Matic AMA Recap with Biconomy COO, Aniket Jindal

On the 24th of November, 2020, Aniket Jindal, the COO of Biconomy, was live at the Matic Network telegram AMA Session, to provide the Matic community with insights on why Matic stakers should delegate to Biconomy’s node. Biconomy is an early validator on the Matic Network and their project offers seamless onboarding & optimized transactions on web3 projects with minimal efforts for developers. The session was moderated by Delroy, one of the Matic Network Telegram Community moderator.

In order to ensure clarity to my readers, this article has been divided into three segments; the first segment, gives full account of the questions asked by the moderator of this AMA session (Delroy), the second segment, gives account of the questions asked by Matic community members, while the third segment gives account of the closing statements.

SEGMENT 1

Delroy — Please welcome the Biconomy team who will be hosting with today for the AMA. Aniket Jindal will be joining us today.

Its really nice to have the Biconomy team today here. You guys were one of the first validators that we had onboarded when we launched our Mainnet.

Aniket Jindal —

Likewise, it’s been a quite a long journey. Super excited for today’s AMA

Delroy — It would be nice if you could introduce Biconomy to our community. Many of us must already know but it would be great for the newbies to get to know about you as well.

Aniket Jindal —

Sure thing, my name is Aniket Jindal and I’m the COO at Biconomy, thanks for having me. Biconomy is a developer platform that empowers blockchain developers to enable a simplified transaction and onboarding experience for their Web3 project.

The plug-n-play solution allows Web 3 interactions to be smooth and seamless between DApps and end-users by removing blockchain complexities. We do this by providing a non-custodial, and gas efficient relayer infrastructure network that enables meta transactions at scale.

Delroy — Yes! Meta transaction and gasless transactions are heavily required right now considering the gas prices that we see daily on the Ethereum network. Thanks for the introduction Aniket. So why did you choose Matic Network as one of the network to operate a Node on?

Aniket Jindal —

First of all, since the beginning of Biconomy as we mentioned earlier, we have been closely working with the Matic team. Matic is the first network on which we are running an official validator node and it has been a great experience.

Few reasons we chose to run Matic validator were:
We are supporting and integrating a lot of projects building on Matic so it made sense to run validator support to further provide better support to these DApps.

We do see a lot of synergies between Matic and our vision of making DApps mainstream.
Needless to say, we believe Matic has a great future and we want to be an integral part of that future for sure.

Delroy — Thanks for the Kind words Aniket! We absolutely feel the same about Biconomy too. We are in this for the long haul. So talking about Matic and building synergies, could you tell us about the experience you have within the Blockchain and Staking industry?

Aniket Jindal —

Sure. 2 years ago back in late 2018, when we first started Biconomy, we started with a running node for Tezos. But after some time we started to see the friction which a normal user will face and eventually lose the interest in any Blockchain-related DApp. Hence we started looking for the solution for that and working towards our one single goal, how to make life easier for any blockchain user and how to enable seamless onboarding for users.
It has been a great journey since then!

Delroy — Absolutely! I think “Making things easier for the user” has been the fundamental vision of Matic as well and that’s why our collaboration has been working kindly.

Aniket Jindal —

Absolutely.

Delroy — We know that Matic is one of the first nodes that you are operating. Are you operating nodes for any other networks / projects and what measures do you take to efficiently run them?

Aniket Jindal —

Just to clarify, we are a Relayer infra service provider and not a node operator. However, we do see ourselves running nodes for the projects we support.
To efficiently run the nodes, we have our servers running behind firewalls and have DDOS protection mechanisms deployed. We are following sentry server architecture that adds an extra layer of protection to our staking server. We have alerts and monitoring systems in place that monitor our servers for any high resource usage and alerts us if any red flag is found.

Delroy — Oh great! That means you will be well informed whenever things are not working correcly on your node with all the monitoring tools. Nice!

Aniket Jindal —

Yep! We have automated most of it!

Delroy — So coming down the important question of the day. Delegation. We are planning to open up delegations for everyone (Community and External nodes) in December. Are you looking forward to it?

Aniket Jindal —

Absolutely, the entire Biconomy team and community is excited. We are partnering with a plethora of projects from DeFi to gaming and may more. We will be launching many exciting campaign so that we can distribute exclusive rewards to the community.
Again we are just getting started and trying to be as creative as possible so would be needing a lot of support and feedback from the community.

Delroy — Absolutely! We know for a fact that a lot of people in the community are excited for the Delegations to be open as well. So in terms of Delegation, and this is one of the most important questions that Delegators have when they look forward to delegation. Why should delegators stake on your node? Would there be any benefits for them?

Aniket Jindal —

Biconomy, being a chain agnostic middleware as a company is exposed to all types of transactions. As mentioned, we will be launching many exciting campaign so that we can distribute exclusive rewards to the community. Again, we would be needing a lot of support and feedback from the community. Work in progress!

Delroy — This is exciting news. We cannot wait to here more about your campaigns. I’m sure the community is as well excited about it.

So staying on the topic of Delegation, What kind of concerns have you come across when talking to people about delegation when they ask questions like, “who should I delegate to” and how do you address these? Also, are there any other concerns that you would like to clarify?

Aniket Jindal —

Good question.

1. Security, how secure are we? — As I mentioned above We have alerts and monitoring systems in place that monitor our servers for any high resource usage and alerts us if any red flag is found.
2. Trust, why should they trust Biconomy? — we have a long history of running nodes and been using the best practices to instill trust in the community.
3. Node uptime- for this we are closely working with Matic team to monitor our node performance and how we can improve it. also internally in our team we are planning to build a automated notification system which will keep on monitoring the nodes and notify immediately.
4. Moreover, easy UX/smooth onboarding can be more of a pull in that alleviates a concern.

