Superfluid: Streaming Money Every Second

0:00 And welcome back to the permissionless podcast. Of course, as always, brought to you by the team at Guardian and we're going deep with DeFi teams who are building on the edge and really stretching the imagination of what's possible in an open permissionless onchain execution environment. And our guest today is really literally defining the meaning of programmable money.

0:22 Today we have Fran from Superfluid and they've got a really interesting perspective on economies and the velocity of money. You'll see shortly how they kind of dive into a a level up a derivative thinking of accounting for money as a rate and having that be the base accounting of balance in an economy and how this takes the velocity of money to infinity if you take the limit.

0:45 And so it's very interesting to think what are the externalities of this way of thinking and this way of approaching things. And so we go deep on this idea and so much more that's possible with the Superfluid app with Fran. And I think you'll have some some deep ideas after this conversation and we get to hear I mean even beyond that just about his approach to entrepreneurship and and how he sees opportunities in the space in general.

1:06 But of course, before we can dive into the full conversation, as always, my name is Owen and over three and a half years ago, I founded Guardian based on the premise that DeFi would house trillions of dollars of assets and that a step-wise jump in the tier of security available had to be made to ship confidently in that environment.

1:24 And so today, I'm happy to say that we have achieved that standard necessary at Guardian. We use not one but two distinct auditing teams accompanied by a world-renowned lead researcher and a full-time dedicated developer building a fuzzing suite for the entire scope across the stack. And through this distinct methodology that we have, we're able to gain so much confidence in the codebase at hand that we're able to put our own funds up as a bounty on the contracts on behalf of the project.

1:53 So now at this point, it's really just up for DeFi to catch up. But now, of course, without further ado, let us get into this conversation with Fran from Superfluid. Well, Fran, thanks for taking the time to to hop in with us today. And I I mean, we've got a lot to talk about and obviously you've got a pretty long history here in in DeFi with Superfluid.

2:18 So excited to dive into all that. But I mean really before we even get into the superfluid protocol and all the different things that we could cover there, how did you find your way into DeFi and and what kind of got you into the industry to start with? So I've I've done a bunch of different things in my life.

2:36 I started I guess my first job was as an entrepreneur. I started my own company with some friends out of high school in when I was 18. And then after that, did a bunch of stuff, moved around, lived in a bunch of different places. Eventually, some crazy dude I met talked to me about crypto and prediction markets and specifically assassination markets.

2:59 If you don't know what that is, you you can look it up yourself. but yeah, Assassination Markets got me really excited because it's like really sci-fiish stuff and I'm like, "Wow, that's possible right now." And he's like, "Well, not not yet. The UX sucks." But, you know, it still sucks 5 years later. but it was it was fun.

3:19 You know, that was 2017. and then basically at some point I went to a meetup and I got a job in crypto. So, that was great. Immediately got a job, jumped right into the operator side. Mhm. you know, a lot of people kind of maybe traded for for a long time or they worked in tech for a long time.

3:38 I was never in tech. and I was never in finance and I just jumped in straight to work. In that case, I was doing marketing. I don't think I'm very good at marketing. but I ended up learning how to code, learning all the the other stuff and you know did did all the other things and I still occasionally do marketing but I'm really it's not my strongest suit probably.

4:01 So that was 2019 and then I started working with my current co-founder in 2020 and no sorry 20 that was 2017 that was 2017 sorry that was 2017 I started working with my co-founder in 2018 and then in 2019 we launched our first public kind of crypto product which was a derivative of D. So 2019 just to set the stage the defi is Uniswap MakerDAO compound and bZx y and PoolTogether right bZx blew up shortly thereafter about 6 months later compound is blowing up now maker still going well Uniswap still going well right and PoolTogether is kind of recovering from the from the lawsuit right and in that context we launched one of the first derivatives on top of D which was well on top of compound actually which was

5:00 Called rDAI and you know it was kind of a yield yield derivative right so again very very early days and basically when we were building that we came up with the idea for Superfluid and we dropped that product incidentally at the time yields all went to zero so there was actually a period when yields were negative on maker right in 2020 so you know at the time it felt like oh yields are going to disapp appear as a as a thing in DeFi, you know.

5:28 Well, we were quite wrong about that one, but anyway, started working on on Superfluid and, you know, it's it's been really fun. you know, Superfluid's kind of, let's say, niche is payments, which is not a very sexy niche if you do it in a DeFi way, right? It's sexy if you do on self-ramps. That's how everybody in payments makes money, but we don't, right?

5:51 We're like pure crypto and you know it's a very tough market basically. but I think what we're doing is really cool. So you know still excited to work on it four years later. but but yeah we haven't you know seen the explosive growth our products saw because basically nobody really wanted to use crypto for payments for the longest time.

6:11 Yeah. And we are proposing a way of making payments which is very cryptonative and very weird and very hard to square with a lot of kind of traditional ways of doing things. So yeah, it's definitely been been you know an uphill battle, but it's been a lot of fun as well in the in the process. yeah. Yeah.

6:31 And of course you know making payments composable and all this stuff a lot of stuff that we can we can get into there. It's crazy to to see that you guys working on the same project for what has it been like five six years at this point plus. you know usually what you see is like folks like just jumping project to project to project.

6:54 So it's like refreshing to see a team like actually focusing on one problem for an extended period of time instead of you know just like launching new like experiment. Sure. but the experimentation is good but it it's also just refreshing to see folks you know really focus on one problem and and make progress on yeah I mean to be fair I I often push back actually on the framing of the problem solution because I I think it doesn't really fit in a lot of cases right and it like if you're if you're educated in kind of Silicon Valley then you know you're told that that's what a startup should be about right but crypto's allowed us to basically fund stuff that is not doesn't fit into problem problem solution kind of statements, right?

7:44 And I think that's great because it allows us to do the things and take kind of outlandish bets sometimes, right? Because Ethereum didn't really solve anything, right? But it's still but it's still a huge kind of you know zero to one moment for our industry and you know it's created a lot of things that like it enables it's an enabler for things that solve problems.

8:03 Does that make sense? And I think of Superfluid the same way. Like you know when u if you try to frame it if you try too hard to frame it as a problem, you're like, well, haven't you always wanted to get paid every second? I'm like, no, I've literally never thought about that, right? So it it doesn't really fit in that.

8:21 But I do think it's an enabler for a lot of efficiency and a lot of kind of new ways of building things and it enables us to build a lot of things that weren't possible before. And in the meantime, it challenges the way we think about money and you know the way it it it moves and you know we can go into that.

8:40 I'd love to go into that nerd about it a bit but but yeah it's it's not something anybody's done before. There's a lot of things about Superfluid that people don't really understand until they go really deep because when they think about money, when they think about payments, they are, you know, they have all these mental models which, you know, are useful to help you understand the world, but when you apply them to something completely new, then you kind of only understand half of it, if that makes sense.

