Review Biconomy ($BICO) – A next-gen multichain relayer protocol that will bring Web 3.0 to be on the mainstream

Web3 apps today suffer significant barriers to user adoption in the form of poor user onboarding and transaction experience. Almost every encounter your users have with your dApp is a complex transaction. When compared to the user-friendly web2 products that users are accustomed to, dApps can be exceedingly frustrating, such as:

• Scalability – transactions are slower on web3 because they’re decentralized. Changes to state, like a payment, need to be processed by a miner and propagated throughout the network.
• UX – interacting with web3 applications can require extra steps, software, and education. This can be a hurdle to adoption.
• Accessibility – the lack of integration in modern web browsers makes web3 less accessible to most users.
• Cost – most successful dapps put very small portions of their code on the blockchain as it’s expensive.

Those are some of the Web3 limitations and that’s also the reason why Biconomy has aimed to resolve the problems, make Web3 products as intuitive and easy to use as legacy web2 products

What is Biconomy?

Biconomy (BICO) delivers a non-custodial and gas-efficient scalable relayer architecture that allows users to enjoy the ease of Web3 apps through a streamlined transaction procedure. The Binance cryptocurrency exchange just released the BICO token, which allows its holders to stake tokens, supply liquidity to receive rewards, and be a part of the governance system.

Outstanding Features

What is the project trying to achieve?

Their goal is to make web3 products as simple to use as legacy web2 solutions. Simplifying the transaction experience will be critical for decentralized projects to gain traction.

Thus, Biconomy is on a mission to simplify Web 3 experiences that will promote mainstream adoption by addressing critical pain points at the crypto transactional layer.

There are various bottlenecks in the transaction experience:

• Necessity to pay a gas fee every time the user uses your application. Netflix does not charge you their AWS fees for every time you watch a video, so why should dApps charge you gas fees for every interaction you do?
• Users can only pay in ETH, which they may not have at that moment. Or the user may not want to spend their ETH investment.
• New Users have a long complicated onboarding process. Non-crypto savvy new users will have to pass KYC, purchase ETH from an exchange, download a wallet, then connect their wallet before they can go any further, which can take days! No one waits for days to try out an application.
• Proficiency in complex blockchain technicalities is required such as using MetaMask, signing transactions, understanding gas etc. If the project is on layer 2, they need to know what that really means and be able to change RPC manually.
• Volatile and high gas fees further dampen the user experience on your dApp.
• Pending and stuck transactions can force your users to wait for minutes and even hours before they can carry on interacting with your application. And sometimes the transaction fails altogether.

As a result, developers who want to fix the above issue would have to design an internal relayer architecture from the ground up. This infrastructure would require active management and upkeep, which would include duties such as:

• Monitoring gas prices at all times based on the congestion of the network and the mempool
• Keeping track of nonces and managing the transaction queue. This is important because if one transaction is stuck then the next transactions cannot be sent until the preceding one fails or goes through
• Managing long pending transactions and automating the process of re-publishing low-fee transactions with a higher gas when network conditions change
• Ensuring relayers can scale as transactions increase and enable the auto funding of relayers
• Addressing relayers private key management and associated security

For developers to manage ERC 20 payments, they would need to keep a treasury and utilize risk management for the acceptance of ERC 20 tokens for users wishing to pay gas fees.

Making all of this gas efficient will necessitate the use of gas optimization techniques such as gas token management and deployment, as well as transaction batching.

What are unique selling points?

Mexa – Enable Gasless Transactions

Biconomy provides two different approaches to enable gasless transactions for your smart contracts.

Custom Implementation

In some circumstances, it makes sense to employ a customized strategy. For example, where it is critical to eliminate external control or where a standard-compliant function – such as EIP 2612 permits – must be implemented.

They provide contracts for you to use in your dApps to inherit this functionality. Tokens like Dai and USDC (together with associated permission functions) can be supported in your dApp via Biconomy’s Custom Implementation method.

