White Star Capital Digital Asset Fund - announcing our investment in Superfluid
Traditional payment methods are archaic and overdue for an upgrade
Frustrations behind traditional payment methods, whether the infamous wire via the SWIFT network or the slightly upgraded ACH transfer, are beginning to reach a tipping point. The plethora of fintechs trying to solve for “X” of payments or “Y” of lending are just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s actually needed to revamp the current financial plumbing lower in the stack.
Given our focus on the digital asset space, which we believe is intertwined with the evolving fintech and capital markets landscape, Superfluid’s vision of the future of streaming payments immediately resonated with us, upon meeting the team in March 2020 for the first time.
At its core, Superfluid is developing a programmable money protocol for Web3 to enable continuous and securitized cashflows that are netted in real-time. It enables participants to move assets on-chain following predefined rules. By bringing cashflows on-chain, Superfluid empowers businesses and allows content to be monetized, bridging speculative assets with real value generation and predictable cashflow-based assets. Superfluid will aim to address recurring transactions including vesting, salaries, subscriptions, and other payments.
Superfluid laid this vision out clearly in their introduction to the world titled The Dawn of Programmable Cashflows:
Using our new smart contracts framework on Ethereum you can transfer any token or digital asset on-chain in several ways based on a novel primitive: predefined rules that we call agreements.
By publishing a single transaction, you could agree to transfer 10 DAI per month in a constant stream. Every second, a tiny amount of DAI will flow between the two wallets, without any need for gas or any further transactions by sender or receiver. Similarly, cancellation is also only one transaction.
Agreements are initiated with a single on-chain transaction. After this, all the magic happens automatically. The agreement will keep working forever without requiring any interactions or gas fees.
The already functional agreements in Superfluid Protocol are:
💸 Money streaming - the way it should be! Ideal for subscriptions, salaries or dollar cost averaging. No time commitments or capital lockups
🎁 Rewards distributions - one transaction to distribute to any number of receivers with a fixed cost. Perfect for frequent payouts of rewards
Other examples of current and potential use cases for the Superfluid protocol include:
Payroll
Subscriptions
NFTs and social tokens with cash flows
Vesting
Machine to machine payments
Automated DeFi strategies
Many more
We believe streaming digital assets will create massive efficiencies and enable a new generation of not only DeFi, but also broader applications to bloom.
We believe this could change how money works. From settling transactions to settling agreements, making transactions obsolete, and updating our financial system for the modern digital world.
We’re extremely excited to back Francesco, ZhiCheng, Michele, and the rest of the Superfluid team along with Multicoin Capital, Semantic Ventures, MMC Ventures, Delphi Digital, Defiance Capital, Fabric Ventures, DeFi Alliance in this $9m round. Join Superfluid’s Discord or visit their website to learn more!