When it comes to Web3, we always emphasize its innovation: some processes and links that already exist in Web2 seem to be unnecessary in Web3.
But there are exceptions.
Such as salary payment. No matter where we are, we must need this link to fulfill the rights and obligations of both employers and employees in the payment and receipt of wages.
When it comes to salary payment, some stereotypes come to mind: a salary slip, which is settled once a month, and arrives on a fixed day as promised.
It's more like a point payment. After some interval, at a certain point, the wages start to be paid.
It's just that this way may not be able to meet the needs of Web3 development. New work models and organizational forms are gradually emerging, such as DAO, gig economy, address as identity...
Correspondingly, new demands such as daily settlement, dynamic settlement, and encrypted asset settlement continue to emerge, and the market urgently needs a more flexible payment form that can support new demands.
So we saw the concept of "flow payment": continuous, flexible and transparent payment.
In the exploration of flow payment, Zebec is the leader. In the first half of this year, Zebec received a total of US$21 million in financing from star VCs including Coinbase, Solana, Alameda, and Lightspeed Venture Capital. Its streaming payment products have also been put into use. While bringing new solutions to salary payment scenarios, It also provides new business models.
Zebec, a one-stop streaming payment infrastructure
In order to better understand Zebec, it is necessary to delve into "flow payment", a concept that is both familiar and unfamiliar.
It is familiar because we have heard similar words, such as "streaming media"; and its strangeness is reflected in the fact that it is difficult for you to imagine the specific payment screen.
Consider an analogy.
Taking the familiar "streaming media" as an example, it can be understood as "streaming while streaming": you don't have to save all a movie on your computer, but watch it online through a browser.
The "stream" here is actually a data stream, which transmits images from the video server to your browser in real-time and continuously.
Correspondingly, the concept of "flow payment" is similar, except that the data flow is replaced by the flow of funds: instead of asking the boss to pay you wages every other month, the funds can be transferred to your wallet in a real-time and continuous manner. . The time interval can be shortened to seconds or days - work uninterrupted every day, and the funds will be paid to you uninterrupted.
Imagine the difference between a cistern and a river. Monthly payment of salary is like a cistern, which stores water once in a rainy season; and flow payment is more like a river, with water flowing continuously.
After understanding the concept, your next question may be, what kind of situation requires such continuous and intensive payments?
Suppose you are the manager of a DAO, and the members work together to advance the project in a decentralized manner. Member A is a newcomer and needs to work intensively in the past few days to complete the construction of a website.
How to negotiate with A on the payment method of salary? Is it one month after the work is done? And how should he trust your promise of deferred payment?
Obviously, for a gig economy or DAO organization that requires high timeliness, trust, and frequency, you still need a payment-oriented infrastructure that integrates different types of members, tasks, and working hours for more efficient salary settlement.
This infrastructure is currently implemented by Zebec.
Built on top of Solana, Zebec provides a technology protocol that enables organizations/employers to pay employees in a transparent, continuous, and automated manner. At the same time, the above capabilities are also reflected in two products: Zebec Pay and Zebec Safe.
From Zebec's official website, we can clearly see the logic of these two products.
The first is Zebec Pay, which is mainly used for sending and paying funds. Continuing with the above example, if DAO wants to pay member A for website design, the manager can use Zebec Pay to initiate the payment as shown in the figure below.
1 Fill in the purpose and use of this payment;
2. Fill in the wallet address provided by member A;
3. Select the asset type you want to pay, currently supports more than 20 encrypted assets such as SOL, USDC and ZBC (project token);
4. Design the specific method of streaming payment, such as paying 500 USDC per day for 3 days, etc.
The above behavior of initiating streaming payment is actually behind Zebec's smart contract. By presetting the logic of payment triggering, a fund can be honestly, automatically and continuously sent to the other party's address when the conditions are met.
At the same time, as member A, you can also click the "Incoming" button on Zebec's management page to check the salary that will be paid to your address in the future; On the "Outgoing" page, you can also see every payment you have made.
For both employers and employees, Zebec Pay actually provides a one-stop infrastructure around salary payment scenarios: salary sending and receiving actions, sending and receiving records, sending and receiving address management, etc. are all integrated in the same place, while supporting stream payment , which greatly simplifies the operation and management costs of Web3 salary payment.
In addition, the management of mutual treasury is also extremely important for organizations in Web3. Zebec Safe comes into play in this scenario: a multi-signature vault that helps members of an organization collectively manage funds.
For example, DAO owners and managers can create a new security vault on the Treasury page shown in the figure below, and add members who are qualified to manage the vault at the beginning of creation (represented by the member's address) . At the same time, it is also necessary to set a signature quantity condition, for example, if 2/3 of the members sign a transaction, the transaction will pass.
