The "Meme of the Month" Club: Building Gasless Recurring Buys on frfr.fun

The difference between catching a 100x runner and buying the local top is often a matter of minutes. This is especially true on frfr.fun, a USDC-denominated token launchpad on Base, where tokens move from early-stage bonding curves to permanent DEX liquidity (Aerodrome, Uniswap) in the blink of an eye.

Historically, retail traders had two bad options: stay glued to a screen 24/7 to snipe graduations, or hand a private key to a centralized Telegram bot and hope its database never leaks. Neither is a real solution.

What's changed is the automation stack underneath Ethereum wallets. Session keys, delegated permissions, and paymaster-sponsored gas are no longer research-paper concepts — they're shipping standards with production implementations. This piece walks through what a non-custodial "Meme of the Month" Club — auto-buying $10 of USDC into every frfr.fun token that graduates — actually looks like if you built it today, on real infrastructure, with the real gaps and deprecations you'd hit along the way.

1. The 24/7 problem and the graduation alpha

frfr.fun uses a bonding-curve launch model: a creator deploys a token, early buyers purchase it with USDC, and as the curve fills, the protocol mints the remaining supply, pairs it with the accumulated USDC, and seeds a permanent liquidity pool on a DEX. The moment a token crosses from the bonding curve to that DEX pool, it's suddenly visible to every sniper bot and liquidity aggregator on Base — the "graduation pump."

If you're manually trying to catch that moment, you're competing against software. You need to be awake, click through wallet approvals, and hope Base isn't congested. To compete, you need something watching the chain and executing for you, without you in the loop.

One thing worth being precise about: gas on Base is genuinely close to free, but "less than a cent" is not exaggeration for marketing purposes — it's close to the actual floor. Base introduced a protocol-level minimum base fee of 0.005 gwei as part of the Jovian upgrade, which works out to roughly $0.002 for a typical 200,000-gas transaction at $2,000 ETH. Real-world Base swaps run somewhat higher once L1 data-posting costs and DEX call complexity are added in, but sub-cent execution cost is the right ballpark, not an exaggeration.

2. Why EOAs couldn't do this before

Standard Ethereum wallets (Externally Owned Accounts, or EOAs) only support "push" payments — you sign and broadcast every transaction yourself. A smart contract can't reach into MetaMask and pull funds the way Netflix pulls a card charge. Historically, developers who wanted recurring on-chain actions had two bad workarounds: hand a raw private key to a bot (catastrophic if the bot's backend is breached), or pre-approve a contract with approve() and still need someone to pay gas and trigger execution manually.

An early attempt to fix this at the protocol level, EIP-3074 (AUTH/AUTHCALL), was proposed and ultimately withdrawn in favor of a cleaner design. That cleaner design is what shipped: EIP-7702, live on Ethereum since the Pectra upgrade, lets a normal EOA temporarily delegate its code to a smart-contract implementation — turning a plain wallet into a programmable account without a migration. Account Abstraction (ERC-4337) does the same thing for dedicated smart-contract wallets. Both are the substrate session keys run on top of.

3. Session keys, precisely: ERC-7715, ERC-7710, and ERC-7579

"Session key" isn't itself a single EIP — it's a pattern implemented across a small stack of standards that has matured a lot since 2024:

ERC-7715 (wallet_grantPermissions) is the JSON-RPC method a dApp calls to request a scoped, time-bound permission from a wallet — a spending cap, a target contract, an expiry — in one user approval instead of a popup per transaction. It was proposed in May 2024 and, as of mid-2026, is still in Draft status at the Ethereum Foundation, though it already has real wallet and SDK support (MetaMask Snaps, Rhinestone session modules, ERC-7579-compliant validators).
ERC-7710 defines the contract-side interface for redeeming those granted permissions.
ERC-7579 is the modular smart account standard that most production session-key implementations plug into as a validator module — Biconomy's Nexus account (over 1.5 million deployed) ships a "Smart Sessions" module built on exactly this stack, and Rhinestone offers similar tooling.

The practical effect on the frfr.fun club is the same as originally described, now grounded in real interfaces: a user calls wallet_grantPermissions once, specifying:

Policy parameter frfr.fun automation bot Allowed contract frfr.fun router only Allowed function swap function only, no transfers Spend limit e.g. 10 USDC per trade, capped per day Expiration e.g. 30 days, enforced on-chain

Revocation is a separate, explicit call — wallet_revokePermissions — and the delegation contract rejects any execution against a revoked or expired context immediately, even if unused spend remains. That's an on-chain guarantee, not a UI promise: a compromised backend still can't move funds outside the granted envelope.

4. Engineering the "Meme of the Month" Club

Phase 1: EIP-2612 permits and USDC — this part checks out

Circle added EIP-2612 permit() support to USDC in the V2 contract upgrade back in August 2022, and it ships on every native USDC deployment, including Base. So the original claim — that the session-key contract can get USDC spending authority via an off-chain EIP-712 signature instead of an on-chain approve() transaction — is accurate and not a simplification.

