Crypto-Native Rails for Recurring Payments - Francesco George Renzi

so just uh in terms of the next uh topic here staying in the d5 space but uh we're going to shift over a little bit to payments you know payments is a very fundamental it's really kind of the og sort of thing going back to bitcoin but um how do you do that scalable fashion how do you how do you make it more programmable a few years ago um kevin owaki kind of built out the most elite eip ever 1337 with the recurring subscriptions but now we're seeing uh evolution and iteration um getting more uh sort of in depth and super fluid is doing some super cool stuff so fran i'll leave it up to you sure okay i'm gonna share my screen and you can start so okay can you see my screen yeah i gotta take it away yeah hello so today uh hi i'm francesco i'm one of the co-founders at superfluid and today i want to tell you about slow tube so slow tube is um and sorry guys this is not working [Music] hello yeah we hear you and see you uh we saw your screen for a minute oh you got it back okay okay here we go so today i want to talk about slow tube so slow tube is an amazing application it basically allows you to select all the videos you want to watch and then at the end of the month you get them delivered to you now that obviously that sucks right imagine you didn't have youtube imagine at the end of the month you were receiving your videos instead of being able to access them every day now it turns out that's exactly how payments work you work your ass off you work for a month at the end of the month you get paid you can't get the money when you need it right you don't get paid as you go money is slow transactions take time you need to process them you need accounting you need to figure out reconciliation you need to account for every transaction in a lump sum right but our interactions with businesses are not like that we when we subscribe to a business we generally subscribe and we click a button and now we're inside the service so how come is that how come is that payment still handled in lump sums at the end of the month right this is it's a very strange concept and i believe in d5 we want to go beyond traditional finance now it's obvious when you start when you have a new technology you try and layer it on top of things you know you try and rebuild things that are familiar you try and re-explore patterns which you've uh you've grown up to be used to right so i think it's natural that when we first had programmable money and we first had crypto what we built were things that look very similar in the end to what traditional finance does but let's go beyond that let's try and imagine what would a more efficient money look like what would uh the payment system we're looking for what what would that look like so i would say we want it to be fluid like bites right so the same way when i click on a youtube video it immediately starts i should be able to enjoy my money as soon as i start getting paid right so i shouldn't have to wait shouldn't have to you know wait for somebody to process something it should be as simple as that should be real time as soon as i start something if i start a service i should start paying it if i start a job i should get paid shouldn't have to wait and the money shouldn't be locked up either right it really should be completely fluid completely liquid i get paid the money is mine i can do what i want i i pay someone they get the money they can do what they want real time programmable money that's that's where we want to go but still for services even in crypto we're still paying once a month so how do we solve this right and how do we solve it maintaining the programmability which is so important for everything we do in d5 so the way we solve this is through money streaming money streaming is an amazing technology it allows you to pay for things every second that you use them and this kind of breaks breaks the the wall here right because you're not paying once a month anymore your relationship with a business as soon as you sign up you start paying them as soon as you start a job they start paying you and you get paid for every second that you're on the job and that's how it should be you really shouldn't have to wait for the end of the month to watch the videos like with slow tube everything should be in real time this would give you much more control right because you never have to wait to see if you do get paid you never have to wait to see if that service is delivered everything is in real time as you use it you pay for it so the way we see it streams these money streams should be open forever because that's that's the best experience right when you sign up for something you don't sign up saying oh i want to sign up for a month or i want to sign up for two months you just sign up and then when you're tired of it you close it and that's how money should work you open a tap money flows you close it up money stops flowing very liquid very natural right and it's strange to say it's natural because it's so different to how we currently use money but actually having thought about this a lot i really think it's how money should work and obviously it shouldn't require me to go and click a button do an interaction or pay any fees in a recurring way we want this to be a very good ux we want this for the user to feel like they're opening a tab and the tap will say open until they close it set it and forget it you don't need to go back to it you don't need to do anything it should be really really easy so imagine you're running a business and your customers are paying you subscriptions in real time every second you receive some money you