EIP 2771 Standard Implementation

Rather than incorporating meta transaction validation logic within your contract, you can inherit a recipient contract that can receive verified calls from a trusted forwarder. The trusted forwarder follows EIP 2771 by verifying signatures before calling the smart contract with the original user address data attached. It simplifies development and allows you to alter the trusted forwarder address as your needs evolve.

With adherence to EIP-2771 to enable native meta transactions in your contract, you can just inherit a simple contract BaseRelayRecipient.sol and set the trusted forwarder address.

A list of trusted forwarder addresses per network can be found here https://docs.biconomy.io/smart-contracts/addresses

Smart Contract Wallet Implementation

If your smart contracts are unable to be adjusted or upgraded to allow native meta transactions, you can still conduct meta transactions using the smart contract wallet approach. Each end-user is given a contract wallet, and all of his transactions are then routed through his smart contract wallet. Gnosis contract wallet integration is supported by Biconomy.

You can check on how to register Gnosis Proxy Wallet, by clicking here

Economics

dApp developers must deposit chain native tokens in the dApp Gas Tank in order to enable gasless transactions. On each network, each dApp has its own gas tank, ensuring that Biconomy relayers have enough gas to pay transaction fees and that transactions are relayed smoothly.

Forward – Enable Paying Gas in ERC20

Forward is a solution they created to make it simple for your users to pay their gas fees in ERC20 tokens. They’ve created Forward to work for any Dapp on Ethereum, especially Defi protocols and payments, where team fees are impossible to cover for their users and consumers have the funds to cover gas (just not in ETH).

They’re launching Forward to accept payments in Dai, USDC, and USDT, but they hope to add more tokens shortly. Their smart contracts are quite generic and allow for extremely customized applications. They will, however, debut with a rudimentary feature set that we intend to expand in the near future.

Note: if you’re developing a payment use case with expected average payments below $1, they recommend you consider Layer 2 options

Gasless != Free

If you’ve launched your Dapp/protocol on Ethereum mainnet and are thinking of utilizing Biconomy to pay the gas for your users, this isn’t a reasonable solution. Ethereum gas fees are exorbitant. On December 18th, 2020, Uniswap-related gas fees were estimated to reach over $3 million. In comparison, Uniswap earned $11 million in seed capital.

The majority of Defi use cases where meta transactions eliminate a pain point for the end-user already involve tokens! Examples include :

• Depositing stablecoins into a lending protocol
• Swapping tokens and more!

Furthermore, the vast majority of ERC20 token transfers on the Ethereum Mainnet involve substantial sums of money – more than 90% of token transfers are worth more than $1,000.

They envisage Forward enabling you to improve UX for these use cases in two ways for your end-users.

1. Allowing your customers to save their ETH
2. When using DApps, there will be no blocked transactions!

Because Biconomy relayers handle ETH gas fees in the backend, they ensure that their relayers pay the most optimal gas fees at any given time, ensuring that transactions are never stalled.

When there is a lot of traffic, they automatically detect it and progressively raise the gas prices. This ensures that your customers never overspend. More information on how this works may be found here.

Charging Users

Biconomy accepts ERC20 tokens from users as payment for meta transactions via Forward. They then utilize these tokens to replenish the ETH in our relayers.
Biconomy charges users according to the following criteria:

• ETH/$PaymentToken Price: We source this from an oracle on-chain, such as Chainlink’s Price Feeds
• Ethereum Gas Prices: Read this to learn how Biconomy sets optimal gas prices for our transactions
• Fee multiplier: A markup we set to offset risk and take revenue. In the future, we’ll give Dapps the option to set this figure higher and share revenue obtained from meta transactions.
• Gas Usage: Much like a standard transaction, we give cost estimates via our SDK based on gas estimates. However, the real gas usage is determined at the point of transaction execution. This figure is calculated within the Forward call and used to charge the user.

