Self-sovereign business operations

Transcript

bonjour everyone hello welcome to this talk i didn't expect so many people i hope it's as interesting as you might think it is i started with something very dramatic because i thought you know people might be sleeping during the talks so i wanted to wake you up so yeah you will be rugged so we've heard this a lot of times right everybody's been rocked in defy but this talk is not about getting rugged in d5 this talk is about self-sovereign business operations so what i'm going to talk about is actually that you will be rugged by a bank now we are here to build alternatives to banks right and i think it's way less common for most people especially in the west to

actually be robbed by a bank now for a lot of people it's happened in crypto especially because you you know break some terms and conditions that weren't very clear right maybe you traded with an exchange that they didn't like or you sent a transaction that you know wasn't something they expected so often they'll rug your personal account right and this sucks right from one day to another maybe a transaction doesn't come through your paycheck doesn't come through whatever but it's a personal account you can open multiple and banks actually have in most countries they have to take on new personal customers right so it's not a huge issue it happens but it's not a huge issue and nowadays most of us have personal crypto accounts right it's quite common i guess probably most people in the room here have meta mask

right otherwise you couldn't get a ticket so this is actually quite normal and we're we're kind of insured right crypto is a hedge against our personal accounts getting rocked but also banks rug your business account now this is way more common than you think for anyone that has a crypto startup of any kind a crypto company of any kind you always get uh problems with max at exchanges one of the hardest things is securing banking relationships right they'll close your banks you have to have like four different accounts in different jurisdictions so if one fails you have the other one but the problem is your bank right is the livelihood of your business because you are paying your people you're you know

paying your suppliers and ultimately you want to be able to automate this stuff if you want to scale the business but when your business account gets rugged suddenly nothing works anymore no payroll no subscriptions no supplier payouts everything is broken from one day to another now this sounds like a hypothetical scenario for probably a lot of you but this happens a lot for crypto startups and you know it it sucks from one day to another you don't get paid all your team nobody gets paid right and now suddenly you have to figure out how to redo all these automations now automating your business account is important because really otherwise there's no way to scale right so trying to fix this is uh you know

what i think crypto is about right trying to provide people with a way to avoid getting rugged by a third party so don't worry we can't fix this right we fixed it for personal accounts we've got a lot of facilities now for people to manage their crypto personally but for businesses i think there's still a bit of work to do and it's important to do this because ultimately banks are a single point of failure right a bank rugging your business account destroys your business it it completely unsettles you for a few weeks right it's a big deal and it's something that we can't accept right we've talked a lot about uh the stuff and i think it's time for self-sovereign uh business operations so we need to start taking business operations onto the blockchain and start

with the same philosophy that has brought us to use crypto in our personal accounts we have to start using it on our business accounts as well because these are even more important right individuals are extremely important obviously but businesses are the most connected nodes in the economic graph right businesses ultimately are the ones paying people they're the ones receiving money they're what makes the economy turn and we have to bring this on chain as well we've talked a lot about these things i'm sure you've heard these slogans right go bank lists not your keys not your coins we talk about this stuff all the time like literally there's podcasts there's newsletters that use these terms right but they're always talking about retail

and i think we focused enough on retail right now we have a lot of retail attention a lot of people are using crypto every day but now we have to start focusing on businesses businesses are way more important because ultimately businesses will bring a new adoption right if we keep focusing on retail we're always going to focus on the same use cases which are around investments but if we start focusing on businesses we can start onboarding real economic transactions which is ultimately way more sustainable in the long term than just investments right investments are cyclical but payments you know businesses they're not cyclical they're you know grocery store doesn't stop in a bear market right so we have to start onboarding all those businesses as well now

we've seen a lot of startups try to help consumers spend coins uh bitpay you know all of these companies they're all checkouts where basically you go you pay in bitcoin you pay in crypto but they convert it to fiat right they convert it to fiat and paid a business in fiat so what's the point that does not help adoption at all because ultimately we already have retail attention retail doesn't want to spend the coins and the business businesses are going to liquidate the crypto anyway right so it's not what we should be focusing on we should be focusing on helping businesses actually use crypto in their day-to-day operations and the only way to do that is to provide a 10x experience right this is true with all new tech with all new habits right you're not going to switch

