Startup Deep Dive : Biconomy — the exchange trusts its wallet infrastructure while its own token hits an all-time low

In July 2026, Biconomy’s BICO token slid to an all-time low of $0.01125, according to CoinMarketCap — a coin that had briefly traded around $21 to $22 within days of its December 2021 debut, per CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. Less than a year before that low, in August 2025, Gemini, a New York-regulated United States crypto exchange, chose this seven-year-old, Singapore-incorporated infrastructure company to build the smart-account engine sitting underneath its own wallet.

That contradiction is the whole story. Biconomy is a company whose plumbing keeps getting adopted by people who matter — a global exchange, DeFi protocols moving hundreds of millions of dollars — while the token that ordinary investors can actually buy has spent four years grinding toward zero. Untangling infrastructure adoption from token price from the company’s own modest, rupee-denominated revenue is the point of what follows.

Quick facts

What they do

Biconomy sells “account abstraction” infrastructure — the software that lets a wallet, exchange or app give crypto users a smart contract-powered account instead of a bare cryptographic key pair, so that logins, gas payments and multi-step transactions can be handled behind the scenes rather than exposed to the end user. Its customers are the wallet providers, exchanges and decentralised-application teams who embed its software development kits and APIs; the people who ultimately use a Biconomy-powered wallet rarely know the company’s name.

• Nexus — an ERC-7579 modular smart-contract wallet, audited four times between September 2024 and March 2025 by CodeHawks-Cyfrin, Spearbit, Zenith and Pashov, deployed with unified addresses across major EVM networks (GitHub bcnmy/nexus repository; Biconomy documentation, accessed September 2026)
• Modular Execution Environment (MEE), marketed as “Supertransactions” — lets one user signature trigger a multi-step, cross-chain sequence of actions instead of a single on-chain call
• Paymasters and bundlers — the ERC-4337 components that sponsor gas fees so end users never need to hold a native gas token
• Hyphen — the company’s earlier cross-chain liquidity bridge, whose version 2.0 smart contracts were put through a public Code4rena audit contest in March 2022

Biconomy’s own documentation states that more than 2 million smart accounts have been created on Nexus and that over $500 million in value has moved through it “without reported incidents” (Biconomy documentation, accessed September 2026) — a company-reported figure, not one independently verified for this piece.

The origin

Biconomy was founded in 2019 by Ahmed Al-Balaghi, Aniket Jindal and Sachin Tomar, and incorporated as Biconomy Labs Pte. Ltd. in Singapore on 7 October 2019, with a parallel presence registered in Gurugram, India (CoinCarp). Tomar, the CTO, had spent roughly eight years as a developer at companies including Samsung and MakeMyTrip before moving into blockchain work, according to his own professional profile. The founding insight was not technical in the narrow sense — Ethereum already worked — it was about who could actually use it. A new user needed a wallet, needed to already own the blockchain’s native token just to pay gas, and needed to repeat that setup on every new chain. Biconomy’s first bet was that if a dApp could pay a user’s gas fee on their behalf through a relayer network — a “meta-transaction” — that single friction point would matter more to adoption than any improvement in transaction throughput. By mid-2020 the company had live pilot integrations with Curve.fi and Idle Finance, two early DeFi protocols, using that relayer model (CryptoVC newsletter, 4 August 2020, citing Biconomy’s own seed-stage pitch materials).

The struggle years

The company’s own seed pitch deck, reviewed and dated 4 August 2020 by the CryptoVC newsletter, shows a business still hunting for its footing: three founders and five full-time employees, three live integrations, and roughly six months of runway left while trying to close a $1 million seed round. Just as unresolved was how the company would ever charge for what it built — the deck weighed a flat monthly subscription of $200 to $300, a 0.05% to 0.1% transaction fee, or a native token, without committing to any of the three. That kind of uncertainty, this late into a product’s life, is a near-death signal in itself: a company can run out of runway waiting to decide how it gets paid.