Factors affecting gas usage charges within Forward include :

• Recipient (your) contract call
• Logic within our ERC20Forwarder & Trusted Forwarder contracts
• The logic within your payment token’s smart contract

Tokens They Support

Supporting arbitrary tokens is risky given the market’s volatility. As a result, they promote extremely liquid stable coins such as USDC, DAI, and USDT. They want to alter our trading models in the near future to support different types of tokens.

Hyphen – Instant Cross-Chain Transfers

Hyphen enables real-time cross-chain transfers between Ethereum and layer 2s. To begin, we are allowing instant USDT and USDC transfers between Ethereum and Polygon.

Roadmap

For the latest roadmap, we will update you soon!

Technical Data

Key Metrics

• Token Name: Biconomy
• Ticker: BICO
• Blockchain: Ethereum
• Token Standard: ERC-20
• Contract: 0xf17e65822b568b3903685a7c9f496cf7656cc6c2
• Token Type: Governance
• Total Supply: 1,000,000,000 BICO
• Circulating Supply: 65,374,608 BICO

Token Allocation

There are in total 1 billion BICO tokens in supply allocated as follows:

Token Sale

Biconomy (BICO) token sale on CoinList

The sale begins on October 14, 17:00 UTC and has two public options:

Option 1

• Supply: Up to 40,000,000 BICO tokens
• Price: $0.25 per token
• Lockup & release: 3-month linear release, starting around November 23, 2021

Option 2

• Supply: Up to 10,000,000 BICO tokens
• Price: $0.15 per token
• Lockup & release: 10% unlock on or around November 23, 2021, followed by a 6-month cliff, and following that 6-month monthly release

The registration deadline is October 11, 2021 at 23:59 UTC

Biconomy (BICO) token sale on Primelist

• Project name: BICO (Biconomy)
• Total supply: 1,000,000,000
• Circulation: 65,400,000
• Sale price: 0.3 USDT
• Mode of sale: Queue + HT Holding
• Total allocation for this event: 2,000,000 (0.2% of total supply)
  • Queue allocation: 1,000,000
  • HT Holding allocation: 1,000,000
• Purchase value limit:
  • Queue: 50 USDT
  • HT Holding up to 2,000 USDT
• Currency used for purchase:
  • Queue: USDT
  • HT Holding: USDT

Token Release Schedule

The release schedule is designed so that the vision of the investors & team is aligned for the long term.

Token Use Case

$BICO is the Biconomy multi-chain relayer infrastructure’s native work and governance token. It plays an important role in network decentralization by serving as the network fee, encouraging all stakeholders to secure and maintain the network, and engaging in network governance.

Network Fees

The Biconomy blockchain has its own native token, BICO. The Biconomy blockchain will serve as a settlement and verification layer for all Biconomy Network activities on all supported chains.

To add any information to the chain, node operators pay a transaction cost in BICO, and they earn BICO proportionally to the amount of work they do on the network.

Stakeholder Incentives

Node Operators

To begin contributing to the network, Validators and Executors stake BICO. They receive BICO in accordance with their contribution and BICO stake. In the case of negative behaviour, the network will reduce its stake.

The Validator monitors other chains for relevant transactions and records them on the Biconomy chain. The Executors are aware of these transactions and take appropriate action (be it a hyphen transaction or a gasless one).

Delegators

BICO token holders stake their tokens to help safeguard the network. They receive BICO in proportion to their BICO ownership.

Liquidity Providers

The protocol will necessitate active liquidity in a wide variety of coins across all supported chains. This liquidity is provided by LPs in the form of various crypto assets to the protocol’s liquidity pools on various chains.

When a user uses the liquidity pools, a small fee is collected and dispersed to the liquidity providers. In addition to this charge, they will receive BICO in accordance with their proportionate contribution to a specific Liquidity Pool.

