Imagine being paid continuously instead of waiting weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly for your paychecks. Well with streaming payments this is all possible. Streaming payments make transactions continuous, allowing us to send or receive money every millisecond. Which eliminates the tedious act of sitting down to pay all our bills every month. We already are seeing streaming payments which have been included in some fascinating projects we will cover in this article.
What are streaming payments:
Before you get confused, this is different than the traditional auto-pay. A payment stream is when you pay for something continuously in smaller amounts using cryptocurrency. We already have this available with projects such as Superfluid. When you use the Superfluid app, you can connect your digital wallet and use streaming payments to send money to others on the app in real time. Before sending a payment, the user chooses how much they want to send to someone and over what duration. After this information is gathered your payment stream begins and starts paying the recipient right away. Paying them every millisecond until they receive the full amount you agreed to send them.
With the digital age upon us, we can now continuously pay for things in real-time. The benefit of this service is you are only paying for what you are using. A true pay as you go system which you control. Streaming is already like this. For example, when you stream a tv show or movie online you are streaming little bits at a time. The whole movie does not download at once. This is the same concept for payments.
How it works:
Streaming payments are a DeFi (decentralized finance) protocol, which uses smart contracts to act out the requirements. The smart contract executes the given standards. The smart contract knows how much the service is, how frequently it sends payment, and what coin to pay with. An advantage of streaming payments are limited to no gas fees when paying for something with cryptocurrency. Usually when you pay for a product using cryptocurrency there is a fee that covers the transaction cost (gas fees). An example outside of cryptocurrency would be the elimination of service fees.
This type of payment method works great in scenarios like paying employees with set hours and wages, electricity payments, a mortgage payment, etc. Payments such as these are easier to program as you know the payment and what duration it should be sent over. Streaming payments are already getting more complicated and can do some cool things.
A company using streaming companies:
Chainwave has helped Xeenon develop their blockchain app which incorporates streaming payments. We have been helping Xeenon to create a way to pay broadcasters in real time for the content they put out. The system is going to work by constantly paying smaller fees while you watch the content on their platform that you wish to enjoy. You only pay for what you are watching. Which means the instant you decide to exit the stream you are no longer paying for the parts you did not watch. We will see both new and existing content creators switch to Xeenon’s model. Other legacy streaming systems, including YouTube or Twitch, have more traditional payment models for their creators.
What coins for streaming payments:
There are some newer projects which allow for people to stream with Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. Certain tokens cannot handle high rates of transactions necessary for streaming payments. Solana is an obvious choice due to their 2-3 thousand transactions per second. Which compared with Ethereum’s 35 transactions per second is much better.
There are some newer projects which allow for people to stream with Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. Certain tokens cannot handle high rates of transactions necessary for streaming payments. Solana is an obvious choice due to their 2-3 thousand transactions per second. Which compared with Ethereum’s 35 transactions per second is much better.
Streaming payments is an innovative way for developers to build new blockchain applications, using automated transfers. The rapid payment system will change how we pay for our content and products that we enjoy. Smart contracts create trust and allows both parties to enjoy the benefits of streaming payments. Companies like Xeenon will be just the beginning as people look to cut costs. The future will decide if stable coins or another token becomes the standard when using streaming payments.