Onmeta’s Year in Review — Tech
Jan 20, 2023
Roots of the Company
Onmeta was founded in early 2022 by Bharath T and Krishna Teja Nemani. Bharath previously worked as Head of operations at Rapido where he was responsible for building one of most admired operations stack in the mobility Industry. Krishna worked as Director of Technology at Rapido and scaled the tech stack that enabled Rapido to be the company that it is today. Together they wanted to solve the next big problem in the tech space and narrowed in on the Idea of Onmeta as they shared a common passion for blockchain and the decentralized world possible through technology.
In late 2021, with the rise of DeFi there was a lot of clamor to buy crypto tokens but the process to buy these tokens were really complicated for a non web3 native user. Onmeta founders saw an opportunity in simplifying this multi-step process into an easily processable couple of steps. This led to the launch of a crypto onramp product in May 2022 and this product also happens to be India’s first ever B2B facing crypto onramp platform. Since then the company has steadily grown every month and currently boasts multiple clients in Industries such as Web3 Gaming, DeFi, Crypto wallets and NFT marketplaces.
Quick Summary
Web3 builders of India! — We have been busy adding new features to your favorite On and Off ramp product in India since April 2022. Here’s a quick summary of the latest and greatest features that we launched in the last 3 quarters.
Updates in Detail
Launch of multiple payment methods in India
One of the biggest USPs of Onmeta was our ability to support UPI payments, the most commonly used payment method among retail customers in India. The prevalence of UPI in India and the seamless nature of transactions enabled many web3 gaming companies, DeFi and wallets to explore the India market successfully. For all its benefits, the UPI method comes with a limitation in the sense that it has a transaction limit of 1 Lakh per day per customer. Enter IMPS & NEFT — the two most common bank to bank transfer methods in India and these methods allow the end user to transfer upto 5 Lakhs per day per customer. We have enabled both these methods at the right time for our clients to convert their initial traction in India to a big ticket size customer base.
This feature is especially useful for companies in the wallet and exchange space as they have relatively higher ticket sizes than other Industries. On of the leading exchanges Integrated with Onmeta saw a 500% increase in transaction sizes worth 50K INR or more.
Revamped Merchant Dashboard for better user experience
This release is the first in a series of releases planned aimed at enabling our clients to use the dashboard to serve themselves without any manual intervention from Onmeta. The current version of dashboard enables the following functionalities:
View of our order history both Onramp and Off Ramp
View your API keys and set up a webhook URL in the dashboard
Select tokens that you want to display in the widget
Below is a Glimpse of how the new dashboard looks like
Customised payment method selection in widget based on transaction size
With the launch of new payment methods, it becomes critical that we optimize the conversion rate by the methods available. Our default payment method for INR is the UPI method but because it cannot support transaction size more than 1 lakh, now we automatically redirect greater than 1 Lakh transaction size to the IMPS method. We have noticed that this change helped improve the UPI method conversion rate by x % and overall order conversion rate by y%
Offramp with crypto input
This is an interesting one — on the face of it, off-ramping with fiat input (our current product) should solve the use cases of most of the customers. But we noticed that a lot of our gaming clients and DeFi clients preferred that we enabled offramp via crypto input. In the current flow it is difficult for the end user to understand the fiat value of the crypto they are holding in their wallet and had to make their own crypto to fiat conversion before inputting into the Onmeta widget. This led to 2 problems
Increase in friction to calculate fiat value
Unable to withdraw all tokens from their wallet due to slippage
We have effectively solved these problems by creating a new set of API’s through which you can offramp via crypto input.
Upgrade KYC for more seamless integration
While we don’t see KYC as a core technical competency of Onmeta, we still consider it our endeavor to provide the best possible KYC experience to the clients and end users using our widget. The current flow had certain limitations in terms of supporting seamlessly across different mobile and web interfaces. We have now resolved this by Integrating directly with our KYC partners widget and providing the experience enabled only by some of the top investment apps in India.