have all these incoming subscriptions normal subscriptions premium subscriptions they're all condensing into one single balance and from that balance you're then paying your salaries you're paying your bills and all the excess money you're investing because everybody wants to buy more ether so how would this look for the business basically they would have a very clear view of what their balance and what their flow rate is so the flow rate would basically show how much money is coming in netted with how much money is going out and this is very important because netting is something which is completely missing in crypto and defy so netting is how the banks manage to uh basically move less money and this is something that we think should be down to the user level everybody should be able to do this because in crypto everybody should be their own bank so with net inc what this allows you to do is that all the money that's coming in and the money that's going out is netted the result of this is that your company won't need as much money because you don't need to accumulate money to pay for those bills at the end of the month you don't need to accumulate money to make sure that if somebody doesn't pay you at the end of the month you can still pay your salaries because all of this will be happening in real time so you will immediately know who is paying you who you're paying if somebody stops paying you you can react immediately your budget cycles become much shorter your ability to react and to reinvest your money becomes much much faster and all of this gives you an extremely strong advantage compared to traditional finance where they still have to wait for the end of the month to get the payments they don't know if they'll get paid and i think this is what money should look like in webfree i think this is really what we should be aspiring to we should be aspiring to creating technology that really drastically improves our experience with money in a way that gives us advantages that eventually will lead crypto native companies to have stronger advantages so i think it this is a completely new paradigm right like a lot of things we do in crypto are completely new we don't know how people will use them we don't know what the use cases are we don't know um what the killer application will be because it's such a new technology it's a blue blue ocean innovation and what that means is essentially we can't know what will happen with this new tool in our toolbox but what we can say is that bringing capital efficiency to defy will enable us to do a lot more with our money it will enable us to run a very very growing and burgeoning economy on crypto rails without needing so much new money to be printed and this is important because let's not forget in v5 we don't have um we don't have um fractional reserve banking right we can't just print money out of thin air in d5 so what happens is we have uh we have protocols like die which struggle to supply defy with enough cash now why is this this is because the cash is not used in a capital efficient way and this is something we think using payment streams we could really improve because payment streams enable money to be in more than one place at a time because when you're streaming if your money is netted everyone who is on that payment stream right is effectively receiving and sending the money at the same time so we have these balance sheets which are effectively expanding the monetary base and this is something extremely excited that some something i'm extremely excited about because the velocity of money is one of the ways we can make the economy grow faster so we believe money streaming will bring about crypto native rails for recurring payments now what this means is we are giving crypto companies and crypto native individuals the power to make recurring payments and let's not forget while trading is great and you know speculation is amazing recurring payments are what power our daily lives we make recurring payments when we receive salaries when we pay for our rent when we pay for our bills all of these things are recurring payments and at the moment without a protocol which effectively enables this crypto cannot break through into the traditional world of real life payments right and this is why having a new a new primitive for recurring payments is so important we believe streaming salaries subscriptions but also things like protocol payouts and perpetual contracts can be automated using streaming money and we believe it will take all of these things to the next level while giving everybody involved a really really unfair advantage compared to those still stuck on traditional financial rails now one thing that we're also very excited about is using money streaming to make open source sustainable now open source has often struggled with financing right how do we fund how do we fund public goods well public goods can be funded in a number of ways generally through taxation or for donations right we've seen amazing things happen with for example bitcoin grants however it's still a lot of work right you see the bitcoin grants team every three months going out there soliciting donations you know making the case for for their projects and that marketing effort should really yield long-term relationships so making open source sustainable through subscription services and recurring donations is something that we at superfluid are very excited about now [Music] a couple of extra things you get with streams is the fact that there's no delays in payments right now i think anybody who's ever worked for themselves or had a company knows that if you expect the bill to be paid and it's