Crypto doesn’t sleep. As I write this article a token currency is being created somewhere, NFTs are being minted, protocols are being deployed and what not. This space is young and suffers from crippling beta issues. One such criticism about Web 3 is the high gas fees on Ethereum. Bad UX inhibits mass adoption. Lucky for us, some super talented folks from India blessed us with a couple of solutions. Let’s get into Why and How about Biconomy!
Why do we need Biconomy?
To answer this let’s first look at the current problems. Every time a user writes on the blockchain, a transaction is created. The user has to pay for such a transaction simply because the data is going to occupy space on a public ledger. Imagine the pain and suffering of the user. It’s similar to filling up gas every time you hit the road. Or charging your phone every time you make a call. Not cool! Bad UX!
As per etherscan.io out of 136 million unique addresses, only about 500K are daily active users on Ethereum. Imagine the potential of decentralized applications once user journeys are made frictionless. No wonder ignorant ones would call it a scam. In short, usability needs to be fixed.
It doesn’t end here. A user has to switch between multiple blockchains. Decentralized apps are very specific in terms of chains and tokens. Ethereum products do not provide native support for token swapping. Think of all the ETH one has to store just to buy NFTs and pay gas fees. Imagine if all Web 2.0 apps only gave the option for Apple ID to log in and you're left with no choice but to create it. That would keep away a lot of potential users. In other words, interoperability is a serious challenge to Web 3.0. What efforts are being made to resolve such known issues?
Enters Biconomy. It offers magical tools for developers to ease the transactional hassle for users, making Web 3.0 a much more frictionless experience.
Two much-needed gifts from Biconomy
- gas-less transactions
- network-agnostic relayer protocol
How the heck does it work?
Biconomy achieves this through meta transactions. What?! Yes, a meta transaction is a neat way to switch the gas-fee payer from end-user to a third party. The third party here is a trusted contract that signs the transaction on the user's behalf. Think of meta transactions as a conventional Web 2.0 transaction where you and I don't have to pay for storing tweets on Twitter's database. All storage and hosting costs are handled by Twitter.
Developers create a gas tank that is to be used for all transactional costs. Moreover, the dApp can have its gas tank for multiple networks making the transaction network agnostic. Super Cool right!
🤿 Let’s dive deeper
You’re a curious reader I tell you. Cool then, Biconomy provides developers with 2 paths to this magical journey. If you’re DIY kinda person with some unique use cases, there is Custom implementation. If you don’t have anything specific, feel free to go down EIP 2771 Standard path. In this article, we'll focus on the latter one.
🧪 Magic Trick One - Gasless
A smart contract that you’ll write doesn’t natively support the meta transactions. For this, we use an existing code called EIP-2771. Some super genius folks wrote this magical code to help other developers get access to native meta transactions. It will enable developers to relay gas fees by switching to a third-party gas payer.
In the above visual representation we have:
- User - The one who signs a transaction in a dApp with a unique address
- Gas relay - receives the transaction request off-chain and pays gas to verify transaction
- Trusted forwarder - a smart contract in itself, trusted by our business logic code. It verifies both signature and nonce before sending the transaction to our final smart contract.
- Compliant Smart Contract - all business logic resides here. It has to be EIP compliant to work with such relay calls.
Okay, the user is saved from hefty gas charges. But what about the constant struggle of network switching?
⚗ Magic Trick Two - Hyphen
Biconomy folks define Hyphen as a tool that provides simple APIs that lets you easily offer instantaneous value transfers between EVM chains, various L2s & allows quick onboarding from L1 to L2s.
An instant cross-chain transactions tool.
Hyphen is essentially a network agnostic token swapping bridge. How is it network agnostic? Well, the idea is simple, let’s say you want to buy an NFT listed on OpenSea. You are required to have ETH balance in your wallet to carry on with the transaction. What if you just have USDT in your crypto wallet? You’ll have to swap your precious USDT for some ETH and then will you proceed to purchase. This is not what an end-user would expect from digital transactions. Enters Hyphen.
Hyphen maintains a liquidity pool on both sides of the chain. It saves your time to visit a third-party exchange. Simply put, any ERC-20 token can be used to buy that ETH NFT. Hyphen does the swapping in the background.
🧩 Integration for developers
If you're a developer looking to use Biconomy tools. Here are the steps you have to follow:
- Smart contract upgrade to make it meta transaction compliant
- Register Smart Contract artefact on Biconomy dashboard
- SDK upgrade and API calls on the client-side
For a complete dApp tutorial, you can check this.
📜 Summary
Biconomy is here to make frictionless UX in decentralized apps. Their 2 key products are - “Gasless” for zero end-user transactional costs and “Hyphen” for chain agnostic experience. Gasless leverages native meta transactions while Hyphen uses liquidity pools in the back-end to support cross-chain interoperability. All of this comes bundled with developer-friendly SDKs and APIs.
🤗 Conclusion
I know there are many projects out there in a quest to make Web 3 more accessible. This was my little effort to understand and spread the word of one such venture. If you enjoyed reading this article share some love. Show it to the world. Tell others now you know how to bypass frustrating gas fees and network switching. Appreciate Biconomy for the amazing work they are doing. Ta-da!