This has increased the KYC conversion rate by 20% and reduced the time to complete the KYC from 4 minutes to 2 minutes now.
Store of logs to new-relic and Upgrading internal libraries for having better traceability which will improve debugging experience
This feature has been long overdue now. While it is not really a client facing feature, it plays a super significant role in delivering a great experience to the clients and end users. Since its implementation we have seen that the average resolution time of customer tickets have reduced by 70% as we are able to act faster and narrow down on the root cause of the issue pretty quickly.
Offramp with any wallet based on EVM chains
In offramp we only had metamask integration so far but with improvements that we have implemented, we will be able to support offramp from any custodial wallet in a matter of few minutes. These new changes that we have made enable us to Identify the underlying wallet address (if it belongs to an EVM chain) seamlessly without any outside input and then make it easy to place a withdrawal request.
Retry mechanism for offramp fiat fails
Bank transfers are a tricky business especially as many of the Banks in India are undergoing a tech transformation and have their servers down frequently. With this feature we give ourselves an easy option to re-initiate any stuck fiat transactions especially in the offramp flow.
Offramp in Widget & API
Back in April, we launched our widget and API with just the Onramp functionality. Backed by demand from onboarded clients we launched our offramp in July 2022 in style. It came with the following features and instantly wowed our customers:
Instant payout to bank account
Support for 6 blockchains
Support for stable coins and normal crypto tokens
Philippines Onramp
Our initial Onramp product was launched Just for the Indian market; Due to popular demand, we launched our Onramp product in the Philippines, the largest web3 gaming market in the world in September 2022. Our onramp product was different from the competitors in the Philippines market in the following 2 ways:
Transaction processing time of < 1 minutes
Local payment support — ability to make payments via Gcash, Paymaya & Grabpay
KYC in widget
We consider it our utmost responsibility to prevent misuse of our platform for fraudulent purposes and to that extent we made it simple for our end users to complete KYC in the widget by integrating with the API’s of one of the top KYC players in India. Previously we collected KYC via an offline process and this upgrade allowed our end users to complete KYC within a couple of minutes and saved valuable time otherwise spent in the manual process.
API & widget Documentation
We also created a new API / Widget documentation using archbee that will make it so much easier for our clients to read and use our documentation. Apart from the cosmetic changes the team is constantly striving to improve the quality of API’s and you will notice this version of document has handled a lot more of the edge cases than the previous version.
Gas pricing calculation with EIP-1559
An even more exciting feature is the launch of the EIP1159 method to calculate gas fees — this method increases the conversion rate of our blockchain orders and at the same time brings down the gas fees. You can read more about the EIP1559 method of gas calculation here.
Custom Gas Price Calculations by Chain
We integrated with one of the leading EVM gas price oracle (Link) to bring accurate gas fees to process medium, fast and premium blockchain transactions. This integration will reap great benefits in the near future, as it allows us the flexibility to pick and send gas price for different transaction speeds depending on network traffic in all the major EVM chains and also provides us the option to easily speed up transaction speed when needed.
Onramp via API and Widget
We launched our Onmeta journey with the launch of Onramp product in Apr 2022. We initially launched it with the following features
IMPS Payment Support
Polygon and Ethereum Blockchain
Stable coin support
Since then we have expanded the product capability to include multiple payment methods, multiple currencies, multiple blockchains & support of both stablecoins and non-stable coins
Merchant Dashboard MVP Version
With the intention of providing visibility about our transactions to the end customers we launched Onmeta dashboard to provide easy access to order history and along with the ability to set up webhook URLs from the dashboard.
Satisfying the expectations of the very demanding web3 builders of India is a difficult process but hope we have justified your expectations with the latest set of additions made to our Onramp and Off Ramp product in 2022.
See you soon with more EXCITING updates in 2023. To new beginnings!
Cheers!
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If you want to improve your sales experience which will let your users buy cryptocurrency without leaving the platform, allow us to serve you. Book a call with Onmeta now!