2021 BiconomyRewind

Hey, fellow Biconauts!

Well, we can safely assume 2021 has been by far the wildest year for all of us in crypto. We started Biconomy 2.5 years ago with:

The vision of making Web3.0 frictionless

Empowering anyone to contribute to this vision through an accessible token economy

I thank you so much for being a part of our journey. This year was by far the most incredible for us. We found product-market fit in an area that many predicted would take years before it can unfold and here we are already paving the standard for how end-users can simply interact with Dapps. We predicted a multichain future this time last year where we expanded our vision to build a new complementary product line, which is now Hyphen, and we successfully released Hyphen V1 this year. We took a developer-first approach thinking deeply about how end-users will ultimately onboard and interact with their Dapp and what Dapps ultimately need which led us to build complementary products that fit in the transaction middleware stack. We have started the build-out of what we call our Multichain Relayer Protocol, which is what we believe will be the foundation for a seamless multichain Web3.0!

One of the most important lessons I personally learned in the past year is that even in hyper-growth markets like crypto, great outcomes, high traction, and continued relevancy will take time.

Patience.

Rinse and repeat.

Trial and error.

This year felt like 5 years in one. When you think about it, a year is not a lot, it doesn’t even represent a dot in history — it’s so insignificant. But when I look back at the things we managed to accomplish in one year, I tell myself if we did all this in one year, imagine what we can do in 3 or 5 or 10?

When I mention ‘we’, I refer to the awesome team and community behind Biconomy. One of our proudest achievements this year was defining and evolving the culture and values we have at Biconomy. As a team, we collectively identified 4 values that define us: Simplicity, Accessibility, Ownership and Integrity. These values drive our decisions, behaviors and the way we operate at the company level, team level and product/protocol level too. It shapes the fabric of how we assemble, create magic, celebrate the small/big wins, how we deal with mistakes and how we deal with all those around us. It’s these values, and the team that we attribute all the success we have had this year.

Now let’s do a 2021 #BiconomyRewind:

• Scaled the team from 5 (Dec 2020) to 26 global full-time staff
• Successfully relayed over 12.9 million Gasless transactions for every use case possible

These Gasless transactions in 2021 represented $1.05 billion in processed volume

75+ Dapps have integrated Gasless this year including the likes of Decentraland, Perpetual protocol, dYdX, TryShowtime, EthSign, Cent, Aavegotchi, and many more. We had 15 in 2020! Now we are at 90+!

Gasless has interacted with 512k unique wallets

Gas tank release — pre-paid model for Dapps

Supported new chains such as Moonbeam, BSC and Tezos

Forward was brought out of testnet to Mainnet Alpha and was successfully integrated with Idle Finance

• Released Hyphen V1 (our cross-chain bridge), which supports Ethereum, Polygon and Avalanche and supports 3 assets so far

$83 million in cross-chain transfer volume generated

Over 14,000 unique users

Our innovative architecture offers the fastest cross-chain experience, as much as 10X faster!

Hyphen SDK for easy in Dapp integration for cross chain transfer liquidity

Zed Run — one of our earliest Gasless customers was the first to integrate the Hyphen SDK, making it the first Dapp to use both products!

• Biconomy litepaper release and protocol build-out
• Took big strides towards establishing Biconomy as a well-known leader in the web3 space.

Multiple top publications such as TechCrunch (Thanks Lior for the shout out!), Cointelegraph, & Investing.com have covered us as the critical infrastructure that will make web3 multi-chain & seamless

• Over $20 million raised

$9 million raised in our private sale

$11.5 million raised in public sale on Coinlist

• $BICO already launched on major exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, Huobi, FTX, Crypto.com and many more
• Last but not least, we did a sexy rebrand ;)

With all of this, we are honestly just getting started — there is so much we want to build and have planned.

What to expect in 2022?

Check out our high-level Roadmap for 2022!

