Superfluid Raises $9M for a New Take on Streaming Payments

Superfluid, a blockchain-based system that streams perpetual payments for use in crypto-native settings and also for things like subscriptions and salaries, has raised $9 million in a funding round led by Multicoin Capital.

Also participating in the seed round announced Tuesday were Semantic Ventures, DeFiance Capital, Delphi Digital, MetaCartel Ventures, Fabric Ventures, The LAO, DeFi Alliance, Divergence Ventures and MMC Ventures. Notable angels such as ex-Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, Terra founder Do Kwon and Messari’s Ryan Selkis also joined the round.

The nascent crypto economy is a dynamic and changing thing. “Real-time dynamic balances,” where financial parties can easily set up money streams from one to another, provides the foundation for a new generation of decentralized applications to bloom, according to Superfluid CEO Francesco George Renzi.

“With one interaction on-chain you can initiate a perpetual payment,” Renzi said in an interview, adding:

“Things like subscriptions have never taken off in crypto, while in Web 2 every online business is a subscription business. Money streaming is futuristic and aligned with crypto ethos, and can help the crypto native economy to flourish.”

Because Superfluid only requires one transaction to initiate a stream, there are no additional gas or transaction costs (the most used types of assets will be stablecoins like USDC), Renzi added. And unlike state channels, users don’t have to lock up assets or keep the full balance of a stream in a wallet, but are able to top-up balances as assets are streamed, he said.

“Streaming payments – meaning from one account to another, and then to others, concurrently, all in real time – has long been the Holy Grail of decentralized finance,” Kyle Samani, Multicoin’s managing partner, said in a statement. “State channels were thought to be the solution but by definition cannot scale due to the ‘locked assets’ problem and the capital inefficiency of design.”