Money Streaming Crypto Protocols
What Is Money Streaming?
What if you could get your paycheck paid out to you as you earn it every second of every day, rather than having to wait for a lump sum twice a month?
That would be really cool, right?
Well, in normal finance, that’s not really possible because it takes a long time for money to clear banks, and it would be a hassle to send thousands of tiny transactions… but that’s not a problem in crypto.
Enter: Money Streaming, a constant “stream” of micropayments sent every second that is used for compensating employees, paying for services, investing, and everything else that money is normally used for.
This continuous stream of small payments made every second reduces complexity (since you don’t have to initiate a new payment every time you need to pay for something), helps recipients get their money faster, and can be redirected to any crypto address or entity instantly.
An Example
Imagine that you’re a freelancer who is working with several different clients. When it’s time to get paid, you can either negotiate payment terms and dates with each client, send invoices, and wait to receive your money once or twice a month or you can set up a money stream and receive money from your clients on a regular basis as you complete work.
Money streams divide up a lump sum (such as $1,000) over a period of time (such as a week), sending a few cents every second, so you are constantly accumulating money little by little in your account.
Money Streaming Crypto Protocols
There are several companies that are at the forefront of crypto money streaming. Below we take a look at two of the leaders in the space.
Superfluid
Superfluid bills itself as a “revolutionary asset streaming protocol that brings subscriptions, salaries, vesting, and rewards to DAOs and crypto-native businesses worldwide.”
Some standout features of Superfluid include:
- The Super Token: Superfluid’s “Super Token” is an ERC20 (which just means it’s an Ethereum-based crypto token) that can be used to set up continuous money streams between individual accounts or even send money from one account to many others.
- Super Apps: The Superfluid platform allows different applications to build solutions using their money streams. These are known as “super apps” and include money streams for all sorts of use cases, including paying salaries, investing, taking out loans, trading NFTs, and much more.
- Multi-Chain Support: Superfluid is supported on most Ethereum-compatible chains, including Polygon, Arbitrum, the Binance Smart Chain, Optimism, and more.
Sablier Finance
Sablier is a pioneer in the field of crypto money streaming, enabling money streams since 2019. Sablier refers to their money streaming services are “real-time finance.”
Some features of Sablier include:
- Easy Interface: You can create a money stream in just a few clicks directly from the Sablier app. Just select what token you’d like to send, how much of it you want to stream, the recipient, and the duration of the stream. Once the stream is created, that token will automatically be sent over your defined time period.
- Community-Supported: The Sablier protocol was initially funded by the popular decentralized lending protocol MakerDAO. Sablier later received support from MetaCartel, another big name in the decentralized organization space, making the protocol community funded (which is a big deal for those who care about maximum decentralization).
What Are The Benefits?
Money Streaming has many different benefits. Here are several use cases that benefit from money streams:
- Breaking Up Large Payments: Payments for large purchases, like houses, cars, school, etc., have many financing options available. For smaller purchases, however, financing options are less prevalent. Money streams can help you pay for low-ticket goods and services in small increments over time.
- Recurring Payments: Subscription services live and die by how well they retain their customers. Many companies find that charging customers once a month leads to payment issues such as expired cards, customer churn, and other problems. Instead, subscription services can set up a money stream to collect money in real time and have a more predictable income.
- Salaries: As mentioned above, compensating employees using money streams is a welcome feature that could increase employee happiness, automate payments, and ensure your people are paid as they do work.
- Token Accrual: The always-on nature of money streaming unlocks new use cases such as token accrual. Imagine that you want to compensate the token holders of a crypto project based on how long they’ve held the cryptocurrency. With money streaming, this is super easy — simply send them a stream for as long as they have your token. If they sell your token, the money stream is turned off, leaving them with whatever they accumulated up to that point.
Who Does Money Streaming Help?
Regular People
In addition to receiving your salary in increments over time, some applications for money streams, such as Huma Finance, allow you to take out loans against your money streams. Huma Finance takes a look at the money coming in through your money streams in order to determine your creditworthiness and issue you a loan. You can even borrow against your future earnings!
Another use-case for money streams is insurance. In traditional insurance, you’re often expected to pay a lump sum upfront, as well as some additional amount each month, in order to cover events in the future. With money streams, insurance becomes much more liquid — get insurance coverage for as long as you’re paying, and cancel your coverage by simply revoking the money stream.
Investors
When it comes to making investments, the standard today is to invest lump sums and large checks all at once. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. What if you could invest continuously based on how well a company is doing? Or what if you could modulate the amount you invest in real-time?
All of this is possible by setting up a money stream that automatically invests some amount of money over a period of time. Not happy with how a company is performing? Shut off their money stream and begin another one with a new company. Is the new company doing even better? You can automatically increase the amount you send them through your money stream with no commitment to a lump sum at any point.
Business Owners
Business owners take the other side of the salary-payment money streams, so they can pay their employees on a constant basis using money streams. Additionally, when it comes to sending company dividends or even royalties for creative works, money streams are a great solution. In fact, products like Instant Distribution Agreements from Superfluid allow you to set up a single money stream that pays multiple people over time.
Another use for money streams in your business is for recurring expenses like rentals. Instead of paying a large, upfront sum for your building’s rent or for other business assets, you can pay a little at a time for as long as you’re using the goods or services.
Final Thoughts
Money Streaming is a unique concept for sending a constant amount of money over a blockchain. You can use money streaming for a number of uses, including:
- Receiving your salary
- Flexible investing
- Recurring subscriptions
- Insurance & loans
Money streaming is yet another way that people may be able to take more control of their finances in the future.
