2021, the Rise of Real-Time Finance

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Superfluid Blog

13 min readJan 21, 2022

2021 has recently ended. And what a year it has been.

It was the 10th of March 2021 when we announced our community had deployed Superfluid Protocol on GnosisChain (then xDAI) and Polygon (then Matic). We’ve since seen developer activity skyrocket; a host of new, unique products built on Superfluid, crypto teams getting paid with streaming salaries; and the appearance of the first “Networked Cash Flows” — real-time streams of value that can flow across the economy, connecting suppliers, clients, employees at the infinite velocity of money.

Later in July, our community received a tremendous boost with a $9M seed round to support the continued development of an interconnected economy where value flows frictionlessly — without intermediaries, lockups, and delays. This frictionless, deeply intertwined economy is something we like to call “Real-Time Finance.”

In a world where your interest compounds every second, your farm yields every second, and your savings could get rugged any second, why isn’t your salary paid every second?

Bridging the gap between the returns from capital and the returns from labour will be one of the biggest challenges of this century. With the Superfluid Protocol, at the very least, we can de-risk labour relations (you only work if your stream is open, eliminating counter party risk) and increase capital efficiency for the payer (top up a treasury as needed to pay expenses) while providing contributors with an experience that is 10x better than regular TradFi payroll.

2021 has seen the first ever web3 teams getting paid in real-time with literal streams of tokens that they can both spend and invest as they receive, without the need to lock funds in smart contracts or withdraw them through manual transactions. MakerDAO Growth, QiDAO, Connext, Coinshift, Delphi Digital, Jarvis.network, Belobaba, 2pi.network, are some of the pioneers who have experimented with streaming salaries to their team members this year. Even VISA 👀 has tried streaming for the first time! But a more noteworthy trend is the number of people, worldwide, who now depend on the crypto economy for their livelihood. In the future, do you think they’ll be happy getting paid once/twice a month instead of every second?

2022 is going to be fun. With an increasing number of popular integrations (e.g., Request Network, Gnosis Safe, DAOHaus, etc.) and our forthcoming launch on L2s, Superfluid will have exposure to a wider audience of users and developers than ever before. This year, virtually anyone working in web3 will have the opportunity to receive their salary in streams.

But what can you do with a streaming salary, and why is it such a big deal?

The Dawn of Networked Cash Flows

Networked Cash Flows (NCFs) are something unique to Superfluid. In simplest terms, Networked Cash Flows are “chained” streams of money that enable users to make payments with liquidity they have just received — without needing to touch the blockchain or make any operations. The power of NCFs is beginning to be harnessed through two ways today: Crypto Native Payroll and Real-Time Investing.

Get paid every second, invest every second. Never miss a dip, never need to connect your Trezor or Ledger. Your salary literally streams into your wallet, and out of your wallet, in real time, with no interactions, in perpetuity.

If you get paid every second in a Superfluid stream, you can put that capital to work immediately by investing every second with Ricochet. By investing your salary in real-time with Ricochet, you don’t have to spend time making manual transactions or worrying about missing a dip. Your salary streams in and out of your wallet in real-time — without any interactions or having to connect your Trezor or Ledger — for as long as you’d like.

Pray_eth from Coinshift puts it very eloquently:

Pray_eth is able to allocate 100% of his income to productive use. Reducing his exposure to stablecoins to almost zero!

The magic happens when you receive, and send, at the same time. Expanding the opportunities for streaming income, investment, and spending will be our main objective this year. In 2022 streaming DeFi will become the norm, and a growing part of the Crypto-Native Economy.

As shown by real-time financial products like Ricochet, magical things happen when you’re able to send and receive money at the same time. Expanding the opportunities created by streaming income, investments, and expenditures will be one of our main objectives this year. If the steady increase in interest and activity on Ricochet is any indication, streaming DeFi has huge growth potential in 2022.

