Shower Thoughts: Pay my salary every second

What if your income streams were exactly that—a constant stream of funds sent to your account for every second of work, rather than 30 days after?

Thought

Superfluid was reintroduced to me a few days ago. I’ve heard of them before when I was first getting into crypto. It’s a simple idea: what if you can stream funds in real time?

It’s not a totally foreign idea if you think about it. Spotify for example pays artists per stream. This Superfluid concept just makes the settlement of funds (1) real time, and (2) per second (instead of per listen).

Now why would I need to be paid per second, you might ask?

I’ll send that question right back at you. Why do we allow ourselves to be paid well after we do the hard work?

Salaries and wages have been paid monthly, weekly, etc. because paying per second of value provided wasn’t feasible before. Web3 changes that.

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Maybe you still think this is over-engineering a non-problem. That’s OK. I thought so too.

Then I remembered about Clair.

Check out the Clair website here

Clair helps people get access to their salaries instantly so they don’t have wait for the typical pay cycle. Get your day’s worth of wages when you end your shift. You worked for the day, so you should be able to spend what you earned. Sound familiar?

There’s a market for accessing spending or purchasing power instantly. Buy-Now-Pay-Later companies bank on this desire.

But real time fund streams make my mind run on overdrive…

Idea

For the finance people out there, this fund streaming concept is basically “democratizing the DCF model”. New financial innovations are now possible at an individual level:

• Redirect your income stream to DeFi (decentralized finance) investments which can earn you yield per second

• If your expenses are streamed as well, then vendors can be competitive by offering terms to delay expenses by X period, thereby letting you keep that money for longer to reinvest for more yield per second

• Since all income streams are on the (public) blockchain, you have a record of all income, provenance on work done, and earning history. This makes credit scoring much easier and scalable.

• With better credit scoring, loans based on your history and income streams can be much more accurate and competitive—this is good for the average worker

• (crazy idea) What if you can pool together different income streams? As a group, you can demand better rates, better loans, etc

• (crazier idea) What if you can fractionalize and sell tokens or ‘pieces’ of this grouped income stream?

• (even crazier) What if you make options and futures products with a superset of these grouped income streams?

Why stop at salaries? What if we expand this concept to difference income and expense streams for groups of people? For gaming guilds? For businesses?

I’d love to dig deeper into this rabbit hole. So many questions:

• How are the people who’ve used Clair and Superfluid? Did behaviors change? Is instant access to earned wages a 10x experience? Would they ever go back to 30-day pay cycles?

• How do the companies who payout salaries by day or by second find this new concept? Does it mess up their planning for working capital?

• What would it take to create a financial market out of this i.e. securities backed by income streams?

• Would entities be willing to loan out funds in exchange for these non-traditional income streams (i.e. account receivables financing on steroids)

• What’s the end-to-end value map? That is, which entities will need to adapt real-time fund streaming to reach critical mass? Is employers adapting this enough? Or will companies and services need to adopt charging stuff via expense streams be necessary to complete a full ecosystem?