Do I need gas for each account to transfer ERC20 token?

Question

I'm in the process of creating my own ERC20 Token.

The idea is similar to have a loyalty wallet where I'm able to send points to my customers. Also, the idea is to make some transfer functions to send points from one to another loyalty wallet (points transfer between customers) and from one loyalty wallet yo owner wallet (debiting points from one customer).

My question is... Do I have to send some ether to all my customers wallets? Or... Is it possible to have ether in the owner wallet to use it for all operations? (Even when the transfer is from a customer wallet and not from the owner wallet).

Thanks!

Answer 1

As ERC20 is just a standard or an interface, the actual implementation is left up to the implementer to decide. This means that you can implement it in any way you want as long as you have the right functions, although many functionalities are commonly "assumed" to work in a certain way.

In a typical ERC20 token only the token owner can transfer his/her tokens and therefore he/she has to have Ether to pay for the transaction fees. However, you can code your token so that the token contract owner has access to arbitrarily transfer any tokens anywhere they wish. This is a huge security risk of course and this means the token will not be accepted in any exchanges, but nothing stops you from coding the token in that way.

So, in theory you can make the token contract owner to pay for all transactions but for all practical reasons this is not a very good idea.

Answer 2

In mainnet all transaction has to pay a fee.

As stated by Lauri Peltonen it should be possible to design a system in which the ERC20 contract will accept transaction sent on behalf of someone else. You need to create the transactions offline and send to a pool, where it can be picked an submit to the ERC20 contract.

Another possibility is using an implementation of State Channel o some of the variations of Plasma. So most of the transaction will be done off chain.