Hydro Blocktoberfest: Subscription Payments in Tide

Our Hydro Blocktoberfest continues with a look at our work to release Tide in 2019. This includes not only our behind the scenes work with Plasma to make payments quicker and more efficient, and interoperability protocols to allow currencies built on other chains to be swapped, but also the ability for dApps and users to have recurring payments and ongoing subscriptions!

Why Does This Matter?

Plasma and chain interoperability help immensely with one-time payments and peer-to-peer transfers on the Hydro platform. But, many financial services applications do not charge one-time fees or rely on one-off transactions or currency movements. They have recurring fees or recurring debits/credits. An example would be a bill paying app. Very few credit card bills are paid one-time, they typically are paid monthly. The same thing goes for contributions to investment accounts, accounts payable or receivable, and payroll.

In addition to recurring financial transactions, many software and SaaS providers that serve the financial ecosystem work on a subscription billing model. For example, very few people need to use DocuSign once, they typically need it for ongoing business needs. The same thing goes for expense software, see example from Expensify below:

Hydro Tide

We are working behind the scenes on infrastructure to make Hydro Tide the most robust, secure, and disruptive ecosystem for financial payments and transactions in blockchain. Much of this infrastructure is built on top of Hydro Snowflake, which acts as an anchor to make all of this work. We have had many updates on Snowflake, including the acceptance of its underlying protocol (ERC-1484) for comments by the broader Ethereum community. Subscriptions will be an integral part of Hydro Tide, interacting with the Wallet and dApp layer introduced with Hydro Snowflake.

Stay tuned for updates throughout the 4th Quarter on development work and partnerships forged to make this a reality in 2019!