When you have businesses receiving streaming income, paying their employees with these streams, these employees investing/paying subscriptions in streams, and those businesses paying their employees in streams–every second every day, with no on-chain interactions–then you start to see what we see: the beginning of a Real-Time Finance Economy:

“A future where value is streamed in real-time. Where cash flows, on chain, in a superfluid way.“

A Community of Builders

In 2021, we sponsored 11 hackathons, where 600 hackers built over 250 projects on the Superfluid Protocol. There were plenty of incredibly original and exciting projects coming out of these hackathons–many of which explored different use-cases / opportunities for streams, and real-time finance. HackMoney was our biggest hackathon last year, with 1 out 6 projects using Superfluid in their final submission! Let’s take a look at some of the most innovative ideas built on Superfluid:

Diagonal: a beautiful web3 checkout protocol that uses payment links and other features to create user fidelization and retention. Having won our top prize at HackMoney, they are now preparing for a public launch in the next few months.

Drip: a web3 affiliate marketing platform for subscriptions, which uses cash-flow NFTs to enable referrers to monetize through continuous streams (or sell that income to someone else!). Drip was one of the finalists at NFTHack 2021, and opened our eyes to Tradable Cash Flows.

Streamroll: still in early development,but I’m extremely bullish about this use-case. It enables DAOs to borrow in streams against their treasury. Using RARI pools in the background, anything can be used as collateral, effectively leveraging treasuries to pay for ongoing expenses (e.g., salaries) in Stablecoins, while not needing to ever sell!

Streaming Collateral: another project in its infancy, but something I’m highly excited about as well. This project will allow me (and many others with streaming salaries) to borrow against that future income. I’m bullish about salary advances being the first kind of uncollateralized loan to scale to thousands of users, as everyone in web3 could use them to buy the next dip 😂

Two apps built by our rockstar builder Mark Carey:
TokenVesting: an app built specifically for the vesting use-case, built on Superfluid streams.
DegenDogs: DeFi + NFT project where each NFT has a streams of yield-bearing tokensmoney to the ownerattached.

dSIP: a system for users to invest into dHedge funds using Superfluid streams. Ever wanted to hand a Hedge Fund a portion of your salary? Now you can do so in a decentralized, non-custodial, and completely automated way!

DAOInsure: an insurance system where premiums are streamed. Users are only insured as long as they stream. IMO this is a great model to programmably insure pretty much everything. Insurance is a retail-friendly financial product, and there are many potentially insurable things.

Osmotic Funding: their work for the DAOGlobal Hackathon has paved the way for the exploration of non-linear (exponentially decaying) flows.

CoFund: they just won the recent DAOGlobal Hackathon (and a Draper University scholarship) by building a Superfluid integration for the Aragon Client that allows DAOs to easily create, transfer, split, and close budget streams, represented as cashflow NFTs.

Jtriley.eth: not a project, but if he was, I would invest in him personally. He has single-handedly created a ton of value for our community, dug extremely deeply into our codebase, and built a few tools for other devs to use. These tools include build-a-batchcall.com, a ricochet-taxes calculator and an accounting tool to keep track of streams and calculate how much money has been sent between accounts. Bullish, keep an eye on jtriley.eth in 2022.

Ricochet: first prototyped at the Scaling Ethereum hackathon, Ricochet is now live on Polygon mainnet. It has been one of the most successful hackathon projects I’ve ever seen. Since their launch in July, they have built significant volumes–peaking at 3 million USD/month and $60k in monthly fees for their DAO. While they are now phasing out V1, the upcoming V2 will come with more capital efficiency, less reliance on external AMMs, and a referral feature which is likely to prove a retail-worthy marketing tool.

A simple yet elegant product, Ricochet uses many of the Superfluid functionalities in a masterful way. As a user, one single transaction allows you to buy ETH/BTC/MKR/IDLE/SushiLP or any other supported asset forever, never needing to touch the app again.

Thanks to Superfluid Distributions, tokens are distributed scalably to all streamers every time a swap occurs. As such, the app doesn’t lock much value. At any point in time, Ricochet would have around $200 in the entire system. All fees are swept to their multisig, which has accumulated about $100k so far.

