Introduction

What Therm is#

Therm is a prepaid gas protocol for Robinhood Chain. You deposit USDG, receive therms at a rate that is fixed at the moment you buy, and from then on a paymaster pays the network fee for your transactions and burns therms from your balance to match. One therm is 100,000 units of gas — the same way a natural-gas therm is a fixed quantity of energy rather than a price.

The point is simple: the price of gas is decided when you buy it, not when you use it. If the base fee is at its floor when you transact, you have paid a little more than you strictly needed to. If the base fee is twenty times its floor because the market is moving and everyone is trading at once, you pay exactly what you paid before. The difference is carried by a pool that holds ETH and is backstopped by stakers who choose to take that risk.

Therm has three moving parts:

• The pool sells passes, converts USDG into ETH and holds it. It prices every pass on a public quote curve that gets more expensive as the pool's reserves get thinner.
• The paymaster is an ERC-4337 paymaster that sponsors eligible transactions, pays the base fee in ETH from the pool, and burns the therms the transaction consumed.
• The backstop is staked $THRM. Stakers earn the spread between the rates users locked and the base fee the pool actually paid, and they are first in line to absorb losses when that spread turns negative.

Who it is for#

Active traders. If you trade stock tokens on Robinhood Chain, your gas bill is highest on exactly the days you most need to transact: earnings, index rebalances, sharp opens. Therm turns that variable cost into a line item you set in advance.

Protocols and apps. A protocol can buy therms in bulk and sponsor gas for its own users under a policy it controls: which contracts, how many therms per user per hour, and when to stop. New users can place a first trade without ever acquiring ETH, and the protocol knows its gas budget in USDG before launch day rather than after it.

Stakers. Anyone holding $THRM can stake it into the backstop and earn the spread. This is an underwriting position, not a savings account. It pays in calm conditions and loses money in a sustained spike. Read Staking $THRM and Risk disclosures before doing it.

Why prepaid gas exists#

On Robinhood Chain, as on other Arbitrum-based chains, the base fee is set by demand. It sits at a floor of 0.1 gwei when the chain is quiet and rises, sometimes very quickly, when blocks fill. It has reached 23 times that floor. On September 2, users paid $4.45M in gas in a single day.

Until now a gas subsidy has softened much of that cost. The subsidy ends on September 29, 2026. From then on, every transaction pays the spot base fee in full, at whatever the chain is charging in that second.

Spot pricing is efficient for the chain, but it is a poor fit for people. The base fee is highest when demand is highest, which is when users are least able to wait. A trader who needs to exit a position during a volatile open cannot defer the transaction to a cheaper block. A protocol running an onboarding campaign cannot predict what its sponsored transactions will cost the week they go viral.

Prepaid gas separates the decision to transact from the price of transacting. It is the same idea as a fixed-rate energy contract: you pay a known rate per unit, a counterparty with a balance sheet takes the price risk, and that counterparty is compensated for doing so.

What Therm is not#

Therm does not make gas cheaper on average. The rate you lock is derived from the recent base fee plus a curve adjustment and a 3% premium; in quiet periods it will often be above the spot base fee. What you are buying is certainty and protection from spikes.

Therm credits are not a deposit. They are non-refundable, and the pool will not buy them back for USDG. They are transferable ERC-20 tokens and they never expire, but their only guaranteed use is paying for gas through the Therm paymaster.

Therm is not audited yet. Contracts are not deployed. The demo runs against a simulator so you can see exactly how the mechanism behaves before any real money is involved.

Where to go next#