9:08 Right? So, a lot of people So, just maybe to give an intro to Superfluid for people who've never heard about us, right? So superfluid is known as a protocol for u money streaming or token streaming right streaming in in abstract for for tokens or value is this concept that every second some value is moving from one account to another right so imagine a payment which instead of happening instantaneously right so instantaneously would mean like money has always worked right I have a coin I give it to Owen now it's his right or in the case of a bank transfer, click click some buttons, I move money in in the bank, right, in the bank ledger.

9:50 In crypto, you know, click some buttons, sign a transaction, gets validated, money moves in the ledger, right? And ultimately, what makes electronic money or even electronic payments, right? What allows them to exist is the ledger and the rules of the ledger, right? And in most people's minds, the ledger can only be in made in one way, right?

10:16 And that is the way traditional banks have a ledger and the way ERC20 is built, right? ERC20 is modeled on electronic money that existed before it. But in the land of smart contracts, you can do a lot more crazy things. And that's actually what Superfluid is. So superfluid is an ERC20 which is so it's it's a token standard which is fully compatible with ERC20 but adds a bunch of functionality which allows the money to move in real time without making transactions.

10:49 Yeah. And and that's where people you know people kind of don't understand how that works because you're like wait transaction equals money movement right. because because I guess kind of software engineers borrowed the word from finance or finance borrowed the word from engineering I'm not sure but we kind of think of transaction equal payment while well actually if you think about it from a computer science point of view transaction means updating a database right while payment means money changing hands right so those are actually two different things and if you split them you're halfway to understanding how Superfluid works, right?

11:31 So, normal payments in crypto, instant payment, you actually update the ledger the same moment the payment happens because the transaction changes the state of your balance and updates the state of the recipient, right? And that's what makes the transfer happen. The way Superfluid works is very different. So, Superfluid calculates balances. It doesn't store them. Yeah. So what that means is basically for each user instead of having just one data slot occupied with the balance we have a bunch of different data points right and you know we can go into the nitty-gritty but the point is there's a lot of extra columns in this table right for each user there's a lot of data points so when you make a transaction so for example a transaction in superfluid could be create stream right so I want

12:25 To send Owen 0.01 a second. That's what a transaction looks like. So you send a transaction to the blockchain and the transaction will change the data points in my personal ledger that refer to how much I am sending every second and it will update your data to say how much you are receiving every second. Right? So there is a transaction that changes the data.

12:55 But then what happens is the next block when you go and ask the blockchain what your balance is, it will compute your balance based on that data that changed in the previous transaction but with a new time stamp because the time stamp is moving forward every block. Right? So the time stamp will make make it so that the calculation returns a different result at every block which is what's moving your balance if that makes sense.

13:24 But I kind of speedrun through it but tell me if it if it doesn't make sense. No, of course like a a bank account that's adjusting in real time and then when you actually come and withdraw against it, you've got, you know, whatever the current balance is to the to the block timestamp to to withdraw. Yeah. Yeah.

13:41 But but you don't have to. Okay. So correct, but you don't have to withdraw. Yeah. So what's what's kind of really cool with superfluid is that this is not a system built on top of money. This is money. Like there are tokens like our token which is built like this. There is no you never have to take your money out if that makes sense.

14:02 Right? This is literally what the ERC20 is how the ERC20 is built. And what that means is that the settle you don't have to think of the settlement as when I take the money out. The same way you don't think of your bank account like it settles when I cash out at the ATM, right? Like because at this point we've gotten to the mental model that the money in the bank is real money even though it's not, right?

14:26 So with superfluid there's two ways to use it. One is that you use it on top of your existing tokens, right? So you have, you know, USDC and then super USDC, which is a wrapper, and then you kind of go between the two. And in that case, it's like, like you said, right? It's like you have your cash, you put it in this extra system, you move it around, and then you withdraw, right?

14:45 A bit like people use I mean, you used to use PayPal like that. I think Venmo works like that. I'm sorry, I'm not too familiar with American stuff, but I assume that's how it works, right? You kind of put money in, take it out. but for tokens that are launched natively through superfluid like our own token and a couple of stable coins now there's a few things in our ecosystem that are launching tokens directly then you never withdraw it.

15:10 So that's the token you know it's it's it streams you know it's it's a normal token but it streams it's the money of the future and where that gets really exciting is with stable coins specifically I think is is where it's most exciting. So, I'm going to describe a scenario and then ask you a question. So, I'm sending a dollar a second to Brendan.

15:32 Okay? I I have $10 in my account. I'm sending a dollar a second to Brendan. Brendan is sending a dollar a second to Owen. Then Owen is sending me a dollar a second. Okay? I have $10. Now, I transfer those $10 somewhere else. Now, there's zero dollars in my account, but there's $3 a second moving around. Where's the money?

15:52 Is it is it not? It just staying the same. It is, but there are free dollars moving around every second. Like there are free economic it it's kind of it's a paradox, right? But that's what happens when you have infinite velocity basically. So there's two things that are happening here. The money is basically settling in all the accounts at the same time, right?

16:15 And that's something blockchains don't usually do. So blockchains usually settle sequentially, right? So I would have I would send So we would make free transactions. I send you a dollar, you send it to Owen. Owen sends it to me. But if they're not ordered in that way, it's going to fail. Mhm. Right. Because they have to happen in order in a blockchain normally.

16:36 With Superfluid, they don't. With Superfluid, all the streams settle at the same time, which means you can spend a dollar at the same time as you're receiving it, which means you don't ever receive it, right? And it kind of you can basically it spins around at infinite velocity which means you don't actually need to have the money to do it which is kind of the the mental where where where I said you know I said at the beginning it's money but it works in a way that doesn't really fit into how we think about money usually working right you need the income not the the money and I I imagine at the contract level you guys are tracking a rate for each of these accounts that's what each account has associated exactly exactly and it's

17:20 A net Right? That's the interesting thing, right? So, if you have if you have income and outgoing money at the same time, it nets to zero, which leaves your balance kind of not moving, but the money is moving, right? And yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, somebody built a prototype for an exchange where the exchange itself is an AMM but has no deposits.

17:43 Like it's just continuously shifting money from the buyers to the sellers and it never holds any but it has like you know super high volumes. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like you can do some really crazy stuff basically. because you've got net settlement which is something again like nobody else really does that in crypto. Yeah. Definitely.

18:03 And the fundamentally you're making sure that everything is still solvent with kind of like a liquidation mechanism built on top of this. which is cool and we can get into that as well. but yeah, I mean going back to what you said about like problem solution statement, you know, Ethereum was more of like technological breakthroughs. They don't they're not amendable to a problem like a distinct problem.

18:30 Exactly. It's kind of like you you you have some sort of breakthrough and then in the case of Ethereum at least an entire ecosystem comes out of that and then and now that enables us to solve distinct problems in a way using this technology in some cases it creates new problems like me and all this stuff is also super interesting the creation of problems that can be then solved.

18:59 What what kind of Okay. So so what kind of opportunities you know much like Ethereum allows for you know like on on onchain you know AMMs and all this stuff that you couldn't even think of you conceive of before. What kind of things has superfluid empowered that that you guys are seeing today? So, so I mean today today mostly cryptonative stuff to be honest, right?