Capital Efficiency will be the key metric in 2022 as DeFi starts valuing Volumes and Fees, setting aside TVL as a key indicator. In the land of Real-Time Finance, Total Value Streamed will be the main metric, showing the volumes moving every second through different businesses and applications of the web3 economy.

All in all, we are excited and grateful for both the incredible amount of applications built on Superfluid Protocol and for its usage so far. We can count over 60k unique addresses, and just in the past 30 days, over 30k unique addresses that had at least one active stream and an average of 3 (incoming + outgoing) streams each. Rabbithole.gg alone has referred a whooping 44k unique users (verifiably unique thanks to brightID) who have all completed the quest to “start a stream on Superfluid”.

To think that the Superfluid Protocol wasn’t even live 9 months ago…

Last weekend we sponsored NFTHack where we saw (27 projects built on Superfluid). If SuperCard, 0xPhotos, and PlantyBois are any indication, this year we’ll see the Superfluid ecosystem more vibrant than ever.

In 2022, we’ll be present at all major events, working with builders, creatives, and entrepreneurs to unleash the potential of a true Real-Time Finance economy! If you are looking at getting into the web3 space, come hack with us. We go out of our way to support the builders in our community. Hop in.

2021: Building Superfluid Foundations

While our Dashboard got a few major improvements this year (3x loading speed, an Address Book to keep track of the addresses you interact with, support for Distributions, automated token display based on your wallet assets, and much more), we’ve also released a few developer oriented tools like the Superfluid Console that lets you explore Superfluid streams and query our Subgraph data with a simple user interface. For example, you can explore data on the Ricochet Launchpad in the Console here. Builders seem to love it so far, but we welcome any and all feedback!

We’ve also released a new Subgraph with significantly more entities, more granularity on user data, and end-to-end integration tests (a first in crypto as far as we know).

Furthermore, to make it easier to build on Superfluid, we released our new SDK Suite. The SDK Suite enables developers to create better front-ends without needing to get into the weeds of the Protocol, and provides a new front-end framework for building powerful dApps (which we call SDK-Redux) that was crafted using the best web technologies.

Just a few weeks ago, we launched our Beta TOGA system (Transparent Ongoing Auction) which is a system to find the most suitable Sentinel– has the job of closing streams from users who run out of funds.

In response to numerous user requests and our community’s palpable excitement for the future of #L22022, we’ve also prepared the protocol, dashboards, subgraph, and backend infrastructure to support optimistic rollups. Hold tight, Superfluid Protocol is coming to Optimism and Arbitrum!

Best of all, we’re just getting started. 2022 will be the year of cross-chain innovation. And as our community’s reach expands to the multi-chain EVM future, we’ll focus on building the tools for Superfluid-powered dApps to prosper across different environments, and for Super Tokens to be widely accepted across the ecosystem.

The Rise of Super Tokens

Users have so far deployed 112 Super Tokens — 90 on Polygon and 22 on GnosisChain. Overall, we’ve attracted ±120M$ (ATH) in TVL to date, which is a huge number for a protocol that has always optimized for capital efficiency (i.e. Ricochet Exchange only needs 200$ in TVL to move 2.3M$/month in volumes).

This accumulation has been driven mostly by three use-cases:

Treasuries: in order to pay salaries with even fewer transactions, some of our early pioneers have loaded up their multi-sigs with enough Super Tokens (USDC/DAI) to last a few months.
Vesting: a few organizations in the space have been using Superfluid for vesting, including MOCA, QiDao, Opolis, Blackpool, and StakeDAO. Vesting generally requires upfront locking of tokens, leading to high TVL.
Native Super Tokens: these are tokens issued directly on Superfluid rails–no wrapping or unwrapping needed. We’ve seen some interesting experimentation in our community from three tokens: $MIVA, $FRACTION, and $RIC.

