Call ERC transfer with ETH from another account (i.e. meta-transactions)

[richwednesday]

I want to transfer an ERC20 token from accountA to accountB but only accountC has ETH (for gas fees).
Rather than transferring ETH from accountC to accountA first.

Can I call contract.transfer with accountA as the signer but send the transaction to the network with accountC?

[zemse]

ATM, tx fee is debited from the balance of the one who signs a transaction.

but send the transaction to the network with accountC

Sending doesn't require a wallet, just a URL of node (RPC URL). Ethers js has a handy way to to that.

const provider = ethers.providers.JsonRpcProvider('rpc-url-of-the-node');
await provider.sendTransaction('0xSerializedTransaction');

Just wanted to make it clear that there is no role of accountC in the process of sending the transaction to the network.

Possible solutions

You can extend ERC20 contract, by adding a method called transferBySig that takes receiver, amount and signature. Recently there was interest about the same idea in ethereum/EIPs#3055. But this requires your contract to be deployed again.

I think I have read some proposals to get this done natively in ethereum so that no extra functionality is required in the contracts (each function would need a functionalityBySig counter part). But they definitely this feature isn't up right now. I don't remember the EIP number, so I don't know what is the community consensus on this idea.

[zimmah]

No, you can't do that, if that would be possible, anyone could spend anyone else's tokens!

The only way you could do that is if you 'APPROVE' AccountC to send the token from AccountA to AccountB (or approve AccountB to take it).

However that would still need AccountA to make a transaction anyway (to approve account B or C), so that wouldn't really help you much.