19:28 Very cryptonative stuff. you know, we've I think there's a really cool exchange built on top of Superfluid that allows you to buy buy stuff every second, right? it get gives you a really good price basically. You know, it's about again the the point is crypto is about is about kind of changing money and taking it out of the state's control blah blah blah, but realistically we're just speculating, right, all the time.

19:54 So, so you know, the the biggest product built on Superfluid at the moment is probably this one, which is an exchange, right? there are some other cool stuff cool things built for distributions, right? So just very efficiently distributing money a bunch a number of people in a constant way and kind of programmatic onchain way right there's some really cool things built there and some of them use this kind of multi-level thing so you know there's like a bigger org sending money to a smaller one sending money to a smaller one sending money to a bunch of different people who then maybe are streaming to Super Boring the exchange to swap it to dollars right so you've got these things are getting quite complex as well to to look at.

20:41 But I think one of the things that I for example would be very excited to see happen which hasn't really materialized except for in very small examples is subscriptions. So you you can do subscriptions very well with superfluid because it's just one transaction and then you're kind of paying forever, right? and as long as you're solvent, like you said, as long as you you never run out of money that this trans subscription will keep going, right?

21:07 So, one really cool thing that we saw last year around May was when we launched this app called Alpha Friends. It's still going, although the volumes are nowhere near what they were at launch. And when it launched, it peaked at 200,000 subscriptions. Wow. And what was really cool there is that it was a network of people paying each other, right?

21:29 So there were people. So imagine I would subscribe to your channel, then you would subscribe to mine, right? So basically money was circulating, right? And that's where it gets really exciting because with superfluid the volume was just insane, you know? people were running, we call it margin, right? So imagine if you're if you've got $1,000 moving through your account every day, but you only have actually $100 in your account, right?

21:56 With Superfluid, you can do that because it, you know, it nets out in real time. And people were running really really what we called highly leveraged accounts. Yeah. Which basically means again they had very low margin, right? So maybe they'd have a hundred bucks and they'd have, you know, money spinning through really fast because there was some market some farming things going on, right?

22:17 So people were trying to lever it up really really crazy and it was so cool to see. You know, you had these 200,000 accounts that were spinning money around really fast. Yeah. and then what happened was basically smart contract bug. which funnily enough, it didn't lose any money, but it basically broke the psychology of people because they they stopped getting streaming rewards and they started getting chunky rewards, right?

22:47 So, what happens is imagine you so you're streaming out $1,000 a month, but now the $1,000 you're receiving, they stop streaming, right? Now you're getting them staggered, right? Which means when you look at your balance, it's going down real fast. Mhm. You know, it's just it's just like going down. It looks like it's going to go to zero.

23:08 It never actually does because you do get these payments, but it looks like it's going down. Everybody freaked out. Yeah. And there was a massive deleveraging. it was very exciting to watch. Very sad for us, but but very exciting. But but that kind of showed us that you know you can build these kind of very efficient economies like basically the amount of money in the system was very low in TVL but the amount of volume of kind of money changing hands in the system was super super high right and we calculated it was like 20 times more the money was moving 20 times faster than in the normal economy.

23:48 Yeah. Right. in this kind of sub subsector of the economy, right? I mean, again, it's a very small thing, but it's kind of a testing bed of what we imagine would be a world running on money streams, right? So, imagine all everybody's salaries, everybody's rent, everybody's pension, everybody's interest, it's all streaming. That's what it would look like.

24:12 Some people would run on very low margins and have kind of a very highly leveraged life, right? and yeah, money basically it would it would move just much faster. So that's kind of the Superfluid world vision. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I mean, you mentioned like getting started in 2019, obviously in 2025 now that's like a pretty long journey in crypto.

24:39 And these are some pretty unique use cases. Have you felt like your vision for Superfluid has evolved like over those years or you've seen different use cases pop up that maybe you didn't at the beginning or is this like you know a vision that you guys had and you've you've been fulfilling? I I I think we were looking so far, right, that the vision hasn't changed too much, right?

25:00 Yeah. So, you know, if you're if you're kind of trying to like you said, trying to solve a problem, then you can probably see the problem, right? So, you you're kind of moving towards it and then if the problem moves, then you'll move with it and pivot. In our case, we're building something that is going to make a lot of sense probably in 30 years, right?

25:18 So we're looking so far that we kind of always went towards that and you know we've had a bunch of opportunities to completely pivot and you know do meme coins do trading do farming do all of that stuff you know but those trends don't last long right and ultimately it's not as rewarding to build something that is a fad compared to something which is you know potentially revolutionary right like I have no doubts that there's a future where everybody is using money streaming right now.

25:49 Will they use Superfluid? I don't know. Will they be able to look back in the in the past and say, "Oh, these were the first guys to try that." you know, that was us, right? So, we're, you know, very we're very bullish on it. You know, obviously it it's it but I, you know, acknowledging full well that it's something that's fairly far in the future.

26:09 Yeah, that that's fascinating. It's kind of like you take the limit as the time to like reinvest or the time to spend in an economy goes to zero and then it's like the economic Exactly. Like and then the economy just goes infinitely levered off the back of that basically. Basically yeah which is super scary but also exciting.

26:40 Yeah. That's really messy to think about, but it's like as long as you have that liquidation mechanism that's like keeping everything honest. I think the liquidation mechanism is not is not a requirement, right? Like it was the solution that we found and that made the most sense 5 years ago, right? it it's and it's worked perfectly like we've you know we've never had any major incident even even with blockchains going offline which is our worst nightmare because when blockchains go offline there's this really weird thing that happens right so at some point basically imagine a blockchain that goes offline for 12 hours right and you know we we [ __ ] on Solana but Polygon went offline a while ago as well right a few years ago and basically what happens is when it starts

27:30 Again, people start submitting transactions and between block one and block two, the time stamp has moved 12 hours. Yeah. Right. But there's been no transactions in the meantime, but the time has moved, which means for superfluid, what that means is the money's been streaming the whole time. So everybody who ran out of money in that in that period, Yeah.

27:53 Should have been liquidated but wasn't liquidated, right? which means now we have a potential problem right but we have safeguards against that and it's always been fine so again liquidations work but superfluid v2 which we are starting starting to talk about seriously now actually won't have liquidations so we found a better solution and it will be fully because the problem is liquidations if you don't do them they do cause problems right because our streams basically keep going even if you don't have money, which basically means you're printing money out of nowhere to fund these streams.

28:33 It's not great. Again, it never happens, but it could. but we found a way to completely eliminate that problem and very excited about it. Yeah. So, is that kind of like having some rule set in there to stop the stream or something like this? What's what does that look like? No. So that's not possible because of how so you know the graph computational problems right so with superfluid you can have a incredibly complicated graph dependency to tell you so imagine you know I ran out of money and then like a hundred steps down somebody gets [ __ ] because of that right that can happen in superfluid because you can have infinite hops on how your money is moving, right?

