Introducing Forward — pay gas in ERC20 tokens!

We are excited to launch Biconomy Forward! It’s another step in our mission of simplifying web 3 experiences. The simple APIs will allow end-users to pay gas in ERC20 tokens such as stablecoins. This will improve the onboarding experience & help users save their ETH.

We have all been there. You wanna trade a hot new token! But the Ethereum network is as congested as Trump’s golf plans. 1 unsuccessful low fee attempt & 2 failed attempts later, you bite the bullet & spend the 500 Gwei gas fee. As you bask in the glory of your smartness, you realize all these transactions ended up burning 0.1 ETH!

Other times, we have a random wallet with a bunch of tokens. But there is no ETH so we can’t move those funds, or swap them, or use them. It’s really frustrating. So you gotta first burn gas to send enough ETH to this wallet. And then if you move those tokens to your main wallet, you are stuck with 7$ of ETH that are now as useless as a windscreen wiper on a submarine.

The necessity to own ETH to pay gas is a bottleneck for new users

It’s even more frustrating for new crypto users. They want to try your shiny new Dapp. They’re all excited to dive into the whole ‘blockchain and crypto experience’. See for themselves what the buzz is all about. Only to be told they can’t do anything because they don’t have ‘ETH’. So they gotta complete KYC, buy ETH from an exchange, download a wallet, learn about metamask, connect it to your Dapp and then finally be able to do anything on it.

The whole process can take days and cost 20–30$ on really good days. In today’s age of seamless 1-click 5-second onboarding, this feels like an eternity.

Spending ETH as gas is a lost investment

But the biggest issue with spending ETH as gas is that you lose your ETH investments. On one hand, you deploy sophisticated ‘wolf of wall street’ strategies to accumulate as much ETH as possible, and on the other hand, you just waste it away like a new lottery winner shopping in a dollar store.

If you spent 100$ ETH as gas in March 2020, the same amount is now worth 800$–1000$! So you just burnt away 700–900$ in investments. That’s like buying groceries with Tesla Stocks. Not only did you lose your gains as the stock rallied, but the pack of milk you bought also ended up costing you twice as much. And everyone will think you are a lunatic for buying milk with Tesla stocks.

Now imagine if you could pay gas in any ERC20 token! You can use your tokens in wallets even without any ETH. New users can onboard in seconds using your tokens as gas. And paying for gas in stablecoins will save your ETH investments.

Biconomy Forward — Pay gas in ERC20 tokens

We, at Biconomy, understand these problems at the transaction level for end-users. Our mission is to simplify transactions for both end-users and developers. Thus, we are excited to launch Biconomy Forward — simple APIs that allow users to pay gas in ERC20 tokens!

This feature opens a ton of opportunities for developers to build various use cases such as:

• DeFi protocols and wallets can improve their user experience by allowing their end-users to do everything without having to own ETH.
• All decentralized applications can onboard new users in seconds by giving a sign-up bonus of their own tokens. Users can start interacting by paying gas using these tokens.
• Financial applications can allow users to pay gas in stablecoins. This will delight their users who want to save up their ETH and would rather pay gas in DAI, USDT, USDC etc. We see this becoming a competitive advantage for certain DeFi applications.
• Blockchain games can improve their crypto-economic model by allowing users to pay fees in their own tokens. This will add a new component in the token model.

The possibilities are endless. Multiple major projects are already integrating Biconomy Forward into their experience. We will be revealing our launch partners really soon so stay tuned!

Ensure no failed or stuck transactions!

Another annoying issue for a DeFi degen is getting your transactions stuck. Not only does it commit the cardinal sin of wasting your ETH, the transaction doesn’t go through all together! That’s super annoying for anyone, especially new crypto users.

However, Forward also ensures none of the transactions are stuck! We use various tricks to guarantee completed transactions while optimizing gas usage. So not only do you save your ETH, you also successfully complete your transaction on time.

We want to see more use cases for Biconomy Forward. How can you best leverage gas payment in ERC20 tokens? We would love to support bold new ideas that leverage Forward.

To dig deeper into the technicalities of how you can enable this, check out the documentation. If you have any questions, do feel free to get in touch with us on our telegram or discord!