not paid at the end of the month that's going to cause some serious issues for you and the only way to avoid that is either to delay your own payments if that's possible or keep a cash reserve or take out a loan now all of those three options are obviously terrible which is why avoiding delays in payments is a huge thing and with payment streams you effectively never have delays because all your payments are going out at the same time in real time in a stream so if any of those cogs stop going around if anybody for whatever reason stops paying you know immediately so you don't know at the end of the month but rather you know as soon as it happens you can act much faster you can you know shift around your accounts and this effectively means that there's no unpayment risk an unpayment risk is what drives costs so high if you think of credit card payments right how many times have you heard ah the credit card transaction didn't go through now what that means is it gives you extra costs on everything you pay in a recurring fashion because companies have to account for the fact that that payment might not go through and reducing that risk or potentially eliminating it would effectively make all the businesses using streaming money more efficient and better off so apart from this obviously using streaming money would mean that your income is coming in in real time and this apart from the extreme psychological effect of actually seeing the money coming in which feels great what i can say is as a business owner if we knew exactly how much money we were making at each point in time we would be able to budget better we would be able to uh more effectively organize our finances even without having a cfo or you know a financial department and that's something that we can bring to smaller crypto businesses immediately because this technology already exists and this is called the superfluid protocol the superfluid protocol is a protocol for crypto native rails it's streaming money in its best form with no capital lockups full programmability on chain and essentially everything i've told you so far so payments are netting everything's fluid you can take out the money any time you never have to wait there's no delays and um most of all again it's completely programmable so the reason we're sponsoring ether this year is because we don't know what people can build with this but what we know is our protocol enables a slew of new things and we really want to see this happen so is it hack.superfluid.finance if you have any cool ideas on what could be made with streams now i also would like to invite everyone to try this out because it's really hard to kind of imagine this as i said it's extremely natural once you try it but if you've never tried it before then i think it's hard to properly feel how it works so head over to app.superfluid.finance you can visit our dashboard and on the dashboard you just need to connect to a testnet and you'll be able to receive some money from us these test tokens you can stream them around try it out and feel what it means when the money is effectively streaming out of your balance it's a strange experience but it changes the way you think about money and it makes you understand that the way we're using money at the moment is archaic and really unnecessary so let's move on to the new paradigm in finance the new paradigm in payments which is streaming money and let's fiddle together at youth denver we're super excited to sponsor here i can't say this enough we were participating last year and it was such a blast i wish we could uh go back to that but yeah visit us at hack.

superfly.finance our discord uh also is a great place to come and discuss you know the future of real-time finance and real-time defy so yeah looking forward to seeing everyone around there and i don't know if there's maybe any questions in the twitch yeah any quick questions for fran here yeah let's take a quick look it doesn't look like it you got some uh some fans though legacy finance is archaic as hell you know it's like you used to crypto it's like wait a minute i have to wait three days for a wire or something like is this the stone age like it's crazy yeah no i mean every time i speak with someone in the us and they're like oh can i mail you a check and i'm like jesus oh okay is there a token model uh well superfluid doesn't have a token what we do enable is that you can bring any erc20 token wrap it into superfluid and stream it on chain so there's a model for tokens but there is no token model but yeah bring your own tokens and make something amazing with money streaming cool crypto sup has a great question could you use this system to build streaming payments service for live streaming maybe like in a micro payments kind of context absolutely so actually there's a really cool hacker that's currently working on a service for uh live streaming music which will be paid with super fluid streams so you kind of open it up you get access close it and you you leave the room cool is that still under under wraps something you guys will be announcing soon no no he's it's a it's a hack for ethamber it's not us oh yeah yeah it's a hack for you it's really easy to to actually hack with with streams so you know even if you have very very little experience you can just build a very quick front end with javascript and it it's just really easy to use it's it's how many should feel wow cool everybody check it out this sounds really cool i'm gonna check it out tonight actually i was not as aware of this platform but um as always thanks for biddling with us and maybe we'll see you next year too hopefully absolutely all right take care