29:20 Which means onchain you can't compute it. Like there's just no way to do it. And what that tells us is that we can't enforce stream stopping on chain because the basically it's impossible to compute the whole network for a single account, right? So that has to happen offchain. So liquidations are an easy way to do it. the way V2 will work basically it will use some sort of ZK to prove certain things that will allow you to not need to to compute the whole thing on chain because you can't compute the whole thing on chain but you can compute you can't compute it offchain.

30:00 So you comput it off chain and then prove it on chain and then your system and and that's cool because then the system becomes fully proven right. and it's ZK proof so you know there's no question about it right you can prove the state of the system in a succinent manner on chain so it's going to be it's a big change for us cuz you know to give you an example the the example I did before where we're streaming money around and there's no liquidity is not actually possible right now with Superfluid because of our liquidation system right so and what that means is at the moment when you open a stream you have to put up 4 hours worth of security deposit of that stream.

30:44 So if I want to send, you know, a dollar an hour, I have to lock $4 into the security deposit. which which means that at the moment, Superfluid doesn't have infinite velocity because those $4 create an economic drag in the system, right? Like the money is actually locked. You know, $4 are locked, right? with Superfluid V2, we will not need that anymore.

31:11 So that's when you actually get infinite velocity of money. so that's really exciting, you know, for even though it's a it's a really small thing, in a sense, it it kind of eliminates the last amount of friction that we've had to add to the system to make it work. So for us, it's like a really big deal, you know?

31:30 It's like, eliminating that last bit of friction is is really really cool. Well, that's the hardest piece is like how do you get to infinite velocity? You've got to get like down to the infinite decimal like last marginal amount. And then like like removing like going from 90% to 95% to 99% to 99.9% like those last like marginal amounts.

31:55 Those are the hardest are the hardest one. Exactly. Exactly. which is why we went with the liquidation system because it's like you know it's still pretty fast you know like nobody will really notice this and in fact you know most users don't need to know it to use the system very few people really understand how it works and it works fine right but eliminating it still feels like a victory you know because then you have 100% and you'll basically be able to open a stream which means make a payment with without having money in your account potentially as long as in the same block you receive a payment from someone else.

32:35 Yeah, it's it it could be like it's such a big idea and it's so it's like almost hard to grasp like what this could mean for like let's say hypothetically you get like the economy into superfluid what happens like what what what is the outcome? What are the externalities of having like hyperinflation? Yeah, I suppose basically because no because you don't need money anymore, right?

33:02 Ton of credit. Exactly. It's it's basically what would happen is everybody so money would start moving much faster. people who are not able to move their money faster will be at a significant disadvantage. Yeah. Right. because you're less efficient, right? Basically it's it's capital efficiency, right? It's how fast you're able to reinvest your money, right? And people who have very good automations will be able to run on zero credit, zero current accounts, right?

33:36 People who don't have access to, you know, good financial technology will probably run in a very similar way to what they're running now, right? So in, you know, change is never instant and everywhere, right? It's always like somewhere first, you know, the future is not evenly distributed, right? So, what's going to happen is you probably start seeing a few companies use this for all of their internal systems and get a significant edge, right?

34:05 Because suddenly they're operating on very low working capital. You know, they're moving money around internally really fast and u you know, all their competitors will be like, "What the fuck?" You know, how are you guys doing this? and and then it will cascade into more adoption, right? but humans are always kind of the consumers or humans are always the slowest to adopt new things, right?

34:31 So even now, you know, we're still using cash even though it has a bunch of problems. And you know, we're still using cash, right? And I think we'll still we'll probably still be using cash in 50 years just because you know our generation might you know some people in our generation might still want to use it right.

34:50 So again consumers don't so and the other thing is that capital efficiency is not something that's easily understood by consumers but it's something that is very easily understood by corporations right like if you have a CFO and you tell them hey you know you don't need to have any money in the bank account anymore you can keep it all invested at all times and still run and and you know and still have every payment made on time you know they'll be very excited about that, right?

35:18 Assuming that all the other frictions attached to this are solved. But if you tell that to to me, I'm like, "Oh, okay. So, I can invest a bit faster, right?" okay. You know, I can put an extra dollar into my into my bank every every day, right? That's great, but it's not going to change change my profitability or it's not going to change my life as much, right?

35:41 Yeah. And and that's where we get to kind of some of our the issues with adoption of this, which is that there's not really any big companies in crypto. you know, it's mostly individuals, amateurs, you know, pro proumers trying stuff out. You know, it's not, you know, it's not that easy to get to the point where these hypothetical big corporations want to adopt a crypto-based payment system basically.

36:07 But we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. for especially for like a high opex type business. This could be that unlocks a ton of value there. And also I mean superfluid the way I think about it it's kind of like the derivative of money. It's like now instead of thinking in like you have x amount you're thinking in rate I have this and then like you know let's say like a CFO operating based on superfluid they're operating based on okay let's account for the rate and look at the rate accounting versus how much money we actually have.

36:41 Yeah and I think obviously that just viewpoint just lends itself way more to efficiency and it's real time I mean yeah they're already doing that right even even just you know the government is doing that right when they talk about refinancing the debt that's basically in and out of your of your books and you have to kind of you know balance them right but people always like they're either doing it yearly if they're a small company or they're doing it monthly if they're a bigger company but nobody does it by the yet, right?

37:12 But that's what we're proposing and if you if you think about it long enough, it actually makes a lot of sense and it actually is arguably simpler to understand. U so to give you an example, right, even just a from a human a person's point of view, right? You have your rent payment, your salary, and your credit card repayment and your subscriptions, right?

37:38 And if I ask you when you're paying those, you might say monthly. And if I press you, you'll tell me, "Oh, my salary is on the 15th. My rent is on the 14th." And I'm like, "Wait, so you have to pay your rent the day before you get paid?" And you're like, "Yeah, that sucks. So I have to keep a full month of rent in my bank account the whole time to pay for it."

37:57 I'm like, "Well, if you were using Superfluid, that would all be settled every second, right? So your money would come in, it would go out and you would know at every point in time how much your rate like you said right the derivative your rate how much is your rate and is it up or down right and that's all you have to optimize for which means basically you kind of collapse this 2D calendar into a one-dimensional list of rates that are either positive or negative and all you need to care about is the net- which incidentally is exactly what the ledger looks like in inside the contracts, right?

38:36 It's literally one number. Is it going up or down? And that's, you know, all you need to know. but yeah, I mean, anyway, sorry, geeking out geeking out a bit. But, yeah, this is, it's fascinating to think about. And I mean I could even imagine there could be financial instruments that even furthermore increase the like capital efficiency or like credit of the system in so far as like let's say I have some rate some financial instrument could let me borrow against that rate and then now I get that credit immediately today and then you know it just compounds upon itself.

39:13 So I think the most likely the most likely result of this in personal finance specifically is that you would effectively always buy everything on credit probably. Yeah. and then you would simply have a rate that you're repaying. Mhm. Right. So you're you're you know you've got like your credit card repayment rate a dollar a dollar a second and then the credit card just allows you to pay pay for anything.

