ETHOnline Oct 2020 Rewind

Hackathons and events are one of the most exciting parts of our Ethereum community. The energy, ideas, and enthusiasm from everyone involved is infectious. And the ETHOnline summit this October was no different. Despite 2020 being 2020 and forcing virtual participation, we saw almost 3000 attendees across 65 countries. We had an awesome opportunity to interact with the 700+ developers across various events. We learnt a lot that will help us further support the DApp developer community. Here’s a quick recap of what happened in the action packed month.

Scaling is the talk of the town

With the imminent launch of Ethereum 2.0, the prince that was promised, scaling was one of the main topics of discussion. It is one of the key issues that many developers are trying to solve in their own innovative ways. Vitalik Buterin had a very informative talk where he presented the scaling roadmap from ETH 1.0 to ETH 2.0. As the scaling mechanism of rollups without sharding only needs phase 1, Vitalik says we can expect upto 100x increase in throughput rate very soon! However, base-layer scalability is still years away. Thus, Dapp projects would still need to look for solutions.

Biconomy is well-positioned to help fill this gap as our chain agnostic relayer infrastructure can support different scalable solutions in the market. This will provide fast gasless transactions that will improve the user onboarding experience. Millions of new crypto users can interact with decentralized applications without having to own ETH. We want to make blockchain transactions as simple and intuitive as web 2 transactions.

These benefits attracted more than 20+ projects to build on Biconomy in the hackathon.

Hackathon

We got an overwhelming response during the entire hackathon from developers hacking on many different ideas. We had projects from DeFi to gaming to social tokens building on our releyer network. More than 100+ new developers signed up, validating Biconomy as a quintessential middle layer for making user centric products. These hacks not only helped in increasing the product adoption but also helped to hone the product offerings.

We offered a minimum $4000 to be awarded as prizes for the hackathon. The primary thesis for us picking the winners was to see Biconomy being fully integrated into the platform and the long term vision of the project. We were very clear on supporting the teams that were long term aligned with continuing their project. Infact, apart from the prizes we will be supporting the teams offline as well

Out of the 20+ truly amazing projects that participated in the hackathon, we decided to award two prizes:

• Batua: A simple end-user wallet with a decentralised non-custodial stablecoin called Rupaysa pegged to the Indian Rupee. The user interface enables sending and receiving Rupaysa using Biconomy’s gasless meta-transactions for a simplified user experience.
• Unite Community: A tool that makes it easy to automatically distribute tokens to your community to reward social media engagement. Rather than ‘pushing’ tokens to people, they have implemented a ‘pull’ process where users can easily claim tokens.

We believe these projects have a lot of potential going forward. They have successful plans for integrating Biconomy and have demonstrated that user-facing products can be created that mask blockchain complexities.

Apart from these prizes, we also decided to provide 1 month of free subscription to all the ETHOnline participants. You can still claim it!

Claim your free 1 month Biconomy subscription!
Send a quick mail to connect@biconomy.io

AMA & Technical Workshop

We conducted a technical workshop on improving user experience for web3 projects using meta-transaction. There are high barriers to entry for building web3 products for developers, while there is significant onboarding friction for the users. These are critical topics of concern for many blockchain projects. Hence, we had a lot of inquisitive developers during our workshop. You can watch the workshop or view the presentation below to understand how to simplify web3 experiences with almost no additional development time.

We also conducted an AMA where we shared our crazy journey and how we started Biconomy. We also discussed our roadmap for the Biconomy ecosystem. It was a great opportunity for us to hear from the community too and interact with the folks who have been following us!! There was a lot of constructive feedback that has helped us add targets to our roadmap. Watch the AMA here! And you can still ask us anything ;) Just drop us a message on our telegram.

Our future targets based on feedback

We are a project whose mission is to support the DApp developer community. Hence, we are always looking for ways to improve our offerings. There were a few key requests that came up during the event.

• A lot of folks asked for ethers.js support as they use it as the front-end library for their project. This was already on our roadmap, but seeing the immense demand we have accelerated the development
• Many participants requested an ERC20 forwarder that will allow the end users to pay transaction fees in ERC20 tokens. The end users will still experience a smooth onboarding process and the DApp projects won’t always have to subsidise the gas fee. We have been working on this for some time and will launch it in a couple of weeks!
• Layer 2 exits is another feature in high demand. We have already been brainstorming and working on different ideas on how to enable quick fund movement from L2 to L1 and even between different L2s.
• We also see a lot of demand for projects building on layer 2 using biconomy, so we are doubling our effort to support more chains. We are currently live on Matic Network and Xdai

We are focussed and motivated to continue building features that support the DApp developer community better. Follow us on twitter to stay updated about these releases and updates! We would also love to hear from you on what we can do better.

All in all, ETHOnline was a great experience for us. Biconomy will continue to participate in future hackathons and events. We are always looking to work and collaborate with innovative decentralized projects! We are also looking for creative and passionate misfits who want to be a part of our journey, so feel free to reach out.