There's also now a purpose-built production example of exactly this pattern: Circle Paymaster, which lets a user sign a single EIP-2612 permit that authorizes the paymaster to both pull the swap amount and pay the gas fee in USDC, with no ETH in the smart account at all. If you're building this club today, Circle Paymaster is worth evaluating directly rather than assembling the permit + paymaster logic from scratch.

Phase 2: the off-chain watcher — and a 2026 infrastructure warning

The conceptual watcher pattern — listen for a GraduationThresholdReached event, loop through valid session keys, fire the swap — is architecturally correct. But two of the "obvious" managed services for this job are going away in 2026, and it matters for anyone building this now:

Gelato Web3 Functions, Gelato's serverless automation/trigger product, was deprecated on March 31, 2026. Gelato is shifting focus to its rollup-as-a-service business; Gelato Relay (gasless transaction relaying) continues, but the "watch for an on-chain event and run custom logic" product does not. Teams that had workflows on it were pointed toward third-party migration paths (e.g., Mimic Functions).
Chainlink Automation is also being sunset: v1.x retires June 30, 2026, and v2.1 retires July 31, 2026, with Chainlink steering existing upkeeps toward the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), its successor platform.

Practically, that means the "watcher" in this architecture should either run as self-hosted infrastructure (a lightweight service subscribed to Base logs via a websocket RPC endpoint from a provider like Alchemy or QuickNode, which is straightforward and avoids the vendor-churn risk entirely) or be built directly on CRE if you want a managed decentralized trigger layer. Building it on a now-deprecated Gelato product would mean a rebuild within the same year.

Phase 3: the paymaster and gasless execution — plus what's coming on Base itself

The ERC-4337 paymaster mechanics as described hold up: the watcher wraps the swap into a UserOperation, sends it to a paymaster contract, and the paymaster fronts the Base ETH gas fee in exchange for whatever incentive the developer has built in (a referral cut, a flat sponsorship budget, etc.).

Worth flagging as forward-looking context: Base itself is building native account abstraction at the protocol level, under EIP-8130, championed by Coinbase/Base engineering. It's currently in developer testing on Base Vibenet (an ephemeral devnet), with mainnet rollout targeted for the Cobalt upgrade in September 2026 — that has not shipped as of this writing (mid-August 2026). Once live, native AA would make gas sponsorship, batched calls, and multi-chain account portability first-class chain features rather than something built entirely through an external ERC-4337 bundler/paymaster stack. EIP-8130 is competing with a separate Ethereum-protocol-level proposal, EIP-8141 (backed by Vitalik Buterin, targeting the "Hegotá" hard fork), for how native AA eventually lands across the wider Ethereum ecosystem — the two are not the same proposal and are being evaluated on separate tracks. Nothing in this article requires waiting for either; it's useful context for anyone deciding how much to invest in ERC-4337 tooling today versus building with an eye toward Base's own native AA path.

5. The developer flywheel — with a fee-structure caveat

The original draft's economics (a flat 1% protocol fee, 14% of that routed to the referrer) don't match how frfr.fun's own material elsewhere describes its fee structure, which is closer to a 6% creator fee and up to a 14% referrer fee on trading volume. Both of these are frfr.fun's own platform self-descriptions — as with every other article in this series, they aren't independently verifiable against a third-party on-chain fee tracker, and the exact formula (whether the 14% referrer figure is a share of volume directly, a share of the total fee, or tiered by referral volume) isn't spelled out in a way that survives close reading. Treat any dollar-and-cents profitability math built on these numbers as illustrative, not a guarantee.

What can be said with more confidence, independent of frfr.fun's specific split: on Base, the marginal cost of executing a sponsored trade is genuinely close to $0.002–$0.01 in gas. That means the economics of a referral-driven automation business are dominated by the referral rate itself, not the infrastructure cost — the gas is close to a rounding error at any reasonable trade size. Whether that referral rate nets out to real profit per trade at 5,000 subscribers and 10 graduations a day is a spreadsheet you should build against frfr.fun's actual, current fee documentation before shipping — not against a number lifted from a blog post.

6. Advanced customization: beyond graduation sniping

The programmability of session keys supports strategies well past a single triggered buy:

Time-based DCA — a cron-style trigger (self-hosted, or via CRE once migrated) fires a fixed-size buy on a schedule, e.g. every Friday.
Dip-buying / conditional limit orders — the trigger checks a price feed (Chainlink Price Feeds and Pyth both remain live, independent products from the automation/execution layer discussed above) and fires only if a token has dropped a defined percentage from a recent high.
Creator auto-buy — the watcher listens for a TokenCreated event from a specific trusted deployer address and fires on block one, rather than waiting for a graduation event.

None of this changes the underlying trust model: the session key's policy — contract, function, spend cap, expiry — is what actually constrains the blast radius of any of these strategies, not the cleverness of the trigger logic.

7. Security: what the on-chain guarantees actually are

The comparison to Web2 subscription risk is directionally right and worth restating precisely, since the guarantees come from specific mechanisms rather than "the blockchain in general":

A permission granted through wallet_grantPermissions is scoped to a specific contract and function — the delegation contract validates this on every redemption and rejects anything outside scope.
Spend limits are enforced the same way: the contract tracks cumulative spend against the granted cap and reverts once it's exhausted.
Expiry is a Unix timestamp baked into the permission context; once it passes, redemption fails even if the full cap was never spent.
Revocation via wallet_revokePermissions is immediate and on-chain — a backend compromised a millisecond after revocation still can't execute, because the delegation contract checks current state, not a cached copy.

The honest caveat: ERC-7715 is still a Draft standard. Enforcement quality depends entirely on how well a given wallet or smart-account implementation has built it, and the standard itself says as much — it specifies the request/response shape, not how any particular wallet stores or enforces the permission underneath. A user is trusting the wallet's implementation, not just the abstract idea of session keys.

8. Step-by-step: activating a strategy today

Connect a smart account. Email or passkey onboarding via a provider like Privy, or a modular ERC-7579 account like Biconomy's Nexus.
Select a strategy. "Graduation Auto-Buy," a DCA schedule, or a dip-buy trigger, with a defined USDC spend cap.
Sign one permission. A wallet_grantPermissions prompt, not an on-chain gas transaction — this is the single point of user friction in the entire flow.
Let it run. A self-hosted (or CRE-based) watcher monitors Base, a paymaster or Base's own future native AA sponsorship covers gas, and the swap executes into the user's wallet without further action.

9. Where this goes next

The friction of manual approvals and gas estimation is being abstracted away, but it's worth being clear-eyed that this is an actively moving stack in 2026, not a finished one: ERC-7715 is still Draft, the managed automation layer (Gelato, Chainlink Automation) is being rebuilt out from under existing integrations this year, and Base's own native account abstraction hasn't shipped yet. Building the "Meme of the Month" Club today means picking infrastructure that will still exist in six months, not just infrastructure that demos well now.

Risk notes

This is a description of how the automation could work, not investment or trading advice. A few things worth naming directly: a "graduation pump" is not guaranteed and newly graduated tokens are frequently extremely volatile in both directions; a malicious or spoofed dApp can present a fraudulent wallet_grantPermissions request that looks legitimate, so verifying the requesting contract address matters as much as reading the spend cap; and frfr.fun, its specific fee mechanics, and any given session-key wallet implementation are all still comparatively young infrastructure relative to, say, Uniswap or Aave.

Sources

Base Documentation — Network Fees
Base Engineering Blog — Native Account Abstraction (EIP-8130)
Circle — Circle Paymaster and Four Ways to Authorize USDC Smart Contract Interactions
ethereum/ERCs — ERC-7715: Grant Permissions from Wallets
eips.ethereum.org — ERC-2612: Permit Extension
Mimic Blog — Gelato Web3 Automation is Ending
Chainlink Documentation — Chainlink Automation and automation.chain.link migration notice
Biconomy Docs — Nexus Smart Account
Everstake / CCN / OpenFort — coverage of EIP-8141 and EIP-8130 native account abstraction proposals (Feb–April 2026)

Transparency log

Corrections and additions made to the original draft:

Session keys reframed as a real standards stack (ERC-7715, ERC-7710, ERC-7579) rather than an undefined generic "blockchain policy" mechanism — including its current Draft status.
Flagged Gelato Web3 Functions as deprecated (March 31, 2026) and Chainlink Automation as sunsetting (June–July 2026, migrating to CRE) — both directly relevant since the draft named an off-chain watcher pattern these products were built for.
Verified the EIP-2612/USDC permit claim as accurate (Circle added it in the August 2022 V2 upgrade) and added Circle Paymaster as a concrete production analog.
Added Base's EIP-8130 native account abstraction roadmap (Vibenet devnet testing now, targeted for the Cobalt upgrade in September 2026, not yet live) as directly relevant forward context, and distinguished it from the separate Ethereum-protocol-level EIP-8141 proposal.
Flagged the 14% referrer bounty and 1% protocol fee figures as inconsistent with frfr.fun's own stated fee structure elsewhere (6% creator fee / up to 14% referrer fee on volume) and noted both versions are unverified platform self-descriptions, not third-party-confirmed data — the profitability math was softened accordingly rather than presented as precise.
Verified the sub-cent Base gas claim against Base's documented minimum base fee (~$0.002 for a typical transaction).
Added EIP-3074 as the withdrawn predecessor to EIP-7702, for accurate historical framing of why session keys required new standards rather than an existing one.
Removed all metadata/formatting artifacts from the source draft (title tags, keyword-stuffing phrasing) per standard editorial pass.