39:41 And it, you know, if you kind of start buying a bunch of stuff, it's just going to increase your rate of repayment, right? And that way you never actually have to deal with having cash in your account, right? Why would you, right? Yeah. I don't need cash in my account. I can just borrow when I need to against my rate.

39:57 So then you literally only have one number and it's not the balance, it's the rate, which is really cool if you think about it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean because a lot of people in you know like the the working class like most of the people in the world are kind of operating on that basis already and that they don't have a ton of you know cash just sitting around.

40:22 They are living like when I get my paycheck then I pay my rent and all this stuff. Exactly. Exactly. It's Yeah. It it would be really interesting to see kind of like a a small like economy that's just like operating based on this and see like what happens like you said you had that that group of of people that you know they had very little actual but the volumes were just crazy like that is such an interesting case study and I'd love to see like hopefully you know we can get another sort of instance of that where you know there are no smart contract issues and people yeah.

41:03 Honestly, it's very exciting to to start seeing this. we'll see. You know, I I don't think mass adoption is around the corner. but but there's definitely like, you know, we've been around for a while. We've been working on Superfluid for a while, right? And 5 years ago, I could I I knew everyone who was getting paid in crypto, right, on on Ethereum.

41:28 Like I I just I could point I can point them out in a room and they were were all in the same room because we all went to the same conferences, you know? It was literally five dudes, right? now it's not like that, right? There's like a hundred EVM chains and on each of them there's people getting paid the salary in crypto, right?

41:48 So like the the space has grown hugely and the financial products available for these people are much more than they were before in the so we've gone much we've grown a lot vertically as well right before people would be like oh how do I offramp how do I onramp how do I spend the money I mean nowadays there's like a hundred different credit cards that you know crypto debit cards you know basically most of the pro problems have been solved right so I don't expect to see mass adoption tomorrow, but I do expect to see some very kind of concentrated groups of people who will start using crypto products a lot more heavily.

42:29 Yeah. Right. so again the kind of proumers and and that's kind of where I hope we will start seeing a dent right somewhere with a lot of concentration of crypto proumers you know Balaji's network state kind of thing you know would do you really want to pay your network state subscription once a month you know what I mean that's so old school you know yeah if you do want to pay it in crypto like it makes way more sense to open open a stream on on Superfluid.

43:03 And yeah, I mean that's the thing with all of these like like let's say like continuous recurring payment solutions in crypto. They always have that root problem of like oh you've got to top up your your account and then it just pays out from there. That's only a problem if the application is only for making this payment because I have to put the money there and it's like I've already paid that money today and I've got to pay upfront.

43:35 It's just a matter of it getting streamed out from the smart contract or you know whatever custodial solution. but with something like a Superfluid, you've got the utility of your money still and it's just being streamed in real time on the on the back end that just affects your rate. And then maybe you've got, you know, other things coming in that are m maybe paying that for you or but you can still access that capital and it's not like just having to like set aside this lump sum that's just going to sit there and like serve absolutely no use.

44:12 Yeah, it I mean there's a lot of kind of cool financial products that can be built to enable you to always make the most of your capital, right? the simplest thing would be I have a sort of some sort of money market or let's let's just say kind of yield pool right where I'm earning yield and then I withdraw from that exactly the same amount that I am spending in these other places right which could be more or less of the yield right it I don't know right it could be more could be less but in any case I'm only withdrawing as much as I need to to pay these people.

44:54 So basically 100% of my capital of my capital is invested, right? Even though I've got outgoing payments. that you know that that's kind of possible. but we're not we're not there yet. I mean there's a lot of things that need to be built. You know, if anyone anyone watching this as a developer come and come and help us crack these problems because there's some funky math there that is not super easy to to do.

45:20 Yeah. On that on that note, are you guys like incentivizing anyone to to build on Superfluid or have like dev grants for building some of these things out? so Superfluid recently launched a token. so the token was launched on the 14th of February. so we're about two months two months later now. the token doesn't directly go to developers at at the moment.

45:45 But what happens is basically the token is distributed in streams over time and you earn it by using applications built on Superfluid. So basically the idea is rather than giving tokens to devs which we've seen not work very well because devs will build but they won't actually distribute which are two different things right. instead we basically give tokens to users which means if you have a product you build it of superfluid you can basically get a bunch of incentivized users and then it's up to you to monetize those users right so you know charge a fee to the user and the user will use it anyway because they're getting a rebate using getting Superfluid tokens right and that's worked quite well so far there's a bunch of apps in our ecosystem that have reported

46:35 You know much higher volumes much higher usage. there's 2,500 people who have started streaming donations in in the last two months which is really cool. and all of this just because of the token, right? every 3 months we have different apps and different campaigns that that kind of join this distribution program. So it is very likely because I'm I'm already having some chats about it.

47:03 It's very likely that there will be something for developers in the next season. but it's not public yet. But you know, definitely, you know, come and come and check Superfluid out and we'll probably, you know, by the time you find this it might be public already, but yeah, there there's most likely going to be something in the next season for developers.

47:22 Awesome. Yeah, it sounds great. And overall for the token, is this on like a governance model? what are some of the other like use cases that you have? So the token is definitely for governance. the interesting thing is that governance is is basically deputized to distribute the token, right? Which means that basically all these apps have an incentive to bribe basically the token holders to vote for them so that basically they get they keep getting those distributions that are giving them fees, right?

47:59 So it's you know it's not something necessarily when you bootstrap an app right you don't have that much money but basically if you build an app launch a token then you can just kind of send some of those tokens to superfluid stakers to convince them to vote for your app in the next cycle of distributions which basically has it's a good flywheel you know it it makes people want to hold the token even though it doesn't have fees at the moment but but at the same time it basically creates these fees through for through bribes.

48:35 Very cool. Those are some interesting incentives going on there. and for anyone listening to this that wants to maybe check out like apps in the superfluid ecosystem. Is there what's like the best place we can point them to? Oh I would recommend so first off check if you've if you're eligible if you're eligible for tokens because a bunch of people are eligible but don't know.

48:58 So, if you if you want to check, I always use banklist.com. They have a thing called claimables. You just put your address in. Put any address in and it will tell you if you're eligible. So, definitely check that out. and basically, if you are eligible, then go to claim.superfluid.org or and there you'll be able to claim your SUP tokens and you'll also see a directory of apps that you can play with to earn to earn more tokens, right?

49:28 So that's what I would recommend. I think all the all the main apps are on there and if they're not there now, they will be in a month in the next season. so definitely worth checking out. but I guess my favorite app is probably Super Boring. So, it's a superboring.xyz and it's basically a market. It allows you to basically dollar cost average or buy overtime any assets.

49:56 Well, any listed asset, but it kind of lists all the main ones getting the best price. So, you mentioned me before. There's no me here because you're well, technically because your purchases are happening at every block. but in an unordered way which means nobody can rent revenue because the settlement is kind of u not depending on the order of the transactions.

50:25 So yeah there's no me and it basically allows you to buy stuff at very good price over time. So if you're a long-term investor or if you're a really bad seller then I recommend it. And when I say bad seller, it's people who never sell and then they regret never selling, right? You can be a bit more disciplined here.