Governance

BICO holders have the ability to propose and vote on choices affecting the Biconomy protocol and the entire Network. Changes to the Network’s code, the inclusion of new services, or decisions affecting the disbursement of its treasury cash are examples of such decisions.

Any BICO holder can submit a suggestion to the Biconomy community for consideration. This is a major component of Biconomy’s objectives for increasing decentralization as they strive for community-led growth and self-sufficiency.

Markets and Community

Backers

Team

Advisors

Investors

Alternative Projects

Ethereum Gas Station Network (GSN)

Anyone who sends an Ethereum transaction needs to have ETH to pay for gas fees. This forces new users to pass KYC (Know Your Customer) and purchase ETH before they can start using any Decentralized Application (dapp). This can be a major hurdle for users without prior crypto experience that are unfamiliar with the concept of needing to keep ETH in their wallet for gas.

Ethereum Gas Station Network (GSN) abstracts away gas to minimize onboarding & UX friction for dapps. With GSN, clients with no Ethereum can interact with Ethereum contracts without them having to pay for gas fees.

How does Biconomy differ from GSN?

	Pros	Cons
Biconomy	– Dashboard for developers to more granular control on meta transaction usage. – Quick 2 step integration with no extra smart contract deployments. – No need to worry about protocol changes or new trends on the blockchain. Biconomy makes sure the system is up to date with market trends. – Less gas per transaction as no extra hops on-chain and payments are processed off-chain. – Gas fee can be paid in stable tokens or ERC20 tokens. – You can do network agnostic transactions. No need to change the RPC URL in Metamask while doing transactions on Layer2	– Not decentralized, so need to trust Biconomy servers for relaying transactions.
GSN	– A decentralized system, so no need to trust any single relayer. – GSN2 is simpler than GSN1, so comparatively easy to set up. – Relayers can be paid in ERC20 tokens while paying back the fees.	– Extra setup is required. – High relayers fees. – Regular monitoring of DApp funds is required to repay the relayers. – High transaction fee, as extra processing is done on-chain like multiple hops, checking dapp deposits, relayer payments. – 70 cents costlier than Biconomy, per transaction.

Conclusion

Biconomy makes Web 3.0 more usable, interoperable, and composable. Their multi-chain relayer infrastructure processes almost 50K daily transactions for 70+ dApps to ensure all the benefits of Web 3.0 come with the intuitiveness of Web 2.0. Users can expect a simple multi-chain experience where they connect their wallet to any dApp, instantly access their funds on any chain or L2/rollup, and enjoy a completely gas-less experience.

A few reasons why I’m excited about Biconomy:

1. Usability – Biconomy provides a gas-less future where users don’t need to bother about blockchain nitty-gritty such as paying gas, choosing the right network or chain, performing black magic to ensure a quick successful transaction. Everything should just work seamlessly.
2. Interoperability – Biconomy is building for a multi-chain future, but one where users don’t need to know it’s multi-chain. Everything is quick, affordable, and scalable but users don’t deal with added frustrations such as painfully slow cross-chain transfers & onboarding. Biconomy handles these under the hood so that the user has a smooth interoperable experience.
3. Composability – Biconomy makes adding a better & simpler user experience to any dApp as simple as adding a lego piece. Their APIs & SDKs can be integrated onto any dApp, on all major chains, and for a huge variety of use cases.

Find more information about the project

Website: https://www.biconomy.io/

Documents:

• GitBook: https://docs.biconomy.io/
• Litepaper: https://verdant-idea-67d.notion.site/verdant-idea-67d/Biconomy-Litepaper-V-1-2-d6365c50ac454ba6bd4874f36a0ebdca

Twitter: https://twitter.com/biconomy

Telegram: https://t.me/biconomy

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HKHxgyEExQ

Medium: https://medium.com/biconomy

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or ideas about the project, please email ventures@coincu.com.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary, and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

KAZ

Coincu Ventures