Let’s Talk Cross-Chain: Biconomy

Let’s Talk Cross-Chain is a series hosted by LI.FI where we interview founders and teams building key infrastructure for the multi-chain future.

For this interview, we’re joined by the Biconomy team, the brains behind Hyphen 2.0, Biconomy’s bridging solution. It is one of the most capital efficient and fastest bridges available to users.

Let’s dive in!

Hyphen 2.0

Interview

Welcome to the LI.FI’s Let’s Talk Cross-Chain Interview Series. First, please introduce yourself, as well as the origins and development history of Biconomy.

The origin story is quite funny actually, the first thing the 3 of us ever did was run a staking node for Tezos, back in the day! But then we realized that one of the biggest pain points in the industry was that dApps are so difficult to use. So we started thinking about that more and more.That’s how the focus of Biconomy & what we wanted to do shifted to solving the usability issues. And that’s still our guiding light and mission for the company.

Since your beta launch in August 2019, what’s the growth been like? Can you talk more about the time since launch and how did it look inside Biconomy? Would love to hear about raising funds as well.

The short answer is that it’s been a crazy ride! We’ve come on leaps and bounds since 2019; we learned a lot from our first version of the Gasless product, and with each client we onboarded, we kept on learning and improving our offerings. Last year, we took the jump into cross-chain interoperability, as we realized the big gaps in the space.

It’s funny, one of our clients actually pointed out their end-users were having issues going cross-chain which made us think more and more about how we can solve this problem. Our expertise as an infrastructure project by that point meant that we were ready for this new challenge, and we launched Hyphen Q3 2021. From a team of 3 founders, we had grown to 13 by then, and today it’s over 30 full-time contributors, with more to come!

Funding, well that was fun — in 2019 no one wanted to fund us. In early2020 we got lucky to be part of an accelerator that gave us our first funding. Since then, we slowly got angels interested. By the end of 2020, we had raised our first seed of $1.5mn — let’s say that took us about 15 months or so! Our private round in 2021 was easier and streamlined which took 3 months. That totaled to $9mn, and the public sale on Coinlist was sold out straight away, which was $11.5mn. The journey has been wild.

What is your next big focus, tech, and concept-wise?

Our next big focus is the launch of the Biconomy chain & multi-chain relayer protocol. We’ve always wanted to run things in a decentralized manner, and once we have our Trustless Multi-chain Relayer Network up and running, we can continue further along this path.

This is a big landmark, as it will enable us to support all sorts of new primitives based on generalized message transfers. Imagine cross-chain lending, borrowing, trading, creating options, all single click and without moving your assets around. Doing this well, in a trustless and decentralized fashion, is the next big step in cross-chain interoperability that we will take with the launch of the Biconomy chain.

It will also be key in the future of Gasless & Hyphen, as we will be able to decentralize and add to BICO token utility in the economic model for our products.

How big of a role does decentralization play in your decision-making process and what trade-offs did you have to do to get to this level of decentralization and safety?

I think decentralization and building in the open are a key part of the web3 ethos. However, it has its own compromises. For example, completely decentralized decision-making is a slower and less efficient process. Thus, it’s important for any project to balance the two. This is why we launched our token when we did; Till we reached a product-market fit & a critical mass of clients we stayed nimble & agile. We made quick decisions and moved fast.

That doesn’t mean however that we didn’t listen to our community & client feedback. Then as we started scaling and growing, we launched our token. Now that we are more mature as a project & team, we are introducing more ways for the community to get involved in governance. We think this progressive way of decentralization is the right way for web3 projects, in particular for a project like ours.

The growth of a platform is dependent on community interaction. How does Biconomy interact with its user base?

We have two different categories of ‘users’ we interact with constantly. One are our product users — clients and web3 projects that integrate our solutions. Mostly the point of contact are web3 developers or founders. We stay in constant contact with all our 100+ clients on telegram. If anyone has any issue, our team is ready 24/7, on weekends, during the apocalypse, etc to respond.

We also get a ton of industry insights from our partners. The other group is the community. On discord & telegram and 20+ regional channels. We engage with them regularly. I even personally talked to a few to connect on a personal level and understand their ambitions of joining the community. We also do Twitter spaces, and community discord calls. And soon we will involve the community via the DAO to help us in the mission to onboard the next billion web3 users.

How do you see the ecosystem evolving? Is the future multi-chain?

The future is definitely multi-chain, the adoption of various alt-L1s and L2s we are seeing is proof of that. Many of these chains have ecosystems that cater to different use-cases; Ethereum Mainnet prices out most retail users which drove the adoption for Polygon, which in turn wasn’t decentralized enough for some, which ushered in the Optimistic rollups.

Scaling a chain is a hard problem, and if web3 is truly going mainstream, the ecosystem has to be multichain to support the sheer demand for blockspace. As builders, it is up to us to shape this future, by focusing on a decentralized & composable cross-chain landscape, where users from all these chains are able to move around in a simple & secure manner.

To onboard the next Billion users, UX is key, and that is at the core of the Biconomy vision. We ultimately believe chains will be abstracted from the UI layer — for the majority of end users they should not and would not care which chain they’re on.

What are your views on other bridges? What do you think is your competitive advantage over others?

As you guys know very well, there’s a lot of bridges currently in the market. Our edge is that we are the fastest bridge by a long margin. Users using Hyphen can move cross-chain with average transfer times of less than a minute, and often under 30 seconds!

We focus a lot on improving the user experience, and our other products like Gasless complement Hyphen by allowing users to bridge from Polygon without needing to have any MATIC for gas. Given Hyphen’s unique ability to deal only with native assets on the chains we support, it means we do not need to mint/burn tokens and create new standards.

This means we do not have trust assumptions like mint and burn bridges have. Our focus is on the capital-efficient liquidity layer and decentralizing the message passing that facilitates the transfers.

What are the biggest challenges you’re facing currently?

We have managed to have a small agile team and build innovative products with strong product fit. Now we need to scale. What we are solving for 30K dApp interactions daily, we need to do for 1M and then 10M and beyond.

So that’s the interesting challenge we are faced with in terms of scaling, growing the team, balancing trade offs, decentralizing further and above all maintaining sound and strong security practices. All this whilst remaining dear to our values and maintaining the culture, vision & work ethic we’ve set up are exciting challenges that we’re facing.

Great times ahead!

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Disclaimer: This article is only meant for informational purposes. The projects mentioned in the article are our partners, but we encourage you to do your due diligence before using or buying tokens of any protocol mentioned. This is not financial advice.