50:48 Just stream out some some ETH or some Bitcoin and it will automatically sell it for you and you know you're always selling at the average price and you know you won't regret it. Awesome. Yeah. we also talked about you know updating that or replacing rather the liquidation mechanism. Is there anything else like you know interesting coming up that you're working on that you know people should know about?

51:15 So not not directly but there's a bunch of stuff in our ecosystem. I think one that's coming up very very soon on Arbitrum there's a new project called narrite nei.org network and they're launching a streamable stable coin. I'm very excited about that because it's a natively it's a native super token, right? So it's a superfluid powered token.

51:42 Which means basically you can stream it without needing to think about anything around the kind of some of the more exotic UX that we have sometimes. And I think that's going to power a bunch of really cool stuff because it I don't know it's just this really cool thing if you want to if you have some balance you can start a subscription one transaction you know your balance will go down or up depending on your streams like all the things we've talked about now kind of the first step for those is having streamable stable coins and with superfluid so far it's always been rappers so it's always this two levels and then people think it's only it's only money when I take it out, right?

52:24 In the case of Narrite, it is money even if you don't take it out, right? And that's I think it's going to help a lot of people understand Superfluid more natively and and kind of use it more directly. So, yeah, I'm very excited about that. and then there's a bunch of other stuff that's not public yet, but should be live in the season two of our rewards, which is starting in May.

52:50 So yeah, definitely, you know, join our Discord, follow us on Twitter, and, you know, keep keep up to date because, yeah, there's some pretty cool stuff coming. Yeah, that is really exciting because it it's to me it's like the real power of the economics of what you've created becomes unlocked only when we have all the the capital inside of the superfluid ecosystem, inside of that accounting world.

53:16 Yeah, exactly. And then when you do like all that money just gets like I don't know for lack of a better term just like supercharged and made like infinitely efficient. So yeah I'm definitely interested to see how that how that goes and what kind of utility everybody's is getting from it. I was also interested how so okay so you mentioned the DCAing mechanism.

53:41 How how do folks get custody of these assets in a stream like manner? Is there somebody who's owning it and then like streaming it out to you as you're buying it? What's the And then of course, how do you figure out what is in real time? How does that Yeah. So, okay, let me let me kind of backtrack a couple of things.

54:02 So, first thing, sorry before I forget, if anybody is getting paid in crypto right now, tell your employer to pay your Superfluid. it's the easiest way to earn Superfluid tokens. everybody basically who gets paid in in in Superfluid there's a whitelisting process and that allows you to earn Superfluid tokens. So, you know, if anybody listening wants to have that chat with their employer, I would recommend it because it's much better to get paid every second.

54:33 And then and then you can do this really cool thing. If your income is in streams, you can then go and stream part of it to Super Boring and buy ETH or Bitcoin, right? So, how does Super Boring work? so, first off, I I took some shortcuts when I explained it. the buying. So so Super Boring is not a streaming exchange.

54:56 Let's let's first off say that a pure streaming exchange is something that some people were trying to build. We've got some models for it. If anybody wants to try that's great, but we we don't have a pure streaming exchange at the moment. it's quite complicated to build. Yeah. And it's actually easier to build than it is to market make.

55:20 So the really really hard thing is to market make a streaming exchange. Yeah. and basically we couldn't find any market maker who was willing to learn how to do this. Yeah. Right. Which is a pretty you know it's funny because you know we're all devs. We like building stuff. But then the actual problem here was we can't find a quant that will make a model to market make it.

55:43 Yeah. so the way Super Boring works is you stream, let's say you're buying ETH with USDC. You stream USDC. USDC accumulates in the contract and it basically is always on sale at the TWAP price. Yeah. Yeah. And the the TWAP price is taken from Uniswap v3, right? So you have people trading on Uniswap and that determines a real time TWAP price.

56:15 When you start your stream you can imagine it like you're setting a first point on that TWAP then you set a second second point and you're basically selling USDC at the average price from A to B right in a in a section of that TWAP price charts line. And then like you said it's arbitrage right so anybody can take that and people do right so they'll come they'll take that USC they'll settle it somewhere else they'll take a small margin and you are guaranteed that you've bought exactly the TWAP price at any point in time because you are technically not taking the market you're making it right so normally the reason you get me or you get front run or you know is because you're you're you're going to the market and you're buying and

57:04 Then other people buy before you buy after you, right? And they they screw you. But in this case, you are setting the price, which means there's no way there's no way to screw you because if people don't pay you the price you ask for, then it doesn't settle, right? So you you're guaranteed the average price. what you're not guaranteed the trade-off is that you don't know when it settles.

57:27 So you you don't know when the arbitrage will happen, right? we, you know, we're running some bots so that it never takes too long. Yeah. But but yeah, technically you don't know when the arbitrage happens. but yeah, to to kind of compress that into a streaming exchange is significantly more complicated. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And that that kind of follows the the recent idea of like intents that everybody is talking about like it's kind of like intent based DCAing or or buying or also selling I suppose.

58:04 Yeah so that's that's really interesting and and so of course we we kind of skirt around this idea of super apps. How long have apps been around and design here? So we design we put super apps in the first version of the protocol and I really wish we hadn't. it was probably kind of pushing it because they they're very hard to build and they complicate the protocol significantly.

58:31 So I I really wish going back that we done V1 with no super apps, V2 with super apps, right? So what are super apps? Super apps are hooks, right? So everybody's talking about Uniswap v4 hooks. super apps are hooks for streams. been around since 2021 when we first went live. And basically the way they work is that you can insert logic that will trigger when your contract receives a stream, when that stream is updated, or when that stream is closed.

59:05 That's it. So they're hooks on basically the free kind of life cycle events of the stream. And it it's it's a necessary feature really because of how streaming accounting works, right? So if you think of a normal smart contract you know you will call a function and money will come into my contract and then you know I can do stuff with that money.

59:33 It's in my contract and then at some point I somebody makes another transaction and moves out. Right. Yeah, with streams, the user who sends the stream could then close the stream at any point, right? So even just having a simple contract that receives money and keeps track of it is impossible if you don't have hooks because you don't know when that stream gets closed by the counterparty unless it triggers logic in your contract, right?

59:59 So we needed that to build even very simple use cases for streaming accounting. and yeah that's how it works basically. So imagine I have a contract you send me a stream it triggers the create onFlowCreated hook you update the stream it triggers onFlowUpdated hook. You close a stream onFlowDeleted hook and it executes my logic.

1:00:22 There's some special rules in there which are interesting I guess from a kind of architectural point of view. so imagine you you open a stream, right, to my contract and then when you close a stream, my my my hook reverts. Mhm. So what what does that mean? That means you're not allowed to stop paying me, right? Which means I can kind of, you know, create a malicious hook that keeps you hostage.

1:00:49 Yeah. Well Well, that's that's not good, right? Because you could have you could have run out of money as far as we know, right? or in any case it shouldn't be possible for an app to force you to pay them, right? So we had to figure out how to fix that. so the way this works is that the onFlowDeleted hook is not allowed to revert which means if it reverts it kind of the system kicks it out.