Once the DAO spends real funds on the business, the spending transaction will be sent to all members with treasury management authority, and they will be prompted whether to sign to approve/reject the transaction. Once the minimum number of signatures mentioned above is met, the disbursement of funds will begin and can be paid to employees/members or external organizations with business contacts in the form of streaming payments. This democratic and trustless design is especially suitable for DAO and distributed office, reducing the communication cost between managers.
The derivation of flow payment, opening a new Web3 entry
When using Zebec for streaming payments, the obvious benefits are obvious: real-time work brings real returns, and it also appropriately matches those high-frequency, multi-flow, and fragmented payment scenarios. At the same time, the salary rules designed through smart contracts protect the interests of employees to a certain extent.
From a functional point of view, this is a lower limit, which solves the problem of "how to send money". But Zebec's ceiling may be more than that.
Based on the matter of sending money, Zebec has made a reasonable extension of its functions: it focuses on both "how to send money" and "how to use money".
Since the salary can be sent and received with encrypted assets, it seems logical to consider where the assets go after obtaining the encrypted assets.
Based on Zebec's flexible programming features, it can automatically use a certain percentage of salary income for regular investment in encrypted assets according to user preferences and settings, or send it to Defi for liquidity mining to generate income; in addition, in a certain Under the conditions permitted by some national policies and laws, Zebec can also create encrypted retirement accounts for users and provide the function of legal currency exchange in reality.
For a large number of users who have not set foot in Web3, these functions of Zebec can actually cause "income fission": the income you get can be used for additional value-added and investment in a more encrypted and native way.
Users outside the circle generally lack awareness of the encrypted world, and also lack rigid scenarios and demands, while the salary payment scenario is a natural and excellent opportunity to understand the Web3 world. In terms of analogy, Zebec is not a "salary slip" or "passbook" that only allows funds to enter and exit, but more like a bank card APP. You can not only control the funds on the card, but also see various related financial products .
Imagine that next to the column of "Yesterday's Income", there is a button of "Defi Revenue Aggregator" or "Scheduled ETH Investment". Under the premise of stream payment, what you get is not only a security and guaranteed guaranteed salary, but also a new entry into the Web3 and encryption world.
Logical and full of opportunities.
So far, we can also straighten out Zebec's entire product logic:
Because of the increasing demand for continuous, flexible and transparent payments, the preset conditions/automatically triggered features in smart contracts can be used in payments to form the basic functions of flow payments with higher frequency and more flexible conditions. At the same time, it naturally involves usage scenarios after encrypted asset payment, creating conditions for more users to get in touch with Web3.
More than salary, large space for gadgets
Compared with most current monthly salary payment methods, flow payment is currently more like a niche salary settlement method.
But not being mainstream doesn't mean not being a trend.
The rise of Web3 and the emergence of DAO have shown us examples of flexible and continuous processing of salary payments; at the same time, this demand for flexible and continuous processing may not only be reflected in salary payment scenarios.
When streaming payment can refine the granularity of salary payment from months to days or even seconds, other products in the above-mentioned Web3 world can also theoretically be more fine-grained in the payment dimension.
Consider a blue-chip NFT with an extremely high unit price, which is difficult for ordinary users to purchase. When we are fragmenting NFT and making "group buying" possible, can Zebec come in handy?
Or a Defi interest-bearing bond with a total value of 100ETH, can the denomination be broken down into 1 yuan for 100 people to buy?
Instead of buying a whole block, take advantage of Zebec's streaming payment capabilities to buy parts of it in a continuous and fragmented manner. The realization of this requirement depends on Zebec's SDK. Other applications can integrate the SDK to realize the ability of flow payment, and the scenarios that allow flow payment can be the above-mentioned NFT fragments or financial derivatives, or more new ones that have not yet been discovered. use.
The same principle can also be applied to Web2.
For example, a user only wants to order and pay for a certain 10 minutes of a complete movie. At this time, the media side can also use the Zebec SDK to develop streaming payment capabilities to meet the user's personalized viewing needs.
And Zebec's impact on the real economy has already happened. On August 15, Zebec has reached a cooperation with the rebate platform Rewards Bunny. When users enter Alibaba, Ebay, NIKE, Adidas and other well-known e-commerce platforms to shop, they can use Zebec's stream payment for settlement.
It is foreseeable that Zebec's positioning will not be limited to a small tool for salary payment. A tool solves a class of problems, not just one problem. Payment itself is a rigid need. Today it is payroll and salary, and tomorrow it may support more high-frequency, fragmented, and flexible payment scenarios.
A fact that cannot be ignored is that Zebec's user base and stickiness are still increasing. The data shows that its TVL has reached 300 million US dollars, the platform fee has reached 20 million US dollars, and there are about 30,000 active addresses. Once the user volume expands to a larger scale, Zebec will have the opportunity to release greater traffic and platform potential, and convert users to more usage scenarios.
Setting the stage with streaming payment, Zebec's wonderful performance may have just begun.