BaneLabs has shipped v0.6.2 of the Neo X go-ethereum client, and upgrading from v0.6.1 is highly recommended, especially for MainNet node operators. The release’s headline addition is GovPaymaster, a system contract designed to improve the account abstraction experience on Neo X by enabling governance-controlled gas fee sponsorship.

The update also introduces two behavior changes affecting validator policy and EVM execution, as well as three node improvements.

What account abstraction means for Neo X users

Account abstraction is a design pattern that replaces the traditional blockchain wallet model, where users must hold native tokens to pay for every transaction, with a more flexible system governed by smart contract logic. The Ethereum standard that defines this approach, ERC-4337, introduces the concept of a Paymaster: a smart contract that covers transaction fees on behalf of users, allowing a developer, protocol, or governance body to fund the gas costs instead.

This allows a user to interact with a dApp on Neo X without ever needing to hold GAS in their wallet. The sponsoring entity pays fees at the Paymaster level; the end user simply transacts.

A governance-level Paymaster also aligns with the broader AI-agent strategy that Da Hongfei outlined in his Humanless Blockchain article, where Paymasters are part of the infrastructure needed for autonomous agents to transact on-chain without managing individual gas balances.

GovPaymaster on Neo X

GovPaymaster is designated in the release as a system contract, generally, a contract built into the protocol layer rather than deployed by a third party. The release describes GovPaymaster as improving the ERC-4337 user experience and pairs it with a related network policy. Further technical details are in the release notes on GitHub.

Behavior changes that come with GovPaymaster

Two policy-level changes ship alongside GovPaymaster.

The first prevents block rewards from being sent to validators using EIP-7702 delegation. EIP-7702, introduced in Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, allows a standard externally-owned account to temporarily set smart contract code for the duration of a single transaction, enabling EOA wallets to behave like smart contract accounts in limited contexts. The v0.6.2 release adds a protocol guard to prevent rewards from being sent to validators using this delegation mechanism.

The second extends the Blacklist Policy to EVM execution, broadening the network’s existing compliance controls to cover on-chain computation.

Additional improvements

Three infrastructure improvements are also included:

  • Hardfork listings in the node log have been updated for clarity.
  • The extensible payload verifier has been detached from the dBFT engine, the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism that underpins Neo X.
  • Optional rewind is now supported during genesis initialization.

The original announcement can be found at the link below:
https://x.com/ngd_neo/status/2086743021874487672

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