Streaming Money, a New Primitive for Crypto

Transcript

hello everyone nice to be here it's amazing what the guys have pulled off in the organization uh so my name is francesco i'm one of the founders of superfluid and i'm going to talk to you about streams that we think are a new primitive for crypto for defy and for money or in general so what is a primitive primitive is a basic piece of functionality which enables us to do other things with it right it might be useful in itself but it's definitely useful in combination with other things and in crypto in d5 we always talk about composability we always talk about building blocks about money legos

we're always talking about the same thing combining different products to create new ones now somewhere what what are some of the primitives of money well the first one that created most of what we know now in d5 is the token right so creating a token and when you create a token you basically define a name a supply and that's it that's your token right and this has enabled us to create uh units of value that are the basis of everything else we've done the balance the balance is the basic functionality of focus that tells you how much you have right how much does a user have and the transfer now the transfer is the

way we are used to experiencing money it's the the basic way that we've always interacted with money so you're moving an amount from one account to another right in a specific moment in time and we call these transactions right often people even use it interchangeably trans transaction and transfer often are used into interchangeably but that's actually not the case right you can make a transaction in d5 without making a transfer now what do we use one of values uh value transfers for so to buy products to donate pay someone invest and then in defy by incorporating this into other primitives we've also created a bunch of

stuff right we have oracle's time we have transfers we have smart contracts that can hold a balance and by doing this the the first basic thing we did was create a smart contract that can hold the balance and transfer money out right we call these bolts they're you know multi-sigs and if you're in bitcoin that's it encrypt in d5 you know and ethereum you can build more complex logic into those volts and create everything else we know right but a vault at this basic level is just the contract that holds funds and transfers funds out or receives funds and does things with those funds so we built all these things in defy and obviously this is not an exhaustive list there's a million other things we've

built by combining these things but why not try instead of combining these existing primitives to add a new one so what we're doing with superfluid is we're trying to increase the number of primitives the number of things you can do with money itself we're not trying to build on top of money we're trying to build more into the token contract so what does this look like well it's the stream function so at its extremely basic level when you obviously when you're building a primitive you want it to be generic you want it to be um unopinionated right so what could stream look like well stream to someone

and stream a certain quantity right a certain amount every second so that's exactly how it looks in super fluid our protocols have defined more complex things right maybe there's a duration maybe there's an end date in superfluid we kept things simple we want a protocol that's generic and can be built on top of it so what is what are streams well streams are an open-ended way of transferring funds from one account to another over time so money is going from your account to another every second the streams are fully liquid what does this mean well this means as you receive the funds every second you're able to spend them those are your funds they're fully liquid they're not locked

somewhere it's in your balance and you can collateralize as you go which means you don't have to deposit funds up front you can literally spend your money as you receive it because it's fully liquid and streams are interesting because they're the most fair way of paying for time if i'm buying your time because you work for me and i decide to pay you at the end of the month that means you're working for free with the promise that i will pay you at the end of the month right if i decide to pay at the beginning i'm paying you with the promise that you will work from up now with money streams that disappears because i'm paying you for every unit of time that you provide to me and this is the fairest way to pay for services uh for employment and for a bunch of other

things and of course there's no delays you get paid every second it can't be late right the blockchain is never late it never falls you get paid every second which means you don't have any risks and of course we do that we do it with no intermediaries you know it's it's a d5 project so you have an extra superpower for your money now the simplest things you can do with uh ongoing payments right which are different to the recurring payments we've got used to are subscriptions salaries down to down payments b2b payments dow to uh user payments all sorts of different ongoing payments right and obviously we're used to doing these once a month in the us every two weeks

but that's just because that's what we could do right there's no reason that paying once a month is the way to pay salaries it's simply what we got stuck with right you should get paid every second you work so what can you do when you start using streams in combination with those other primitives that we were describing well you can build a hell of a lot of things so first of all one thing i want to explain about superfluid and about how salaries and streams work is that you can really send money as you receive it now this is something i don't think you could really do before with our protocols but here you have a continuous income and you can continuously spend that on your expenses

your rent but you could even invest part of that into money markets or other things as you receive the funds you can transfer them and i'm not talking once a month i'm talking every second right every second a tiny tiny bit is going from you to these other people continuously with no transactions and fully unchained now why is it important for us that our streams happen on chain well you know we've talked about state channels we've talked about a bunch of other things for ages but the truth is it's extremely hard to build on state channels right while it's extremely easy to build beefy on chain so what does this look like well if you think of a normal balance right

a user has a balance right they have some funds in their account when you go to a smart contract the basic check it will do is does this person have enough to do the thing they want to do with my smart contract and that's the only thing you can check because there's no way on chain in a smart contract to actually check what happened before there's no on-chain record of those transactions obviously there is off chain in the logs but there's nothing the contract inquiry to see if this person is receiving funds every month right again it's a promise that they will receive funds every month but there's nothing unshame now with stream these changes you have an on-chain record of all the funds you're receiving in real time you have an on-chain record of all the funds you're sending in real time your smart contract can query this

