Superfluid — $9M To Build Real-Time Finance
Fabric Ventures is an investment firm that has spent the last 5 years in the emerging Web3.0 space and as such the extended family which we have built over this time is both deep and broad, and a critical part of being a successful investment fund: Michele D’Aliessi — COO & Co-founder of Superfluid falls into this category. We have had the pleasure of working with Michele and followed his career path closely and are now excited to invest in them. Michele and his co-founders Francesco George Renzi and ZhiCheng (Miao) Miao are tackling a new paradigm for global payments. Programmable money written by smart contracts has the potential to change the way the money movement happens.
It’s especially exciting, having seen the artificial restrictions that traditional financial payment rails impose: Why is it that settlement in many currencies still can take 3 days, why is it that employees are only paid once or twice per month on specific salary days, why is it that rental payments only happen periodically, why is it we pay monthly for consumed digital services such as Spotify or Netflix?? etc.
Our first hand experience of this comes from companies such as PayPal — prior employer of GP Anil Hansjee — which was the first large scale successful disruption of traditional payment rails by offering instant settlement in wallets, a critical life blood for small merchants. Yet even PayPal is built upon traditional payment rails and at the end of the day is restricted in its ability to truly impact the full value chain.
Addressing the speed, cost, and frequency of payments has been an elusive goal for blockchain. Superfluid’s streaming payment protocol is tackling this head on. The blockchain enables “instant” execution of any form of economic contract done with no banks or traditional payment rails involved, decentralized. It can also enable more real-world use cases that create new efficiencies in transacting. Imagine the opportunities, for the sharing economy, of paying for work completed in real time as funds are unlocked minute by minute. As a new primitive enabling new applications it is where the biggest value is likely to lie.
Increased bandwidth, standard network protocols of tcp/ip, http and html all contributed to the emergence of audio and video streaming over the internet. Today, we can see the effects. It is more convenient to stream music rather than buy and store it. There is no doubt that this has changed the media industry. We believe that the same is in store for the traditional bank rails of payments via a new type of container for money.
Superfluid exists at the intersection of traditional and blockchain financial services with a wealth of first hand experience represented by our operational team as well as investor base. We are excited about supporting Michele, Francesco, and Miao in their journey.
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Superfluid — $9M To Build Real-Time Finance was originally published in Fabric Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.