1:01:14 So it it it kind of breaks your app. so you know that was one interesting thing. and there were some other things. you our CTO can probably talk more about but there's some gas rules that we had to enforce right for for kind of checking if there was a out of gas or or what you know why it reverts.

1:01:37 Yeah. Exactly. There's some there's some interesting stuff there. that is the most by far the most complicated part of the protocol. I don't I don't pretend to understand all of it. our CTO does obviously he built it. but that's also you know that was you know part of the problem we got hacked now four years ago three or four years ago and that was the part that that that was problematic right because again it is a very complicated part of the system yeah I'm not surprised I mean anytime there are callbacks security researchers start to salivate because there's just so much that you could do could like reenter you could expend a ton of gas even like return some nasty data that could just be huge and then that could cause a ton of gas

1:02:23 Even if you only specified a certain amount of gas to forward to that call. so there's like yeah exactly of course the try catch has all of these like weird behaviors and solidity. and I assume you guys are using thing like a try catch. Yeah but it is a really tough area. Funny funny tangent. these are mostly quirks of solidity, right?

1:02:49 And this is one of the reasons why our CTO has now embarked on a kind of side quest. and he's actually built a new programming language for the EVM really. I mean you should have him on probably to talk about just that because he can he can nerd about it like crazy. it's called the Yulk and it's it's basically Haskell for the EVM.

1:03:12 So it it compiles to u it gives you actually it gives you solidity too. but it's written in Haskell. So you have you know full full functional programming. it's called it's using something called linear types. I I'm probably probably mean getting this wrong but I think it's called linear types. It basically ensures that some of the bugs that you mentioned are impossible.

1:03:42 So you know it does something called data versioning which basically ensures that the data is always you know the right data basically right format. Yeah. Again it's very complicated stuff. I definitely don't understand that the syntax the syntax is insane. Like if you I don't I don't know if you've ever tried the Haskell but the syntax makes no sense to me.

1:04:04 It's just like looking at an alien language. but it is probably very safe, right? Again, it's still very early days. I think he's probably the only person who's coded with it yet. Yeah. but but yeah, it's definitely one to watch if you're, you know, interested in looking into the next generation of smart contract development. No, that's fascinating.

1:04:28 Has he talked to like some teams like Arbitrum Stylus or you know teams that are building like alternate EVM compatible languages like I think he's probably talked to a bunch of people about it. Honestly I I try to stay out of it because it's too nerdy for me. I mean I can't I can't even I can't even read the contracts, you know.

1:04:50 It's like looking at the you know these scrolls written in, you know, Sumerian or something. I really I I don't even know where if it's red up to Yeah. right to left. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that I mean, yeah, definitely. I'd love to hear more about that. I mean, obviously we've got Vyper. we've got well, obviously Solidity and then I think, you know, we've got with Arbitrum Stylus, there's some like Rust and now of course some like Haskell like syntax.

1:05:21 Is almost like client diversity in terms of like having all these different kinds of languages that are now EVM compatible and we'll see. I mean that also unlocks like new use cases that probably were not I'm interested to see like what kind of because you've still got to consider gas and everything at a fundamental level. So that's interesting to see like what kind of constraints you have working in that way.

1:05:47 Yeah. But yeah, I I don't know if it will be more or less gas efficient. so our CTO has this kind of way of thinking about things which I think is is probably a good one which is that we shouldn't think too much about gas basically and it's been a long time definitely. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. He basically you know and this we've had this debate for years right when we started we were building for mainet you know gas was really high you know it was just before DeFi summer was very you know gas was crazy in those times right and it it it went 100x in a matter of a couple of months and it was stably up at 100x right and our CTO always basically had this long-term vision that if we if in five

1:06:38 Years we're still talking about gas then we failed basically Yeah, right. Which I think makes sense because if you look at the history of computing, comput gets cheaper, right? We know that that's the case. There's no reason to think that you know, blockchain based compute won't get cheaper too, right? For similar reasons, it might it's probably always going to be more expensive than non verified compute if you want, but it's definitely going to get cheaper over time, right?

1:07:03 And that's proven true, right? Nowadays, it's much cheaper than it used to be. and arguably even more secure than it used to be, which is interesting, right? Like the same amount of money will buy you a lot more compute and a lot better compute, right? So, you know, we've got higher gas limits, like basically kind of his his proven true.

1:07:23 So I think I think I kind of agree with them and I think that's kind of also how he's building Yulk which is not focusing too much on gas optimization because security is actually more important. Yeah. you know, like I think any solidity developer would probably pay a 10% gas premium to avoid a whole class of risks, right?

1:07:49 And so, you know, I think sometimes it's worth having that extra piece of code in your contract that makes your contract easier to write, easier to audit, easier to read, even though it makes it slightly more expensive, right? instead of having your assembly block that is, you know, unscrew inscrutable. Yeah. Yeah. I've audited my fair share of like hyper optimized libraries and stuff like that.

1:08:15 Not fun. not fun. Yeah, it is definitely not readable by users. but yeah, so I I think directionally that's right as well like especially and we've seen it with like L2s and stuff like this. like I mean gas is gas is very cheap on like an L2. Are you guys mostly actually on on L2s at this point or Yeah.

1:08:39 Yeah. So we were building for mainet but then we actually it was roughly the same time that the kind of u rollup ccentric road map was rolled out. Right. So we actually went L2 first. our first deployment was on Polygon. Mhm. which is you know not an L2 but whatever like it's what we had at the time so we deployed on polygon exactly there's deploy on polygon and and Gnosis first and then Arbitrum optimism base you know just kind of all of the other relevant EVMs y yeah very cool well so obviously we can we can definitely push folks who are if you're getting paid in crypto today definitely head on over to superfluid and and talk about getting your your stream switched over.

1:09:29 And then of course I think it's really cool the incentive that you guys have for builders. It's very like you're going straight to the destination instead of like trying to give it to the developers to dole out like yeah you're going straight to what will get the developers traction for their app which I think is the best incentive because then it's up for to them to build something that users will actually get utility out of because then you can monetize that on the back of that and then you have some like some seed traction to get started and and start marketing and get some incentivized usage.

1:10:06 So I I love that incentive in the way that you guys have done that. I think that's that's been something that there's so many examples of like just absolutely wasted burned money on getting like malicious well not even not malicious but mercenary capital to just like bridge over and just sit there and then take it and then bridge back after you're done.

1:10:28 Yeah. And of course, if anybody wants to go and and build and and leverage that incentive, we got a lot of technical folks who are going to be listening to this, you can go head on over to to Superfluid, check out the super apps. you can implement some callbacks and hopefully not cause any issues in the main system.

1:10:49 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, building with Superfluid is a lot of fun. it's it allows you to do a lot of things with very simple you interfaces right so you just give an example right transfer right when you make an ERC20 transfer you specify a recipient and an amount y and create flow is almost the same so create flow is a recipient and a rate right so it's a super intuitive API to use right and and it allows ows you to make payments that go on forever.