Here are some of the highlights to look forward to:

• Multichain relayer protocol testnet and mainnet launch — The Multichain Relayer Protocol is our approach to mulitchain communication which will allow for cross chain transfers, and gasless transactions as two main use cases. It will also allow for cross chain contract calls which allows developers to build a variety of use cases on the protocol itself. The protocol build out has been in full swing — we intend to launch testnet in Q2 2022 with incentivised staking. Just before that we intend to publish our formal whitepaper for the technical spec. Given modules for Hyphen and Gasless has already been built, this means we can be ambitious in our delivery as we are expecting mainnet to be live in Q2/Q3 of 2022. This means our Validators, and Executors are expected to go live, in particular the introduction of being able to stake your $BICO tokens!
• Improved Gasless Features and new chain support — we’re excited for how Gasless will evolve in 2022, including the following:

New chain integrations: Solana, Fantom, Neon, roll ups such as Arbitrum, Optimism and Boba as well as ZK rollup networks

Revamping our Developer Dashboard and dApp Statistics — super excited for this one!

Wallet address whitelisting feature for dApp partners

• Scaling Hyphen and opening up liquidity — as the multichain thesis plays out we aim to be the fastest and cheapest for cross chain transfers. Here’s what you can expect:

Introducing Dynamic Fees which allows Hyphen to easily scale support for new chains and liquidity across a number of assets

Support new chains such as BSC, Moonbeam, roll ups such as Arbitrum, Optimism as well as ZK roll up networks

Opening up liquidity for LPs and introducing a liquidity mining program

Ability to buy a small amount of the native fee token of the chain the user is transferring to

• Strengthening BD and sales — We aim to grow this team to ensure the Dapps we work with successfully integrate both Hyphen and Gasless as we have seen earlier in the year with Zed Run. This really positions us to be a prime middleware piece for the growing Dapps on Web3.0
• DAO and community — Our DAO foundations has already been built out and we expect to formally launch the DAO to the world in the new year. This means our community will involve a wide range of new stakeholders including validators, market makers, developers with new cases and more. Our community has evolved in 2021 and we aim to hone in and strengthen our community which will drive further interaction, engagement and growth of the protocol itself

What we are doing at Biconomy is all about making Web3.0 frictionless and making the UX seem like magic! When we think about what adoption looks like, we look at the viewpoint of the 99% of the population who are not exposed to crypto yet and consider the UX pain points crypto natives have now and in the future. Users will eventually not care what chains they are on, and cross chain mechanics will all be under the hood at the Dapp level where we will be a core part. We are long-term in our thinking, so we are adapting ourselves in this ever-evolving marathon. Honestly, we’re just getting started.

We started Biconomy by solving pain points related to user onboarding at the gas and transactional level, and so I wanted to point you to this tweet that I shared recently.

Gas will evolve, and Gasless as a product will evolve to allow for a variety of use cases. This will become ever more apparent, and problematic at a cross-chain level. Developers and users will find solutions like ours more valuable especially if we wanted Web3.0 to onboard and interact with 1 billion users.

We are committing to putting more resources behind Hyphen given the ever-expanding multichain ecosystem that is increasingly becoming difficult to access. Working on both the infrastructure level, liquidity level, dapp level, and end-user level allows us to drive value to a variety of stakeholders. As we introduce cross-chain contract calls, this enables us to serve a variety of use cases that developers can utilise to their benefit.

Noah from Proof Group, shared an amazing analogy with me earlier this week. He said the roll-up space is like back when the internet got set up, people were just starting to connect Universities together, like Stanford to Berkely, Berkley to Columbia, MIT to Stanford. Much like there are thousands of Universities around the world all now easily connected to each other, there will be a thousand roll ups/chains that will be connected.

I really loved this analogy! And that brings me to the glue meme touted no one other than the great Fisky himself…

It’s been a great year and we are super excited for 2022! That’s a wrap and thank you so much for being a part of our journey. Happy New Year!