Martin Saps

Why We Invested In Biconomy

January 7, 2021

Contents

Making Crypto accessible to everyone

For mass adoption of blockchains and crypto interactions, particularly transactions, need to be more simple, decentralized, transparent, and secure.

Newbies to crypto, still have to go through a fairly complex process before interacting with any decentralized application (Dapp). Usually, that involves creating a wallet, providing the necessary information/documents to an exchange in order to be able to buy crypto, transferring these tokens to your wallet, and, finally, interacting with the Dapp itself and managing calculating gas costs. For many first-timers this is enough to put most off. 

Even for the crypto savvy, not having the necessary native token means you’d need to obtain it, increasing time and cost for these users. Additionally, stuck and failed transactions have recently become a hinderance for the more experienced users, where uptime is becoming a number one priority.

Biconomy’s powerful plug and play SDK and APIs allows developers, adding just a few lines of code, to offer a user-friendly experience removing many of these friction points and enabling a simple and customized user journey so that their end users don’t get frustrated by blockchain complexities which drastically helps to reduce drop-off rates and increase user retention.

 

How Biconomy Works: Gas-less fees & meta transactions

Decentralized applications can leverage Biconomy’s infrastructure to offer gas-less transaction to their end-users, create a monthly subscription model (eg. $10 per month for all transactions) or be able to pay for transactions with any given token, whether it’s directly pegged to monetary value or a different community token. 

Biconomy’s non-custodial and trustless infrastructure relies on the use of meta transactions, and in the case of gasless transactions, allows users to transact on the blockchain with zero balance account, as the dapp owner/developer or any third party can pay for the transaction fees on behalf of its users as a part of user acquisition/retention or server costs. 

What is interesting here is how Biconomy enables gasless transactions across layer 1 and layer 2. On Layer 1, Ethereum Dapps are able to pay the most optimal fees on behalf of their end users where Biconomy bumps up the gas automatically to ensure quick finality of the transaction without overpaying gas. Gas tokens are also included to further optimise gas costs. 

On layer 2, where Biconomy supports chains such as Matic and xDai, has not only enabled gasless transactions but also network agnostic transactions. What this means is, Dapps on layer 2 that integrate Biconomy do not require end users to change their RPC network to use the Dapp. This is revolutionary from a point of view as end users can easily use the Dapp without needing to configure a network, and pay gas fees. 

Biconomy has always been focused on providing superior developer experiences and have thus given multiple options to developers to implement meta transactions. Given meta transactions can operate in a twofold way under an EVM environment, either via contract based accounts or via native meta transactions, developers have the option in fully integrating the SDK itself or the meta transaction API can be used directly for more flexibility and to ensure a smooth integration.

Biconomy has its native SDK, Mexa, which, through its developer dashboard, can be integrated to the Dapp’s codebase to enable meta- and gasless transactions. After registering the Dapp to the dashboard, a generated API key can be used to integrate Mexa SDK in the Dapp. 

After Mexa has been integrated, it will handle the transactions; that is, Mexa first relays all transactions to Biconomy servers where Relayers get to sign them, and only after relay them onto the blockchain. Essentially, the API allows for relaying the transaction directly to a specific smart contract (i.e. Dapp’s/third party’s smart contract) without the user having to pay the transaction fee.

 

Blockchain agnostic middleware

Biconomy’s architecture is platform and blockchain agnostic, meaning that it can be integrated via rest APIs on any platform as well as on any chain, while as to date, there is already support for 10 networks, including main and beta networks, making the possibility of offering a smooth first-time user experience a reality. 

Biconomy occupies the middleware layer and we believe there is plenty of room for growth in this segment. Developers need bridges for adoption of their products and dealing with the gas fees is only the first stop of the journey for both Biconomy and the market. Going forward, Biconomy is on a mission to resolve all issues at the crypto transactional layer and become the de-facto transaction infrastructure for the decentralized web.

Last, but not least, it is interesting to analogize the plethora of possibilities when it comes to regulating/easing the gas side of things in the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Biconomy is exploring various use-cases that could bring seamless experiences to the end user, while incentivizing Dapps to tackle more sophisticated ways to empower their users with fast, reliable and gasless transactions.

 

About Biconomy

The Biconomy folks are super passionate about bringing mainstream adoption to blockchain based applications and they are excited about what the future of blockchain-enabled digital economies will hold. 

By enhancing developer and end-user experience, they are paving the way for how blockchain applications are built, and are led by a team of entrepreneurs, builders, and product people looking to make the digital economies of the future a reality for future generations to come.

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn

 

About Base Camp

Base Camp is a dedicated virtual Web 3 accelerator run by Outlier Ventures, specialising in The New Data Economy, NFTs and DeFi focusing on nurturing pre-seed / seed stage startups to find product market fit and close their first seed round. 

We bring together a network of 1,000 of the world’s leading Web 3 founders, protocols, VCs to mentor and invest.  

 

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