.png)
A twenty-minute form started Ahmed on a life-changing road, via China, Vitalik Buterin, and the grassroots web3 communities that became Biconomy’s first customers.
We talk about the fundamental concepts that underpin money - the value we place, its usage as a proxy for conflict, and the fatalism of fiat currency that history is destined to repeat.
Web3 communities feature heavily in Ahmed’s journey, from initiating the first blockchain association for students in China, to sourcing Biconomy’s first customers, and spending most of 2020 actively listening to specific problems discussed in grassroot meetups.
We discuss the use of trust in selling your solution and how adding value to the projects around you without an agenda is the best way to introduce your project. Solutions not sales.
Building core infrastructure for web3 means gradually decentralizing and building for the future while solving for the now. Avoid building in a vacuum, focus on intentional use cases, make it provable, and put the end user’s experience at the heart of everything you build. Back in the nascent days of Ethereum, that meant asking how they could empower devs to build simpler experiences for better adoption.
1:54: Intro to Blockchain and studying Mandarin in China. How a twenty-minute form changed my life.
5.18: How Google’s rejection opened the door to a series of Blockchain meetups
8.16: The paradigm shift to replace fiat currency and the value of money
10.36: My introduction to Ethereum at $2 and speaking Chinese with Vitalik Buterin
13:12: The meeting of Aniket Jindel and how a group of international students initiated the first Blockchain association in China.
16:06: Meeting Sachin Tomar and assisting Polygon in an investment round during a Crypto Winter
17:52: Working for the Amazon of the Middle East
18:33: How a remote side project with staking planted the seed for Biconomy
20:50: A couple of hundred users on Ethereum made us ask how we could increase adoption and the life of developers and end-users
23:15: Meta transactions at a DAP level and focusing on why end-users have to pay gas fees
25:23: Making a full-time commitment to our vision and our first customer
27:10: Building during a bear market and avoiding building in a vacuum
29:16: Our launch on Ethereum and Polygon
31:19: How we built our growth on trust and solutions
34:19: A holistic ecosystem that makes web3 usable, frictionless, and gasless
37:15: An entire year of listening to our customers
38:21: Launching Hyphen
41.44: Things have to be frictionless at a transactional level. End users should be able to move freely.
44:01: Integration with DYDX - the easiest onboarding experience in crypto
46:15: Gas solutions: setting a preferred method for payments
47:24: What next for Biconomy
50:46: Multichain composability. What does the user’s next interaction look like?
53:28: Building for the future and solving for the now
55:36: Focus on being impactful and useful over decentralized and trustless
57:15: The challenge of scaling a team in web3
59.51: A shared narrative, North Star, and the founding values of Biconomy
1:05:50: Never lose the heartbeat of what you’re doing as a company
1:09:40: Aligning the team and the community with a vision. We know the direction over the destination.