because something is marginally better you're not going to switch because decentralization right you're going to switch because the experience is 10 times better you're going to switch because ultimately you know that what you get is better right and it has to be significantly better to get people over the hurdle of changing their business processes right and business processes are even stickier than personal habits right because you have a cfo that has to change things and then they have to onboard everyone in the company you know it's much harder so we have to work much harder to get that business adoption and that's why a lot of companies aren't focusing on this right in crypto it's much easier to sell bitcoin and through an atm and you know make 10 margin than to provide actual business value so this is much harder problem there's way fewer people working

on it but it's a much bigger opportunity because if we onboard businesses then there's a huge amount of new avenues for innovation that we haven't even explored yet so we've got the basic stuff pretty covered i'd say you know custody accounting payments i would argue payments is the one we've done the best and there's actually a lot of people uh even non-crypto companies use crypto for payments when they have to do cross-border things for example and obviously we have you know global cheap and instant settlement which is a huge value prop on custody and accounting there's a lot more work to do custody is a huge pain nobody wants to use a multi-sig if they do use a multi-stake it's still painful to use you know there's few interfaces there's a lot of work to do there and on accounting ultimately

jurisdiction specific you know taxes it's a it's a huge pain so there's a lot of opportunity there for builders to you know try and fix these problems properly but ultimately this is not enough to run a business right this is a very basic business you know making payments sure if you're a small company this is enough but if you're a bigger company if you want to scale and ultimately we want to scale right then we need a bit more a few more things so first of all we need recurring payments right recurring payments is the basis of any sustainable business you have both your incoming payments your outgoing payments you know your subscriptions your salaries these are all things that happen continuously right and you you don't want to be doing those manually right that wouldn't allow you to scale as a business cash flow advances this is a you know

the concept of basically taking your income and factoring it right this is something that is very helpful and useful in businesses to cover liquidity gaps but again in crypto nobody's ever built this right why not because nobody's ever built anything for businesses right and consumers don't necessarily need these things credit lines there are people talking about credit lines for consumers and actually i think people miss are missing an opportunity here because providing credit lines for businesses is a lot easier than for consumers right businesses can't run away businesses won't care if you dox them because they're businesses right they have a public-facing uh presence so i think providing credit lines in d5 is actually a huge opportunity that not many people are looking at and then insurance right insurance

covers everything it's just a way of making business more secure right whatever risks your business might have you got to try and insure them and obviously people have tried doing this actually etherisk i think was one of the oldest ethereum based companies but there's no market for it because there's no business adoption right but the moment business adoption starts happening there's a huge market for insurance and actually b5 is probably the best place to provide insurance because you can easily pull capital you can easily you know re-insure your insurance so there's a lot of opportunities in general to provide all of these business services and here is where i start showing my project so we work we work on recurring payments we're a company called superfluid and we do

money streaming so money streaming is a crypto native way of doing recurring payments they happen on chain happen every second and basically we move from recurring payments to ongoing payments so your payments literally happen every single second which means uh you know on chain ultimately you can build all sorts of uh you know magical things that happen every second the way it works as a business right you could have all your income coming in every second so you know any number of incoming subscriptions or b2b payments or vendor payments and then outside you know you'll pay your employees you'll pay your b2b suppliers and this allows you as a business on chain to effectively start you know processing those recurring payments in a you know fairly scalable and efficient way because this is completely

automated once you start a payment for example to an employee that's it you don't have to touch that payment again it will just keep flowing automatically and what this means is ultimately with very few interactions with the actual blockchain you can start automating your business processes right which is what as we were saying is what helps you scale and what helps provide those 10x benefits but i would argue this is still not enough right this is enough for crypto native businesses to start accepting payments crypto native businesses to start automating payroll but it's still not 10 times better right this is not enough for retail well retail it's not enough for you know normal business adoption but for that i do think this helps a lot