The second stretch of difficulty came from the market, not the product. BICO priced its December 2021 debut near the top of the entire crypto cycle, then rode the 2022 to 2023 downturn down with it, shedding the overwhelming majority of its value over the following years — a slide that continued all the way to a fresh all-time low of $0.01125 in July 2026 (CoinMarketCap). That decline unfolded precisely while the company was trying to use the same token to decentralise its relayer network, tying a core piece of infrastructure to an asset whose price it did not control. Separately, when Biconomy put its newer Hyphen 2.0 bridge contracts through a public Code4rena audit contest in March 2022, reviewers covering 1,621 lines of Solidity across seven contracts found 5 high-severity and 20 medium-severity vulnerabilities — including bugs that would have allowed free token deposits and manipulated share pricing — before the code reached mainnet. Code4rena’s own report noted that “overall, code quality for the Hyphen 2.0 contracts is high,” so this was a caught-in-time result rather than a loss of user funds, but it is a documented reminder of how much can go wrong in bridging code shipped under pressure.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point came on 15 August 2025, when Biconomy announced that Gemini — the US cryptocurrency exchange regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services — had built its new self-custodial wallet on the Biconomy Nexus stack (Biconomy blog, 15 August 2025; corroborated by a TradingView/Coindar news republish). Gemini’s wallet uses passkeys instead of seed phrases, a single address across supported EVM networks, and gasless execution for new users — all features assembled from Nexus’s ERC-7579 modules rather than built by Gemini from scratch. For a company that had spent six years selling infrastructure that end users never see, having a licensed, regulated exchange choose to build on it rather than in-house was the clearest third-party validation Biconomy had received.

Set the two sides of the ledger next to each other. On one side: a global, regulated exchange betting its own wallet’s plumbing on Biconomy in August 2025. On the other: within roughly eleven months of that announcement, BICO — the instrument through which the public actually owns a piece of this story — touched its lowest price ever, $0.01125, in July 2026 (CoinMarketCap). Enterprise validation and public market price moved in opposite directions at the same time, which is exactly the gap this piece is trying to explain rather than paper over.

The money behind it

• Seed round, reported 11 January 2021: $1.5 million from Fenbushi Capital, Outlier Ventures and Binance Labs — now rebranded YZi Labs (CoinCarp)
• Private round, 28 July 2021: $9 million led by Mechanism Capital and DACM, with Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Huobi Innovation Labs, Bain Capital Ventures, True Ventures and other crypto-focused funds (CoinDesk, 28 July 2021)
• Public token sale, 28 October 2021: $11.5 million raised on CoinList ahead of the BICO token-generation event, drawing more than 860,000 registrations and roughly 12,000 new token holders (CoinDesk, 28 October 2021)
• Strategic round, reported 28 March 2024: amount undisclosed, with Jump Capital, Borderless Capital and ConsenSys Ventures named among the investors (CoinCarp)

Adding the three disclosed rounds comes to roughly $22 million, which matches Inc42’s company-profile figure of “$22.00 million across three funding rounds” (Inc42, accessed September 2026) — two independently compiled tallies landing on the same number. No equity valuation for Biconomy has been published in any source reviewed for this piece. That gap matters because it is routinely confused with the BICO token’s market capitalisation of roughly $22.4 million (CoinGecko, 25 September 2026) — a number set by exchange trading among token holders, not by the company’s investors, and not a stand-in for what Biconomy the company is worth.

How it makes money

As late as August 2020, Biconomy’s own pitch materials show it still choosing between three revenue models: a subscription of roughly $200 to $300 a month, a 0.05% to 0.1% transaction fee, or a token (CryptoVC newsletter, 4 August 2020). It picked the third path in public: BICO launched in December 2021 as the network’s staking, governance and rewards token (CoinDesk, 28 October 2021). Today, per the company’s own documentation, its commercial relationships with wallets, exchanges and dApps run through direct integration agreements for the Nexus and MEE stack — paymaster gas sponsorship, bundler infrastructure and cross-chain execution — rather than a visible per-transaction fee charged to end users. The specific commercial terms of named integrations, including Gemini’s, are not public.