you have on-chain cash flow data that you can use to build applications that move money in the future right because the stream is not now a stream is next block and this is something again you could never do before which is why we really think it's a primitive right because you can now write a smart contract or as a user send funds tomorrow you can send funds in a week right every second from now to then you will be sending funds now what if people started building with this well again a lot of stuff right we're still early days but we already have quite a few projects that we're very excited about now streaming exchanges the first thing people decided to build auctions auctions are extremely interesting with

streams because instead of being a one-off transfer you can buy positions over time right so people have built continuous touch auctions continuous english auctions and a continuous document actually is a great way to make a streaming ico which somebody has already done you can do streaming airdrops where you transfer money from one account to many over time rather than instantaneously right so they can't dump as quickly and maybe you can incentivize them to stay in your community and of course vaults right we talked about before a smart contract that has money can now also have cash flows and this of course enables a bunch of things right you could have uh your smart contract wallet streaming salaries to all your employees right and we have

an integration with nosyssafe and molok dao so that you can do exactly that and money routers so money routers are so far i think the newest thing we've seen because money routers are smart contracts that don't have a balance so all they do is receive funds every second and send those funds to someone else every second so they're like an intermediary with logic to a cash flow right and this is actually a very powerful primitive we think it's original i don't think you could really do this before and what it does again is move huge amounts of money potentially without ever holding any of it right it's simply a pass-through for

your accounts and this i think i find extremely fascinating now what if people uh use this for well real-time finance right the idea of building streaming into defy we call real-time finance it's tricky to build this stuff you have to think not only how much money does my account have but how much money will it have in 10 minutes how much money will they have in an hour right and it makes things more complicated i was trying to explain yesterday to someone that calculating variable interest on cash flow is actually extremely complicated but i think as more you know of you maybe come and build with us we'll be able to build uh even more and exciting projects now i'll talk a bit

about a few of the projects that have already been built in our ecosystem so ricochet is uh and it's an exchange their first product is a dca right you can buy ether every second so imagine you're receiving your salary right every second you're getting paid a bit of salary and you decide i'm gonna allocate a thousand dollars from that to buy ether for me right this way it's completely automated the the employer does one transaction to pay you and you would you do one transaction to the dca exchange and it buys ether for you forever without any other interactions on your part and basically how it works they have a small intermediary contract it gets some money and then every 30 minutes it swaps that money on sushi swap and

redistributes all the income to the people streaming it's already working eventually they realized if they removed sushi swap it was a streaming ico so now they're doing that as well right so you can really start experimenting here and i think these guys are onto something they're very early days but a very exciting crowd so what else well stream uh drip sorry trip drip is a very interesting product so what these guys did is they're building a checkout right you want to accept subscriptions as a company you want to accept subscriptions you want to get paid every second for a service you're providing but you want to access affiliate marketing right so i refer you to a business you start paying them and i

receive 10 of that strength right so what's happening is effectively every second i'm taking a tiny portion of that stream and getting paid for it but that they didn't stop there they decided this affiliate cash flow right is a very interesting thing i can put a link on the internet and start accruing money now what if that cash flow itself was tokenized so what they do is they issue nfts for the affiliate cash flows and these nfds can be sold on any nft market meaning that whoever buys them becomes the owner of those future cash flows so you can buy an nft and you start receiving money for the affiliate

marketing someone else did right and this is uh basically cash flow securitization i think it's extremely exciting because this is just one application right if you can package and slice and dice cash flows in your application you can build all sorts of cash flow based finance which is something we've never been able to do on chain because again we don't have all those transactions in the contracts right we simply have the balance which doesn't give us any historical information and any future information so yeah i'm very excited about them as well you know they have a growing community as well so check them out createsim so creating is a great project it's uh trying to be a web-free patreon here you stream to your creators and in exchange get access to a private feeds

of content right again very simple concept but you really couldn't do this before without some sort of recurring payment from the user which is terrible ux in this case as a user you go to their application send one stream get access to the content and then when you're done close that stream and that's it right they take a cut of this and they allow the artist to send some funds in a stream back to the user right all of this everything you see in the slide happens in one transaction which means again a great user experience now what can you do with this well two things one is build right i mean i think i've met so many amazing builders here i would really

like all of you to come to superfluid come to our discord join us and just build something right again this is a green field right you can build anything new with this primitive you can think of any existing application you know of take out transfer put in stream and see what happens right i don't know what i don't know what it could be like again the slide where i do all the examples is very incomplete we don't know what people will build which is why it's so exciting for us to build a primitive right and the other thing you could do right now if you're working in web free is go to your employer and tell them that they have no excuse to pay you at the end of the month

there is absolutely no reason you should give credit to your employer and that is exactly what you're doing when you get paid 30 days late you should get paid every second you work because you can it's possible right and on top of this it's actually good for them because they only have to make one transaction on chain to initiate a stream that will keep paying you until you decide to leave right it's a good ux for the employer and it's what you deserve as an employee so if you're working in web free go out there go to your employer and tell them they should pay you every second you work because you deserve it so yeah

we believe payments shouldn't have friction we believe that programmable money streaming is an incredibly interesting primitive and that whoever manages to build this early on into their products will be able to create a new generation of financial products and they are by definition a new generation because they're built on a new primitive thanks a lot and follow us on twitter and see all around we have t-shirts