Biconomy rooted in UAE making the blockchain experience frictionless

The best companies in the world are those that solve problems. In the blockchain world one such company with its roots in Dubai’s Area 2071 is Biconomy. The word Biconomy is a Chinese English mix, with BI in Chinese meaning “token” and of course economy in English, explained in other words as token economy.

UNLOCK interviewed Ahmed Al Balaghi, Co-Founder of Biconomy to learn more, especially after the success of their recent seed funding round of 1.5 million USD led by European venture capital group Eden Block along with eight other investors including Fenbushi Capital, Binance, Outlier Ventures, and DACM, as well UAE Blockchain evangelist Dr. Marwan Al Zaarooni. According to Al Balaghi, “This is our seed round and we will be using it for product development, team building, expansion and general marketing.”

What is Biconomy?

Biconomy aims to enable blockchain developers to provide a simplified onboarding and transaction experience for users of Web 3.0 and blockchain projects. As AL Balaghi explains, “We are a transaction blockchain infrastructure for the next generation Web 3 applications on decentralized networks. As a founding team we came together first to do staking, and once we realized the network was secure and we were validators, we asked ourselves where are all the end users and where is the actual adoption of blockchain, and how can we increase adoption and make it mainstream.”

So the three founders, Sachin Tomar, Aniket Jindal, and Ahmed looked at the situation both with a business lens and technical one and found out that one of the biggest roadblocks are user experience and developer experience. So as Balaghi explains, “ We work on  building the meta-transactions, where by pairing public and private keys, users can sign meta transaction and incentivize desktop minters to pay the gas fees for them. Through our powerful an easy to use APIs (Application Programming Interface) developers can enable a simple and customized journey so users don’t get frustrated with blockchain complexity. Today when users use a Dapp there are gas fees at every single point, gas fees are a pain and should be low. By using Biconomy Dapp developers would pay the gas fees on behalf of their users and users don’t have to buy ETH or take on extra steps, so this was our original concept.”

He adds, “The ways in which users can use blockchain applications needs a complete overhaul. Netflix does not charge its users a fee every time they watch a video, so why should dApps charge users a gas fee for every interaction? This is the vital difference between a web2 application and an over-complicated web3 one”.

Biconomy’s customers are the developers who integrate with Biconomy’s APIs. There thesis is playing out on Layer 2 networks, Layer 2 blockchain technology is often referred to as an “off-chain” solution. Its main purpose is to scale blockchain transaction capacity while retaining the decentralization benefits of a distributed protocol. As Balaghi explains, “Most Dapps are being developed on L2 networks where gas fees are low and using our API and transaction infrastructure.” Layer 2 blockchain technology systems are those that connect for example to Ethereum, and rely on Ethereum as a base layer of security and finality.

We asked Al Balaghi what would happen if Ethereum was able to lower its gas fees dramatically, where would the need for Biconomy be? His reply, “We would love it if Ethereum were to reduce its gas fees, and we even have a product on Ethereum that optimizes gas fees. We will also be releasing a new product called Forward that allows end users to pay gas fees with stablecoins, because it can be tracked easily and it is less volatile. It also helps to resolve what we call stuck transactions which usually the end user has to manage but which we will manage from our side with relay infrastructure, we pay gas fees, and sometime resort to paying optimal gas fees to ensure transaction get out on time. We might up the gas fee in case it doesn’t go through. So we are trying to solve problems at the crypto transaction layers in both Layer 1 and Layer 2, as we want to build bridges and simplify things.”