Delroy — Good point about Node Uptime. You guys have been running your node at almost 100% performance which is line with our Foundation Nodes. So great going guys, that is absolutely great efficiency on your node.

Moving to the last 2 questions for the AMA. And these are more in lines for new and coming validators.

Aniket Jindal —

Thanks to our hard working dev team! Sure!

Delroy — What are the some of the biggest challenges for operating nodes? Some of our community members would be looking forward to this question.

Aniket Jindal —

Validator business model is a business where there is predictable income, however, it’s a business model where fees can go down over time due to competition. The challenge is to pick the best networks that can provide the best sustainable rewards over time and how to best beat competition by not using fees alone but rather other things such as brand, other ancillary services.

Delroy — So you’re basically saying to research extensively before jumping on the wagon to run a node. Am I correct?

Aniket Jindal —

Yep, and we will try our best to spread awareness from our end to the community.

Delroy — So in terms of encouragement, what would you like to say to up and coming validators? Someone who wants to run a node on Matic but are nervous about it. Especially on PoS networks like Matic.

Aniket Jindal —

The first and the foremost thing for anyone considering to run a validator node to thoroughly read the entire token economies of the network. This will definitely give an idea to pick right projects and also get an overview of the potential ROI.

There is another important aspect to build the infrastructure needed. It can be both time consuming and a bit expensive so only if you are willing to make that upfront investment to get into this business. rest, we have the every supporting Matic team to guide the way!
Hope the above was encouraging.

Delroy — Very insightful answer I must say Aniket. Lastly, anything that you would like to add?

Aniket Jindal —

Lastly I will say, we are super excited to be working closely with the Matic team. We can clearly see Matic being one of the most preferred layer 2 solutions at this point of time. There are a lot of awesome projects yet to be launched in the pipeline. So it’s a good time to be in the industry.

SEGMENT 2

Community Question 1 — Gasless transactions is something that I have no doubt is novel and very attractive. My question is, if gas is a fee that rewards nodes and avoids spam, if there is no gas, how then does Biconomy intend to avoid saturation of the network? Or seen in another way, with gasless, who pays the bill?

Aniket Jindal —

Great question! the projects integrating Biconomy pay the has bill currently. And on Matic it’s very cheap so all the projects take it more of a server cost.

Community Question 2— Your website says “Blockchain Agnostic”. What exactly is agnostic? From what perspective is this measured or rated?

Aniket Jindal —

We are currently compatible with all the evm-based chains. Also, we are building on Tezos as we speak.

Community Question 3— How do you deal with the current race of hackers trying to exploit any smart contract related to DApps and DeFis? Do you have any active hackathons or bug bounty to help improve the platform? Or also, are you working with auditors?

Aniket Jindal —

We are actually very active in sponsoring hackathons and giving dev grants. We recently sponsored eth global and currently sponsoring money dance by ava labs. Yes, our contracts are audited

Community Question 4— Hi all! You currently support matic, ethereum xDai. Do you plan to join other networks? Since there is currently fierce competition over which is the best blockchain for dApps, we have BSC, tron, Bitcoin 2nd layers. What do you think? Thank you very much.

Aniket Jindal —

Bsc and AVA are already supported on the test net. Yes, you see new chains being supported as we move along.

Community Question 5— Pretty insightful AMA, Delroy and Aniket! if you have to advise a person looking into Biconomy and GSN, what key benefits would you mention for him to stick to Biconomy only?

Aniket Jindal —

Hahah, I got the answer ready for this.

Biconomy Pros:

• Dashboard for developers to more granular control on meta transaction usage.
• Quick 2 step integration with no extra smart contract deployments.
• No need to worry about protocol changes or new trends on blockchain.
• Biconomy makes sure the system is up-to date with market trends.
• Less gas per transaction as no extra hops on-chain and payments are processed off-chain.
• Gas fee can be paid in stable tokens, ERC20 tokens or Fiat.

Biconomy Cons:

• Not decentralized, so need to trust Biconomy servers for processing transaction.

GSN Pros:

• Decentralized system, so no need to trust any single Relayer.
• GSN2 is simpler than GSN1, so comparatively easy to setup.
• Relayers can be paid in ERC20 tokens while paying back the fees.

GSN Cons:

• Extra setup is required.
• High Relayers fees.
• Regular monitoring on DApp funds is required to repay the Relayers.
• High transaction fee, as extra processing done on chain like multiple hops, checking DApp deposits, Relayer payments.
• 70 cents more costlier than Biconomy, per transaction.

Community Question 6 — What are of advantages including gaming platform here?

Aniket Jindal —

Gaming works perfectly with meta transactions as we see high volume of transaction and removing per transaction fees is key to spread mass adoption. There are couple of games such as Zedrun, Decentral games going live with Biconomy

Community Question 7— I have read that 2 years ago they started with an execution node for Tezos and currently their node is running on Matic, so I wonder, how do these 2 compare in the Biconomy ecosystem? Also, what impact has the latter generated?

Aniket Jindal —

As mentioned we just started off with tezos baking and hence started running a tezos but we realised other important UX problems to be solved as we dug deeper so discontinued our services.

Community Question 8— And how does Biconomy make its profits? I am concerned about the sustainability of the projects.

Aniket Jindal —

We are currently working on a monthly subscription basis so all these projects integrating us have paid a monthly fees.

SEGMENT 3

Delroy — Thanks for joining us today Aniket Jindal. It was a pleasure. We have now ended with the AMA. Thanks to the community for all your questions! I hope you have a great evening ahead.

Folks that have more questions for the Biconomy team, please join their Telegram channel

Aniket Jindal —

Thanks a lot Delroy and the entire Matic team. It was a great session!