can’t overcharge you.
Who runs the bundler — and who gets the fees
Every network points at a bundler. By default that’s Vela’s own bundler, but you can point any network at a third-party ERC-4337 bundler — Pimlico, Alchemy, or your own self-hosted one — under Settings → Networks → (network) → BUNDLER. (Vela’s backend is open source, so you can run the whole bundler service yourself too.)
Whoever operates the bundler for a network collects that network’s fees — both the relayer markup on every transaction and, for Vela’s bundler, the gas-account activation deposit. So the choice decides where your fees go:
- Stay on Vela’s bundler → activation deposit and relayer markup fund Vela’s service.
- Point a network at Pimlico / Alchemy / your own → you transact under their pricing and pay them directly (typically via your own API key in the bundler URL). Vela takes no cut on networks you route elsewhere.
Activating the gas account (Vela bundler)
On Vela’s bundler, your first transaction on each network activates a dedicated gas account. The app offers Free Activation — sponsored by Vela for new users — and falls back to Self Activate, where you send a small amount of the native token to the gas-account address shown in the app.
You pay the activation fee yourself whenever free sponsorship isn’t offered — namely when:
- Vela’s treasury for that network is empty or low — the free fund is temporarily depleted on that chain.
- You’ve used up the free quota — sponsorship is capped per wallet, so beyond the first few it’s self-funded.
- Vela’s bundler doesn’t fund that network at all — e.g. custom or test networks you added yourself, which Vela holds no treasury for. (Route these to your own or a third-party bundler if you’d rather skip activation entirely.)
The activation deposit is non-refundable — it’s the relayer’s starting balance and tops itself up from gas refunds over time, though it can still run down and need re-activating later. The relayer address can also change on a service upgrade, which needs a fresh activation.
Because the fee is always paid in the native token, you need a small native balance to send anything — including to move an ERC-20. If a send is blocked for gas, it means you hold the token but not enough native token to cover the fee.
When you send the maximum amount of a native token, Vela automatically reserves enough for gas so the transaction doesn’t fail.
How Vela talks to each network
Vela reads balances and submits transactions through a pool of RPC endpoints, not a single provider. It gathers endpoints from several sources, scores them by latency and reliability, and fails over automatically when one is slow or down — temporarily benching bad endpoints — so a single flaky node never takes the app offline.
Next: how passkeys work.