Biconomy is a provider of blockchain development tools, trying to simplify the transaction experience of Web3 applications through a series of APIs.
Written by: Jiawei
If a new DeFi player Amy wants to interact with DApp, the preparation work is extremely cumbersome. For example, if Amy wants to interact with Decentraland, she needs to have ETH and MANA token. To this end, Amy needs to purchase ETH and MANA through KYC and CEX, register and learn to use the Metamask wallet, withdraw ETH and MANA, create a Decentraland account, and finally interact with it. If unfortunately, the ETH purchased by Amy is not enough to pay the gas fee, she needs to purchase ETH again and withdraw cash. And these processes require a certain amount of gas cost. The long preparation process is really unfriendly to novice players.
What if ERC-20 tokens can be used to pay for gas, and dApps provide some of its own tokens to help new users get started quickly?
What did Biconomy do?
In this context, Biconomy proposed a “Meta Transactions” solution. The essence of meta-transactions is to allow dApp developers to pay transaction fees on behalf of their users. In order to lower the barriers to use of dApps and attract new users, many dApp developers will be willing to do so. And with the application of side chains and expansion technology, transaction costs will also be significantly reduced.
Mexa
Mexa is an SDK developed by Biconomy, which allows dApp developers to integrate meta-transactions into dApps without changing any smart contract code.
Developers can conveniently manage all dApps and their users on the Mexa Dashboard, apply meta-transactions at the API or user level, or create APIs for smart contract methods, etc. ( Tutorial ).
The smart contract has been audited and approved by QuantStamp and MixBytes and is open sourced on GitHub .
Forward
To put it simply, Forward provides an easy-to-use API that allows dApp users to use ERC-20 tokens to pay for gas. And to ensure that the transaction will not fail, while optimizing the gas fee. The main considerations of Forward are as follows:
- A common situation is that dApp users have a bunch of ERC-20 tokens in their wallets, but no ETH. At this time, the user can neither transfer nor use these tokens.
- Transactions in Pending or Stuck may cause dApp users to wait for several minutes or even hours before they can continue to interact with the dApp. Sometimes the transaction may even fail.
- For new users of Ethereum who want to experience dApp but do not have ETH, they may have to complete KYC, purchase ETH from a centralized exchange, download and learn to use the wallet, and finally connect to the dApp. It is undeniable that this is a long and unfriendly process.
- In addition, using ETH to pay for gas is also very luxurious. When the price of ETH rises, the price of gas paid with ETH also rises. This feels like using Tesla stock to buy milk.
In order to illustrate this point more vividly, Biconomy has created a website (iwaste-eth.com), which calculates how much ETH can be saved if you use stablecoins to pay for gas at your address, as shown in the figure below.
In summary, if you can use any ERC-20 token to pay for gas, and use these tokens without ETH, it will bring a good user experience. New users of dApp can use the token provided by the dApp to get started quickly, or use stablecoins instead of ETH to pay for gas.
The first use case based on Forward is Forward Swap, which is different from Uniswap in that it provides a variety of stablecoins as a means of paying gas fees.
Project development
In the first quarter report released by Biconomy, it can be seen that the adoption of its platform has shown a good growth trend. At present, Biconomy’s mainnet has supported Ethereum, Polygon (Matic Network), and xDAI. It has deployed a testnet on the Binance Smart Chain, and is in collaboration with DeFi projects such as Curve, Decentral Games, Zed Run, Perpectual Protocol, and the second-tier expansion project Arbitrum. Both have established a partnership.
Currently, Biconomy has been applied to seven DeFi projects, namely Curve, a decentralized exchange for stable currency trading, Decentraland-based virtual reality game platform Decentral Games, blockchain digital horse breeding game Zed Run, and decentralized sustainability. Contract trading agreement Perpectual Protocol, community governance AMM exchange Dfyn, on-chain social platform Sapien Network, and gathering reasonable financial agreement Idle.
Investment and financing situation
On January 11 this year, Biconomy announced the completion of a USD 1.5 million seed round of financing, led by European venture capital firm Eden Block, and 8 venture capital firms including Fenbushi Capital and Binance. The funds will be used for development. Team, expand platform and business scale.
summary
Biconomy, a provider of blockchain development tools, aims to provide a series of APIs to simplify the Web3 transaction experience. mainly includes:
- Allow dApp developers to pay gas fees for their users;
- Use ERC-20 token to pay gas fee;
- Achieve up to 50% gas fee optimization;
- Can be integrated in any blockchain.
As an infrastructure provider, Biconomy is also developer-friendly, providing a plug-and-play solution that can be integrated into dApps in three simple steps. In addition, developers can easily manage dApps with the help of Biconomy’s Dashboard, detect the daily activities of dApps, and obtain complete transaction history. It is foreseeable that in the future dApp wave, tool applications may emerge suddenly, and Biconomy is expected to become an important part and solid infrastructure.
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