Streaming Money Reservoirs
This month we participated in HackMoney22, an online hackathon astutely organized by ETHGlobal. With 1200 hackers from 19 timezones and 214 projects submitted, it was their most ambitious hackathon yet.
The theme is evident in the name: hack the concept of money. Your mission is to push the envelope. Invent ways to transact that haven’t been seen before. Create services, resources, and tools that redefine our interaction with currency.
This overlapped with our recent efforts where we’ve been experimenting with data markets, in particular Ocean Market and Streamr. Tokens, in one form or another, fund the operation of these markets and we’ve been investigating how we might put data that we’ve worked with in the past online in a market environment.
The markets solve a fundamental problem: they make data findable. Ever since our first project we’ve been storing data on IPFS. While the methods have evolved and gotten progressively friendlier, the uploaded data is still ‘lost in space’ of the Interplanetary File System. Somewhere an index with links to the data has to be hosted, otherwise nothing can be found. Plus the stored files need metadata to be useful. Our project in the Apollo hackathon, ClimateDataPool, worked out a solution for this requirement:
Now the data markets provide a frontend, make it searchable, and display metadata that contextualizes each dataset on offer. They inherently solve a number of our problems so we’re looking to make use of the platforms.
Streaming Data & Tokens
We’ve also been testing live data hosted on the nascent Streamr market. This is a common use case, especially where climate data is concerned. We initially considered making a component that couples flowing data to a streaming payment using Superfluid technology. But after spelling it out in a user story, “Data Flows In, Money Streams Out”, we decided to set it aside for a future project. As a collaborator pointed out, the concept was more network oriented and didn’t fit well into HackMoney.
We decided to pursue a more futuristic scenario. When streaming payments become commonplace and companies are streaming salaries, or they have multiple data subscriptions, there will be infrastructure needed to manage the cash reserves. We imagined a component that integrates with DeFi protocols called a “Reservoir”:
A Dapp that enables management and investing of streaming subscription funds.
The primary component is a Dapp called a Reservoir. Its purpose is to manage funds used for subscriptions paid in Superfluid money streams. It also acts as a DeFi Vault and manages supply to DeFi protocols. A Reservoir is only modifiable via its creator wallet but it allows Superfluid streams to flow in & out.
For full context read the “Streaming Money Reservoirs” user story which elucidates the needs and requirements.
The implementation of this idea would be complex. Ultimately we didn’t have time to buidl during the hackathon but we worked on the design and submitted the concept. This process flow illustrates the functionality:
The Reservoir is a variant of another idea on Superfluid’s wishlist, a SuperPool. In a future blogpost we’ll take a deeper look at how this infrastructure might come to be.
Looking down the road(map)
A rising tide this year is ReFi (Regenerative Finance). The initiatives are a subset of DeFI (Decentralized Finance) and rapidly gaining mindshare:
ReFi projects aim to promote the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) and use their services to increase the transparency, accessibility and profitability of social and environmental projects. Similar to how DeFi develops an open, accessible financial marketplace and addresses limitations of the traditional financial system, ReFi projects seek to attract new investors to SDG projects.
—Stefan Grasmann
Maybe it’ll be a ReFi summer! That would be hot. In any case we’re planning on applying for an OceanDAO Grant in order to accelerate our progress and maintain traction. Stay tuned…