• What people get wrong first: BICO’s roughly $22.4 million market capitalisation (CoinGecko, 25 September 2026) is a token metric set by traders, not a measure of Biconomy’s revenue, profit or equity value — the two are unrelated numbers that happen to share a company name
• What people get wrong second: the company’s India-registered entity reported revenue of just ₹4.2 crore (~$437,500) in FY22, up from ₹44.6 lakh in FY21 — a real but small number set against both the $22 million raised from investors and the token’s market capitalisation (Inc42, accessed September 2026)
• No profit or loss figure for Biconomy has been located in the public filings reviewed for this piece

The numbers

These two years are the only Biconomy revenue figures located in the company-data trackers checked for this piece (Inc42, accessed September 2026). FY23, FY24 and FY25 filings were not found in either the Inc42 or Entrackr financial trackers consulted, both of which carry dozens of other Indian startups’ figures for those years but not Biconomy’s — so rather than estimate a number no filing supports, this piece stops the table at FY22 and flags the gap. It is also worth restating plainly: ₹4.2 crore is the revenue of Biconomy’s India-registered entity alone. Whatever the Singapore parent, Biconomy Labs Pte. Ltd., earns globally from its enterprise integrations is not separately disclosed in any source reviewed here, and should not be assumed to equal, or even resemble, the India-entity figure.

Where the money comes from

Biconomy does not publish a revenue split by geography or business segment. What is verifiable instead is where its technology sits, which is its own kind of segment picture:

• Consumer wallets: Gemini’s self-custodial wallet, launched August 2025, runs on the Nexus stack for login, addressing and gas sponsorship (Biconomy blog, 15 August 2025)
• Multi-chain coverage: Biconomy’s documentation describes Nexus as carrying “unified deployment addresses” across major EVM networks, naming Ethereum, Base and Optimism explicitly (Biconomy documentation, accessed September 2026)
• DeFi execution: a Biconomy blog post published 24 March 2026, titled “When Yield Optimization Got Smart: How Rosetta Turned $270M in Capital Into Self-Orchestrating Strategies,” describes a partner running $270 million in capital through automated strategies on the company’s execution layer (Biconomy blog listing, accessed September 2026) — a company-published claim, not independently verified for this piece

The surprise sits in the gap between these numbers. A single partner integration cited on Biconomy’s own blog moves more capital ($270 million) than the entire disclosed annual revenue of the India entity across two years combined many times over, and the company says north of $500 million in total value has passed through Nexus. For infrastructure that is supposed to be invisible and everywhere, “value processed” turns out to be a completely different number from “money Biconomy keeps” — and only the second one tells you whether the business works.

The risks

• Token-value risk: BICO traded as low as $0.01125 in July 2026, more than 99% below the roughly $21 to $22 level it briefly reached within days of its December 2021 listing (CoinMarketCap; CoinGecko) — anyone holding the token as an incentive or investment, including early backers and possibly staff paid in BICO, has seen most of that value erased over the token’s lifetime
• Smart-contract risk that survives audits: the Nexus code repository itself discloses a fixed issue “affecting classic (non-7702) accounts that hold funds before they are deployed,” disclosed alongside four separate third-party audits carried out between September 2024 and March 2025 (GitHub bcnmy/nexus, accessed September 2026) — proof that even a four-times-audited smart-account codebase can carry a live, disclosed flaw
• Platform and roadmap risk: Ethereum’s own Pectra hard fork, live from May 2025, shipped EIP-7702, which lets ordinary externally-owned wallets borrow smart-account features natively instead of needing a third-party provider. That is the exact function Biconomy built a business selling. The company has responded by building EIP-7702 compatibility directly into its own SDKs (Biconomy blog), which is a sensible defensive move, but it is a response to the risk, not evidence the underlying business model survives Ethereum absorbing the feature it monetises

