Why Web3 Businesses Should Stream Payroll With Superfluid

Published in

Superfluid Blog

4 min readSep 30, 2022

Crypto payroll is complicated. Between globally dispersed teams, non-traditional compensation structures, and multisig treasury management, Web3 payroll managers have their work cut out for them.

And while there’s a growing number of protocols that simplify crypto-native business ops, many DAOs and crypto-native organizations still put up with the inherent inefficiencies of blockchain value transfer (high gas fees, manual multisig transactions) when paying contributors.

But with Superfluid streams, they no longer have to.

By streaming payroll with Superfluid Protocol (either directly or through a partner such as Coinshift), web3 organizations can reduce payroll admin efforts and gas fees — maximizing the efficiency of their company’s treasury while providing contributors with greater financial flexibility and new opportunities.

How Streaming Payroll Benefits Web3 Businesses 🏦

Whether you’re a team of 5 or 500, streaming payroll with Superfluid can save your organization time and money.

Benefit #1: Decrease HR Labour Costs Through Automation

HR managers have better things to do than manually approve recurring payments and chase multisigs signers to process payments. Since Superfluid streams run in perpetuity once they’re opened, HR managers can effectively put payroll on autopilot and dedicate their time elsewhere, only taking action when an employee’s compensation needs to be modified or stopped.

Benefit #2: Reduce Gas Fees

Because Superfluid streams only require a single on-chain transaction to run in perpetuity, crypto-native organizations can avoid costly, recurring transactions and ensure payment flows to their contributors as long as they want (given the distributing wallet maintains a healthy balance, more info on this here).

But payroll streaming doesn’t just benefit crypto-native organizations — it directly benefits the people building them as well.

How Streaming Payroll Benefits Web3 Workers 🙋‍♀️

Benefit #1: Give Employees Access to Their Money in Real-Time

A big part of the appeal of web3 is having autonomy over your funds, and what better way to champion this experience than to give employees access to their money the second they earn it?

By streaming contributors’ payroll with Superfluid, you provide them with the ability to earn, invest, and spend their money in real-time, giving your team members unprecedented financial flexibility. To see what’s possible with redirectable salary streams today — as well as upcoming use cases — users can check out our continually evolving Ecosystem page.

Benefit #2: Ensure Contributors Are Consistently Incentivized and Rewarded

Oftentimes, organizations use larger, discrete lump-sum payments (i.e., performance bonuses) to incentivize employees to reach certain targets.

However, these lump-sum rewards can feel disjointed given they’re distributed at the end of a month, quarter, or year. The delay between action and reward is a psychological shortchange that, due to web2 payment rails, we’ve been forced to accept.

To bridge this gap, we created the Perpetual Conditional Rewards (PCR) token in collaboration with UMA Protocol. In essence, the PCR is an UMA KPI option that streams token rewards proportional to the condition met. With the PCR, crypto-native organizations can continually reward employees to reach and maintain specific KPI metrics — something impossible to do in a scalable way in web2.

Optimize Your Crypto Organization With Superfluid Payment Rails

Web3 organizations are an evolution in collaborative work, but they’re not without their challenges. By streaming employee payroll with Superfluid Protocol, crypto companies can offset some of the downsides of web3 while taking advantage of its strengths.

Start streaming your crypto-native business’ payroll here and maximize the potential of your organization and its contributors today!