Users interact with dapps without tokens

On the Internet Computer, a browser is all you need to interact with smart contracts. You do not have to overcome any hurdles such as creating a wallet, hold tokens, or pay expensive gas fees. This is in contrast to other blockchains, where users need to acquire tokens to do anything.

A key property that enables everyone to directly use a dapp is the reverse gas model.

Reverse Gas Model (AKA "canister pays")

In the "Reverse Gas model" developers pre-pay costs by loading canisters with computation cycles. So users can interact with a dapp without having to pay in tokens. Cycles are stable in cost are obtained by converting ICP tokens. This allows developers to know in advance how much they will need to spend on computation.

As an example, the Motoko Playground dapp is hosted and executed entirely on-chain and it does not require visitors to pay for the computation: https://m7sm4-2iaaa-aaaab-qabra-cai.raw.ic0.app/. The Internet Identity app is also a free to use application running on the IC.

Examples

There are many IC applications that allow to interact without tokens. One of the forerunning apps is Internet Identity app which allows to authenticate to many other apps. NFT Marketplaces like Entrepot allow to sign in with various wallets without the need of tokens.

See Also

• The Internet Computer project website (hosted on the IC): internetcomputer.org