The takeaway

Biconomy’s seven years say something that reaches well past crypto. The founders correctly diagnosed, as early as 2019, that gas fees and seed phrases — not blockchain throughput — were what kept ordinary people out of the products they were building. They kept being proven right about that diagnosis, culminating in a regulated exchange choosing to build its own wallet on Biconomy’s rails in 2025. None of that foresight moved the number that the public actually owns a piece of: a freely floating token whose price is set by speculative trading flow, not by the enterprise contracts signed in the same year. The lesson for a founder is not that tokenising a business is a mistake. It is that the instrument you sell to the public and the business you actually run can drift so far apart that being validated on one axis — adoption — tells you nothing about the other — price — and treating the two as the same thing is the fastest way to mislead your own team, and your own investors, about how the company is actually doing.

Frequently asked questions

What does Biconomy actually build?

Biconomy builds account-abstraction infrastructure — smart-contract wallets (Nexus), gas-sponsorship and transaction-bundling components (paymasters and bundlers), and a cross-chain execution layer (the Modular Execution Environment) — that wallet providers, exchanges and decentralised apps embed so their own users get a normal-app experience without seed phrases or gas tokens.

Is Biconomy an Indian company?

Its holding entity, Biconomy Labs Pte. Ltd., was incorporated in Singapore on 7 October 2019, and it also maintains a registered presence in Gurugram, India (CoinCarp). The India entity files its own revenue separately from the Singapore parent, and only the India entity’s figures — ₹4.2 crore in FY22 — were found in public company-data trackers for this piece.

What is the difference between Biconomy’s token and Biconomy’s revenue?

BICO is a freely traded cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of roughly $22.4 million as of 25 September 2026 (CoinGecko), set by exchange trading among token holders. Biconomy’s revenue is the money the company itself books from its India entity’s filings, most recently ₹4.2 crore in FY22 (Inc42). The two numbers are unrelated and should never be added together or substituted for one another.

How much has Biconomy raised, and is it profitable?

Across a seed round (January 2021), a private round (July 2021) and a public token sale (October 2021), Biconomy raised roughly $22 million, plus an additional undisclosed-amount strategic round in March 2024 (CoinCarp; Inc42; CoinDesk). No profit or loss figure for the company has been located in the public filings reviewed for this piece.

Why did BICO’s price fall so much?

BICO launched near the top of the 2021 crypto cycle and then fell alongside the broader market downturn, eventually setting a fresh all-time low of $0.01125 in July 2026, more than 99% below its roughly $21 to $22 level in December 2021 (CoinMarketCap; CoinGecko). The token’s entire 1 billion supply was already circulating by the time of this research, so there was no scarcity mechanism left to offset years of net selling pressure.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• CoinDesk, “Biconomy Raises $9M to Make Building Dapps Easier for Developers,” July 2021
• CoinDesk, “Biconomy Raises $11.5M in Public Sale of Native Token BICO,” October 2021
• CoinCarp, Biconomy project and funding profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, Biconomy company financial profile, accessed September 2026
• Code4rena, “Biconomy Hyphen 2.0 contest Findings & Analysis Report,” March 2022
• GitHub, bcnmy/nexus repository README (audit history and disclosed fix), accessed September 2026
• Biconomy documentation (docs.biconomy.io), accessed September 2026
• Biconomy blog, “Gemini Builds on the Biconomy Nexus Stack to Power Its Self-Custodial Wallet,” 15 August 2025
• Biconomy blog homepage listing (blog.biconomy.io), including the 24 March 2026 Rosetta post title and date, accessed September 2026
• TradingView/Coindar news republish, “Biconomy to Be Integrated With Gemini Wallet,” accessed September 2026
• CoinGecko, Biconomy (BICO) price page, accessed 25 September 2026
• CoinMarketCap, Biconomy (BICO) price page, accessed 25 September 2026
• CryptoVC newsletter (Camron Miraftab), “SEED: Biconomy — ‘Stripe for DeFi & Web 3.0,'” 4 August 2020

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