The future is multichain,  according to Salil Naik , a frontend engineer from Goa who is part of the team that built Bungee – an app that helps you move assets between multiple blockchains.

Here are 3 questions that we asked Salil about Bungee and his work, this is what he had to say

What is Bungee?

In simple words, Bungee is a bridge aggregator. The web3 space is going multichain, that is, multiple blockchains co-exist parallelly. Today users are using chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Solana, etc. And to transfer assets (cryptocurrencies) between these blockchains is a tedious task. The users have to use bridges to transfer their assets across different chains. But there are so many bridges out there, that the user doesn’t understand which bridge to use and which route is more efficient. That’s where Bungee helps. Suppose the user wants to transfer USDC from Chain A to Matic on Chain B, we show them a bunch of routes they can take and also help them transfer their tokens across the chains.

It’s similar to how flights are shown on flight aggregators, where the users enter the source and destination, and they get a bunch of options to choose from. Each of those options takes a different route. Some may have layovers, some may be direct flights. Some routes may be faster, some may take more time. Some may stop at one destination, while others may stop at some different destination. Similarly, bungee shows a bunch of routes, each having different bridging properties. This allows the user to choose the route that is best for them. We also allow users to sort routes based on high returns, gas fees and bridging time.

In the near future, we are planning to roll out a multi-step bridging feature which will include destination swaps too. With this, users will get a lot more options of tokens to bridge and much more efficient routes to choose from. Bungee leverages Socket’s easy to use APIs to enable multichain bridging. Socket aims to unify the multichain ecosystem by connecting all chains and enabling seamless asset and data transfer between them. Our goal with Bungee is to provide the best bridging experience to our users and make it the go-to bridging app.

 

How did you get into web3?

It was an unexpected transition into the web3 space. During the pandemic, I came across this amazing opportunity by Devfolio called Ethereum India Fellowship. I applied for it and was shortlisted as one of the fellows. Shrey Keni, a good friend, who is interning at Socket was also a part of the fellowship.
During that fellowship, we learnt about Ethereum blockchain, smart contract, solidity, a bunch of DeFi protocols, deployed our own token, built some cool projects, etc from some amazing people from the industry. The journey which originated at a fellowship just blossomed after I joined Polygon as an Intern. At Polygon I spent 7 good months building their client-facing products with an awesome team in amazing work culture. After 7 months, I decided to leave Polygon to join Socket Technology as their only frontend engineer. And honestly, it’s the best decision I made.

What’s been your experience building Bungee?

I joined Socket as their first frontend engineer and it has been an amazing journey with a super cool team. For the past 6 months, my sole focus has been on improving Bungee’s UX and making it an app everyone would love to use. And it only gets better when the entire team is equally enthusiastic about the product you are building. Being one of the youngest engineers in the team, I get to learn a lot from my teammates.

When building a unique solution, you will always be challenged. There are few to absolutely no apps you can take inspiration from, but that also puts us in a sort of unique position. We are the ones to set the path, be it with our infrastructure, our product or our design.

Though my work is limited to Bungee at the moment, I’m trying to step into the unknown and try a few things that will make socket integration even easier. Imagine integrating Socket into your application in a few hours. How about a few minutes? Our backend team has done a commendable job of building a robust infrastructure, but our integrators still have to spend some time using those APIs to build the bridging solution on their dapp. And I want to simplify that process.

Maybe provide our integrators with a bunch of components that take care of everything they need, how cool would that be? How about a component library tightly bound with the APIs? There are a few crazy ideas in my mind, and I am looking forward to turning these ideas into reality.

My advice to all the young people reading this would be to work sincerely and to be open to challenges, feedback and criticism. At Socket, most of my learning has come from taking up full responsibility for my work and taking all the feedback seriously.