1:11:25 Just think about that, right? Like you some of the contracts that I've written have been moving money for the past. So when we launched, we launched with a a streaming auction, which was really fun. And some of some of those people never closed their bids. And the way this worked is that when you made a bid, you're streaming to the contract and the contract was streaming money back to you.

1:11:48 Yeah. Right. And then when your bid was accepted, then it stopped streaming money back to you. Does that make sense? So it was kind of canceling bidding. Exactly. So it was cancelelling out your bid and then when it accepted your bid, it would stop cancelling it out, which means you were effectively pink, right? and some people never close their bids.

1:12:08 So they've they've been there for four years and spending no gas, right? So there's just this money moving for four years, no gas is spent. you know I don't know I think that's really cool you know there's few ways there's few things in crypto that give you so much power as a developer u so yeah definitely recommend to have a look yeah indestructible and actually I mean that's that's actually a huge problem in the web two like traditional online business world is failed payment processing like for for subscriptions I I forget what the rate is but it's like something crazy like 30% % or like I don't know maybe it's not that high but like 20 20% or something like this of like monthly billings actually just fail and then they have apps there's like

1:12:56 Paymentsai that specifically try and like solve it. That's crazy. It's crazy. This is something we've spent like we've heard a bunch of times there's some people that in our ecosystem that tried to work on subscription products. I think there's a huge opportunity there because like you said it's it's a mess, right? Yeah, like just in general monthly payments, right?

1:13:18 So I'll tell you why I think streaming payments are significantly better than monthly payments for subscriptions, right? So imagine you're a business, you've got subscriptions, right? You're expecting money at some point, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like so, so you're basing it basing it on an expectation, right? But you don't actually know if you will get paid or not.

1:13:41 Yeah. Like that's an insane amount of uncertainty to build a business on, right? It is. And and those payments could have a bunch of states, right? So just imagine it as a you know, from a kind of a computer science point of view, the payment could be active. It could be well, it's pending, right? And then when it's not pending, it's delayed.

1:14:03 It could be failed. It could be in transit. You know, there's there's literally a million states, right, that you need to track. And there's a million error failure cases. Streams are much simpler, right? You're either getting paid or you're not getting paid. Yeah. Right. There either is a stream or there was a stream, right? Like it's it's very binary.

1:14:25 And I think that allows you to program everything much easier, right? Oh, your your stream was closed, right? Did it fail? Did a transaction fail? Well, that's up to you. But your stream is closed and we're closing your account unless you reopen it, right? like and that's how kind of you can do that with with with super apps, right?

1:14:45 So one of our biggest users is a game on Polygon and they basically allow you to rent land with a stream and when you when your stream runs out, right, so the stream gets closed and you stop earning yield on the land immediately. Yeah. Right. there's no question marks, you know, there's no follow-ups. is just, you know, fully fully binary automated.

1:15:11 Exactly. which which might sound harsh, but it's, you know, automated. You can build. Yeah. That's the only thing you can build off of something that has guarantees like that. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And you know that everything that has been streamed to you is settled. And you know, there's no, you never have to like the the really weird thing for me is that in this day and age, people are still chasing unpaid bills, right?

1:15:40 Like if you're chasing unpaid bills, it means you worked for free. Yeah. Right. And now you're doing more work to to try and And now you're doing more work to try and get paid. Exactly. You should just get paid every second. If they stop paying you, you stop working and then there's no unpaid bills, you know. But, you know, old systems are hard to die, but we'll get there.

1:16:04 Yeah. No, I think absolutely this this problem of payment failure and then of course, you know, like chasing unpaid bills, it the only way that it can be totally solved is onchain. like there's no solving this with all the intermediaries and all of the like inner like parts that just like miss each other and like all this like yeah it it's there are solutions like there's a ton of solutions like payments AI is one I know for sure that they're trying to solve it in like the traditional online business world but like to totally solve it it's only going to happen onchain so I think that's a huge problem that that you guys are probably positioned pretty well to to be able to solve.

1:16:50 I mean especially immediately for the onchain stuff already obviously but that's a huge problem globally and of course is there any so of course we we touched on the super apps you know like streaming and income is there anything we can push folks towards you know maybe of course if if they really like what you guys are building and they want to work with you where should they reach out?

1:17:14 I think probably joining our Discord and then starting to be active there or ask questions there is probably the easiest way to get our attention, right? And then just build something and show us. we we run we run a really cool program called the Frontier Guild, which is basically a sort of can think of it a bit as an accelerator.

1:17:33 So it's a program where we we have a budget which is a stream that is basically it's usually about 20k a month and that's distributed across certain number of teams depending on bi-weekly votes, right? So you have a bunch of judges every two weeks you check progress and they vote and then your stream can get really big or it could get really small depending on how well you did, right?

1:18:02 So, it's like a paid or maybe a paid internship to build a product, right? Yeah. I think that's a really cool program because first of all, it it really keeps you on the hook, you know, like people people deliver on this program because if they don't, the you know, their stream stops. You don't want your stream to stop, right?

1:18:21 Yeah. and that's worked very well, but it we're very selective who we let in. So, you know, building stuff first, coming to our Discord, showing it off, you know, is is usually the right way to do it. Yeah. I love how you guys have integrated your own app across all these like different layers of like incentives and stuff like this.

1:18:43 First of all, with the token streaming and then with this, I think that's that's really cool to see. It's kind of refreshing to see like somebody who's like, you know, you're eating your own dog food, you're using the app, you're and you can see like I mean, you've got to think like, okay, we used our app to solve this for us.

1:19:02 Is that useful for other teams in the same light like so yeah, it's it's really cool to see you guys. Yeah. You know, it's such a utilitarian platform like there's so much that it could be used for in this sense. So yeah, just really cool to see all the ways that you guys are are applying that. but yeah, anything else?

1:19:25 Any anywhere we should push folks? Obviously, we'll have the the Discord and the website and everything down below, so if folks are interested, but yeah, anything else? I mean, if again, go get some SUP tokens. It's very easy. It's an open mechanism. It's not a retroactive airdrop. It's a continuous campaign, right? So, you can you can make yourself eligible by using apps at any point.

1:19:48 And the probably easiest thing to do is mint.superfluid.finance. it's an NFT that's basically a perpetual stream, right? It's been going for over a year. So everybody who mints this NFT gets a part of this continuous stream. It's currently streaming about two ETH a month, I think, something like that to all the people who've minted it. And it's been going for a year, so it's you know, it if we're lucky, it'll never stop.

1:20:20 And if you mint it now, you'll get paid forever. So, it's worth it's worth a try. that's the easiest way to get points to make you eligible for SUP tokens. So, do that. Then go to claim.superfluid.org and yeah, go claim some sub and then, you know, we'll see how it works. Yeah, 100%. Well, yeah, did excellent conversation.

1:20:41 Kind of learned a ton about what you guys are working on and and the potential here. Appreciate you hopping on and and taking the time. Yeah, same. Thanks for thanks for inviting me and looking forward to maybe having another episode about Yulk next time. Yeah, 100%.