DeFi-oriented regular payments protocol Superfluid Finance has raised $9m in a seed funding round led by venture capital firm Multicoin Capital.
We have raised $9M, to push forward our vision for a Real-time Finance Economy
Semantic Ventures, DeFiance Capital, Aave CEO Stani Kulecov, Messari founder Ryan Selkis and other investors have also backed the startup.
Superfluid Finance will use the funding to expand its staff and promote the solutions it develops. The project team will organise hackathons and launch a targeted grants programme.
Speaking to The Block, startup head Francesco George Renzi said Superfluid Finance plans to build an ecosystem of real-time DeFi applications. These will enable instant cash flows, including regular payments like subscription payments or payroll.
Superfluid Finance believes that in the future, decentralised organisations will receive payments in "constant streams of assets moving from one wallet to another, second by second". This will increase the speed of exchange, thereby eliminating "unproductive idle capital".
The startup's protocol works on Ethereum, Polygon and xDai networks. According to Renzi, using Super Token (an ERC-20 standard token), the solution allows users to perform multiple tasks within a single transaction.
To achieve this, Superfluid Finance needs a fast blockchain with low transaction costs possible through the use of sidechains.
At the time of writing, the Ethereum network is processing an average of 14 transactions per second, according to Etherscan. Polygon transmits more than 76 transactions in the same time, at an average fee of around $0.00004, according to Polygonscan.
Data from The Block shows that the average cost of transferring a transaction on Ethereum is at $4.88. This is significantly lower than in May 2021, when the figure was at $45, but still quite expensive.
At the end of June, Polygon's daily transaction volume was 2.38 times that of Binance Smart Chain and 6.59 times that of Ethereum.
As a reminder, in the middle of last month, Goldfinch, a DeFi-protocol that provides collateral-free crypto-loans, raised $11m from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors.
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