Biconomy 2020 Recap!

2020 has been a wild year for everyone. The year forced us to transform our lives, both individually and collectively as a species. It was also a great year for our crypto ecosystem! From Defi Summer, yield farming craze, & ETH 2.0 to Bitcoin all-time highs, it was an action-packed year. Watch a quick montage of crypto highlights from 2020 that we made.

For us at Biconomy, 2020 was a defining year as we have made significant strides in how we’re laying the foundations for a more intuitive workflow of the crypto transactional layer that is fit for mainstream adoption. We went from a mere MVP to mainnet launch to successful integrations. We went from 4 passionate folks hacking away to now a coordinated global team of 9 awesome individuals. We’ve processed over 110,000 transactions in our private beta alone. Our community of developers and builders grew stronger every day.

It has been a crazy and humbling journey. We are delighted you rode along with us so far. I know it’s a cliche, but developer-friendly tools such as us cannot survive without the support of our early members and community. So thank you!

Let’s reflect on our year in 2020!

Started from the bottom…

Going into 2020, all we had was a simple idea, a demo to showcase it, and a hungry team of 4 fighting to make it work. We managed to build an MVP at the beginning of 2020 and were the finalist at the Meta Transaction hackathon organised by Metamask, which validated our idea and thesis.

What really got us going was that we made it to the Outlier Ventures Basecamp in March, and what great timing it was as the pandemic hit 2 weeks after the accelerator started. Major kudos to the OV team for an amazing experience at the accelerator because, as first-time founders, we needed it. We got connected to a ton of talented individuals, mentors, investors, and builders, and the OV team really helped refine our messaging, made us go through daunting pitch practices, and overall, they were a great support during the lockdown and pandemic.

Watching our demo day presentation makes us realize how far we have come! The young Padawans were deemed to be ready!

Beta Launch

I have been in the crypto space myself for 4 years, and I’ve always respected projects that are able to ship and actually have a product that can be used. Instead of projects that wrote whitepapers and opinion articles but never shipped. And so we held ourselves to that standard. Countless hours of hacking and anxious brainstorming later, we managed to finally launch our beta in May during the accelerator program with 10 awesome launch partners.

It was during these months that we, as a team, really started to learn the art of dealing with potential customers, responding to client requests and figuring out our product-market fit, which in crypto, is not an easy feat.

Rapidly building and iterating — Biconomy V1 and V2

Simplifying blockchain transactions is a broad and nascent category. But we were constantly seeking insights from the ecosystem and were able to ship fast regularly.

The Beta launch was essentially a version 1.0 to enable gasless transactions. Straight away, we started to work on Biconomy V2. This included:

• Releasing our newly designed SDK, called Mexa
• Implementing gas optimised transactions, including CHI tokens
• Providing Dapp statistics for developers on our developer dashboard
• Data dashboard for the team
• Network agnostic transactions so users don’t need to change their RPC
• Forward — enabling users to pay gas in ERC20 tokens (Jan 2021 launch)
• Transaction batching for greater gas efficiencies (To be launched)

Due to our blockchain agnostic approach, we support:

• Ethereum (Mainnet and testnet)
• Matic (Mainnet and testnet)
• xDai (Mainnet and testnet)
• Binance Smart Chain (Testnet)
• Avalanche (Testnet)
• Tezos (Recieved a grant from the foundation)

We make sure that everything we build takes us closer to the goal of empowering developers to easily offer a delightful experience to their end users.

Integrations

We have been fortunate that major web3 projects such as Curve & Idle Finance started integrating us early in June. And new integrations haven’t stopped since. We now enable a gasless frictionless trading experience on Perpetual Protocol. Decentral Games leverages our relayer network to sponsor gas on behalf of users. We also help improve the gaming experience on Zed Run. Our partners have been a pillar of support to help us refine our offerings and the diversity of our partners showcases the number of use cases we can support. These integrations also helped us become revenue generating by October.

In total, during our private beta in 2020:

• We have processed 110,000 transactions
• We have processed $100 + million in transaction volume

You can expect a ton of more integrations in the next 2–3 months. We are already working behind the scenes with various top projects in the space.

Community & Ecosystem

One of the most amazing things about crypto is how helpful and supportive the entire community and ecosystem is. We met so many fellow builders in this space, and they have helped us immensely. And we try to pay it forward by helping new projects. We sponsored various hackathons such as the moneylego hackathon, NYC Blockchain week and ETHOnline. We mentored various upcoming web3 projects and helped them in any way we can. One of our teammates literally sat down for hours with a project to help them write their code. Little things like these make us happy. We never forget we are a developer-centric company. We also gave grants to a few teams during ETHOnline in October, and organized AMAs and workshops.

We were also incredibly lucky to be enrolled in the Creative Destruction Lab program based out of Toronto, Canada which is a great program that has allowed us to connect to new mentors and a new community we never had access to before. I definitely recommend entrepreneurs to look at the CDL program, especially since it’s an equity-free program.

Oh yeah, we were also in Denver during EthDenver, which was in February 2020. It was one of the last physical events (remember those?!) I ever attended and grateful to have explored a new city too. Denver is a gorgeous place.
Thinking in-person events were a thing of the past, I managed to attend one in Dubai in December, called Gitex which featured the Future Blockchain Summit too. Yes, I was not wearing a mask because of the picture but I assure you everyone attending the conference had to wear a mask.

Slowly, our community on Twitter, Telegram and Discord is also growing.

We plan to help even more entrepreneurs, developers and Dapps this year. If you are a new project in this space, feel free to get in touch with us!

Funding

Well, all we can say is we managed to close our round quite literally at the end of 2020. The announcement will be made very soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

Onwards to 2021 & beyond!

We started Biconomy because we realized that blockchain transactions and web3 user experiences are still complicated. People are finally getting it, and this really gets us going.

There is SO MUCH planned for 2021! From launching tons of new features to integrating more use cases, the next year is going to be a hell of a ride! Remember, removing friction expands markets, and in 2021 we aim to expand as many markets as we can.

And we want you to ride along! So stay tuned, stay safe, stay hungry and stay foolish.