$MIVA is the utility token of Minerva Wallet, the first wallet built specifically for the xDAI (now Gnosis) chain. They now support multiple chains and have native support for Super Tokens, with stream visualizations coming soon as well! $MIVA was first issued through a huge streaming airdrop to around 2000 users, and later introduced a new concept: the streaming farm. These are LP positions wrapped into tradable NFTs which give the holder a right to a stream of $MIVA tokens. You can buy one on Eporio and immediately get access to a stream.

$FRACTION was the second ever Native Super Token, and a token with the total supply of 1. Beyond the beautiful website and interesting concept, they came up with a cool distribution idea–a streaming faucet. Send 0 xDai and receive 0.000000000000000001 FRACTION per second.

$RIC is the governance token of the Ricochet DAO. It was first distributed as a reward to anyone streaming on their markets. Since about 3 months ago, $RIC has been on sale through the Ricochet Launchpad, which is probably the first ever continuous ICO (users can stream tokens continuously in exchange for a fixed amount of $RIC). The volume streamed determines the price of $RIC. $RIC is currently being used to compensate Ricochet team members and can be used as collateral in the REX Bank.

As salaries are the strongest proof of real stablecoin usage, we’ve seen many new issuers rush to create wrapper contracts, enabling more people to stream salaries and/or other productive use-cases. In the past 2 months, we’ve seen mUSD, agEUR, jEUR, RAI, JPYC, MAI and jCHF integrate streaming via Superfluid.

While we’re on the topic of wrapped tokens, it’s worth talking about MKR. There is currently 326,288.79$ worth of MKR on Polygon. Of this amount, 7.4% was wrapped into Superfluid. If you look at individual holders–excluding contracts–about 20% of the supply is in Superfluid. MKRx (Super MakerDAO, the wrapped token that adds Superfluid streaming capabilities) also accounts for 35% of the individual holders of MKR on Polygon. This is all due to Ricochet listing MKRx (and running an incentive program).

As our ecosystem grows and more use-cases are built out, we’ll see wrapped tokens become more useful than their counter-parties. This will be especially true as the proliferation of new networks fragments liquidity significantly. Deploying tokens on L2s as Native Bridged SuperTokens will also improve UX, allowing users to go directly from L1-ERC20 to L2-SuperToken. We expect this kind of usage will proliferate, as projects use different L2s to test different use-cases.

As our community dissects the implementation and starts exploring what they can do, I expect this year we’ll see a Cambrian explosion of new Super Tokens and related tools. Just from the last hackathon we got: SuperToken factory for fractional NFTs, and SuperTokens as NFT property metadata.

Dear Community, Thank You!

Our community on Discord has grown to over 5.000 members and has proved to be a great open square to discuss Real-Time Finance, Networked Cash Flows, Superfluid, and related ideas. Our community calls are full of great new community projects and ideas, and I wake up every morning to more and more activity on Twitter.

It’s energizing to be a part of such a revolutionary idea. I hope going forward we will continue to attract talented, creative builders to our community. Ultimately, ideas are only as powerful as the communities that promote them and make them a reality. But I truly believe a small community of passionate people can have an outsized impact on the future.

Overall, it’s been an incredible year. Superfluid is now live, providing value to thousands of people. We’ve grown our core team 3x in 2021 by hiring outstanding professionals and some brilliant minds in the web3 industry. We expect to do the same next year; in fact, we are hiring for a number of positions across Engineering, Marketing, Product, Operations and Growth with many more being added every month. If you believe web3 can build much better systems than TradFi, we’d love to hear from you!

We’ve started seeing our vision for streaming payroll being adopted by crypto-native organizations, and we’re inspiring a growing community of builders to re-imagine the future of finance with us.

I couldn’t be more excited for what 2022 holds.

Join us in our journey to build streaming salaries, subscriptions and ultimately a real-time web3 economy in 2022! We need your help to make this happen. Hop in our Discord to become a part of the conversation.

Some great articles on a Superfluid-enabled future: