Let’s continue with the overview of streaming payment projects.

3. Streamflow

Streamflow is a suite of products that enables organizations and individuals to distribute funds simply and straightforwardly. Currently deployed on Solana, Streamflow supports tokens that include USDT, prtSOL, and several other SPL tokens.

Streamflow builds protocols, SDKs, and applications to help users solve problems in fund distribution (e.g. token vesting, payroll, multi-signature treasuries), allowing them to streamline processes and save time and money. Streamflow’s Product Suite covers:

Token Vesting: An open-source, verifiable, programmable token vesting protocol that features common configurable parameters for token unlocking/vesting, including start/end time (including the locked time), TGE ratio, and release rate;
Stream Payments: A progressively released payment in the form of a time-lock escrow account (see the paragraph below for the specific steps);
Batch Payments: Payroll for a team or reward distribution for crypto natives, including easy one-to-many payments;
Multisig Wallet: Create treasuries and vaults that require M/N signatures.

When creating a stream payment on Streamflow, the sender may enter/select a series of information, including the token type, amount, recipient address, frequency (per second/hour/day/week/month/year), contract title, start date & time, who can transfer contract (recipient, sender, both, or neither), who can cancel contract (recipient, sender, both, or neither), and whether to activate automatic withdrawal.

（Source: Streamflow’s official website）

In addition, Streamflow is backed by a strong lineup of investors, including Jump Crypto, Solana Ventures, GVB, Amber, etc.

4. Zebec

Zebec Protocol is a programmable streaming payment protocol and a multi-currency treasury management tool deployed on Solana. The automatic money streams made possible through Zebec allow businesses, employees, and consumers to completely reimagine how they are paid, how they invest, and how they buy products or services.

Zebec Pay, Zebec’s first application, is an efficient, low-fee payroll solution that enables employees to be paid by the second and immediately use their money. The app now supports Solana tokens that include SOL, ZBC, USDC, and USDT. Zebec Pay is more than just a streaming payment tool. It also offers employees superior crypto-native financial services, covering:

Automated Dollar Cost Averaging: Zebec provides the real-time, by-the-second dollar-cost averaging investing function. Users can automatically convert a percentage of their paycheck into cryptocurrencies, allowing them to invest their salary with greater ease.
Investments & Yield-Farming: Users have complete control over how they use their money through easy-to-program smart contracts, which enables the automatic investment in cryptocurrencies or DeFi applications to earn yield.
Crypto IRA and 401K Accounts: Users can effortlessly allocate a portion of their paycheck to compliant crypto IRA and 401K accounts.
Free Fiat On-Ramp and Off-Ramp: Users can swap their cryptocurrencies into USD and transfer their money to their regular bank accounts without paying any fees.

When creating a stream payment, the sender must first deposit tokens to Zebec protocol and enter/select information that includes transaction name, remark, receiver address, token type, amount, start time, and completion time. If the fixed streaming rate is selected, then the amount and completion time are not required. Instead, the sender should only select a streaming rate (e.g. a number of tokens to be sent per X week(s)/month(s)/day(s)). Once a stream is created, users may also suspend or terminate the stream.

（Source: Zebec’s official website）

At the moment, Zebec is the only streaming payment protocol that has issued tokens (ZBC), with a total supply of 10 billion. On March 16, Zebec raised $28 million, $21 million of which is from private investors that include Circle, Coinbase, Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Alameda Research, and the remaining $7 million was obtained through public sales in partnership with Republic.

Conclusion

Though the core business of all the four projects above is streaming payments, they differ in terms of product design. Concerning the number of networks supported, Sablier ranks No.1 and is followed by Superfluid. However, it should be noted that these two projects mainly support EVM-compatible networks, while Streamflow and Zebec support Solana, which is not compatible with EVM. With regard to the type of streams, Sablier allows for streams with a fixed amount, while Superfluid supports streams with a fixed flow rate. Meanwhile, the two only require simple information when creating a streaming payment. On Streamflow and Zebec, on the other hand, users have more options, and more customized information is required when creating a streaming payment.

Each of the four projects has its own unique advantages. Sablier provides a well-designed visual interface, with clearly presented data. Superfluid features a community-based development model that allows members of the community to explore more application scenarios. In addition, its framework enables developers to build more functions. Streamflow makes the protocol more visible, and an operation on Streamflow is converted into text when creating a streaming payment. The most prominent feature of Zebec is that it provides solutions to how employees of crypto organizations get paid. In addition to streaming payments, Zebec also offers streaming investment/management of wages, compliant crypto IRA and 401k accounts, as well as fiat on-ramp and off-ramp.

The table below contains the basic information about the four projects:

IV. Application Scenarios of Streaming Payments

Although streaming payment might not flourish on its own, it is nevertheless a major tool in the Web 3.0 process. One may even argue that it is an indispensable infrastructure. Streaming payments play a vital role in the realization of micro-innovations in Airdrop, IDO, and fund management, as well as the implementation of roadmaps for projects in categories such as DeFi, NFT, DAO, and the metaverse.

The following paragraphs introduce several application scenarios of streaming payments. Readers are encouraged to imagine and explore more use cases of streaming payments.

1. Real-time payroll

Company employees, service providers, or DAO contributors can all get paid in real time through a streaming payment protocol without any spatial/temporal limits. Streaming payments reduce both labor costs and financial costs. With streaming payments, folks will no longer have to waste money on accounting, invoicing, and timestamps. Instead, they simply need to pay Gas fees when creating/terminating a stream, which also improves the money flow. Here is a more specific scenario of real-time payroll: Multinationals could pay their employees based around the world through streams with a fixed streaming rate in real time (compliance factors must be considered). In addition, students of short-term training courses may pay for the courses through streams with a daily frequency, without having to pay a lump-sum fee at the beginning. Finally, landowners in a metaverse could pay their virtual world designers tokens such as MANA through streams with a fixed amount.

2. Token unlocking & airdrops

Private/public investors of a project can often invest in its tokens at a lower price, which is why project teams require such investors to go through a lock-up period. For instance, when distributing tokens, TGE has set a certain percentage that will be locked for six months to a year. When the lock-up period ends, the tokens will be released monthly or daily during a period that ranges from 1 year to 2 years. Such an approach creates management problems for the project team and frays the bond of trust between the project and investors. Here, a streaming payment tool can be used to solve the problem. With streaming payments, project teams will not need to create separate smart contracts. Instead, they will only have to set up simple parameters such as the vesting ratio and the lock-up period on a streaming payment platform to enable the real-time token vesting (as introduced in paragraphs above). At the same time, investors don’t have to worry about the non-performance of the agreement on the part of the project team because the sender would not be able to stop the agreement once a stream is created. Moreover, the project team would not have access to the funds locked up in the agreement.

The same also applies to airdrops. Right now, most airdrops are lump-sum distributions where tokens distributed to users create selling pressure. However, a streaming payment protocol allows project teams to distribute airdrop rewards in real time at a fixed frequency, which mitigates such pressures.

3. Fund management

For example, Zebec’s Automated Dollar Cost Averaging and investment functions allow users to convert a percentage of their paycheck into cryptocurrencies for investment purposes, which enables an automatic investment plan that reduces short-term fluctuations. That said, when it comes to the specific technical implementation, streaming payment protocols and DeFi protocols should form a LEGO. When investing their funds, users could predetermine the amount and frequency of the automatic investment plan (i.e. the automatic & regular purchase of a token). For instance, 1,000 USDT of ETH could be purchased every Wednesday, which saves users the time for fund management.

CoinEx Research: Payment LEGO: An Overview of Streaming Payment Projects (II)