# Allowance

## What is the Allowance?

Allowance or access permissions, allow a third party to have the right to carry out a transaction of a certain amount of user's tokens, which are associated with the user's address. All this without giving the private key of the user's address.

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Allowance costs a small amount of gas and is vital to interact with the protocol.
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## Where is it used?

Our protocol uses Allowance when dealing with situations involving any token that is directly residing on the user's wallet; for instance:

* BMI tokens; when staking them in native BMI staking, or paying the 1% claim fee
* stkBMI tokens; when staking them in the voting process
* USDT; when providing coverage, or paying the Premium
* BMIxCover tokens; when staking them to earn BMI yield

## What is the Unlimited Allowance?

To avoid the Allowance process becoming tedious or even annoying, it's possible to set an Unlimited Allowance for a particular token. Doing so will allow the user to only have to go through the Allowance process once for each type of token used. 

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Unlimited Allowance can greatly reduce gas fees, as it removes the need for repeatable transactions.
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## Is Unlimited Allowance safe?

It all depends on when, how, and by who is it used. In the case of our protocol, the simple answer is yes. However, it's a decision that all of our users need to make for themselves. As such it's never forced, both "Regular" and "Unlimited" Allowance types will always be viable for the user.

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Unlimited Allowance is an advanced procedure that should be used only as a result of a conscious decision. 
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