because ultimately recurring payments and cash flows are the basis for providing credit right so once you have on-chain cash flows right which you can read you can verify you can program effectively you have a way to start assessing credit worthiness you have a way to start doing cash flow advances right because you have the actual physical cash flow on chain which you can start factoring right we're building this stuff it's it's pretty easy to build insurance we haven't started yet obviously you need a lot more market but all of these things become possible when you start having on-chain cash flows so that's what we're working on you know ultimately what a superfluid stream is is just a

effectively a format for data which represents an ongoing movement of funds right so you can imagine that exactly like a token balance instead instead of a token balance it's the amount of money moving every second but you can use that you can build all these other applications and hopefully you know over time by pushing really hard on providing the best possible business experience we can actually start you know onboarding real businesses so yeah that was my talk if you're interested if you want to start using superfluid intro.superfluid.finance is a great place our discord is discord.superflow.finance if you're a hacker hack.superfluit.finance and for anything else just look for me around i'm the one

with the green t-shirt very easy yeah that's it does anyone have any questions thank you and yeah i generally like the idea of money over time but when it comes to paying employees and some like regulatory legislation uh how does it work with like like traditional nation states and like social security like all these like paper contracts can we interoperate with superfluit and like all these regulatory regimes so it's just uh sure to answer no i mean ultimately the the legal

system is not set up to support money streams right but it also wasn't set up to support uh cars in the 1800s right regulatory regimes change and we shouldn't allow basically you should never put the regulator in the front seat right the regulator is purely trying to make sense of the world that exists not of the world that could exist so you should always try and push the boundaries and find ways to make this stuff work but yeah i mean if you ask me do payment streams fit into the legal system no right but the regulator's never heard of this so how could they regulate for it right i think it's a matter of time we start with where it makes more sense cross-border contractor payments b2b payments where ultimately you can fix you know the amount of money and then i

think over time regulatory regimes will move as well it's ultimately just another payment technology right there's nothing good or bad about it and regulatory regimes will simply have to adapt i often make the joke that accountants hate us because we we do this right but i think regulators don't hate us simply because they don't know us yet any more question wait it's a livestream thanks um for a lot of the business enablement that you talk about why does it need to

be is the graphic of having it every second is that just because it looks nice or does that have an actual let's say meaning because like a lot of the value for instance for my business it runs on a monthly basis or on a 90-day basis i don't necessarily care about the second by second basis absolutely i completely agree so the trick is that a monthly payment is not like monthly cash flows are not actually a data structure right what they are is a series of one-off payments which you observe from the outside and you say oh this is always coming from the same person on a regular cadence so it's a cash flow but it's not a different data structure it's just a normal payment right the advantage with money streams is that they are actually

a data structure and the payments are settled every second so the result of this is that you can actually use it on chain as a piece of data right and the money is settled until the point where you execute your logic which ultimately means you can effectively use it in b5 right while if you had some sort of unchain contract that says every month the payment will come it's you know it might come right but a money stream until now has come right which makes building with it way easier and ultimately i think in d5 you always want to build things that are composable right and month by month payments are not

composable right so one of the biggest things with money streams and this goes beyond superfluid simply by making the payments more granular you're reducing the unpayment risk right to the smallest unit you reduce it to so if you pay every second effectively there's no on payment risk right which means you can you can consider the payment settled and as a result you know you can use it much more efficiently super cool yeah do i understand that correctly then for instance that like a lot of the suites that stripe are building for instance like refshare you you just put that in the data structure and like you don't have to care about it anymore right absolutely so if you want to do revenue sharing uh you want to you know split a fee you want to split the

fee to 100 people you want to split a fee to an nft which then becomes an asset which represents the referrals people in our community are building all of these things i think for referrals it's especially interesting because you know you can start creating referral systems for any product that you build very easily ultimately they're just it's just one function to open a stream and you open it once and then it flows forever so you can build a contract that when your client pays your business you start paying a stream to someone else right you can build all these fancy automations on chain which is why we get excited about you know actually building uh products for businesses that can scale their operations because we can for example build marketing channels

straight into the payment line out of time so thank you very much [Applause]