Paul Razvan Berg - Local Innovation: Sablier

My name is Paul Berg. I'm a co-founder and CEO at Sablier. Um, the pronunciation is up to you. I typically use Sablier the the American way just because English is the way, but the word actually means hourglass in French. So, if you prefer Sablier, you can go with that.

Um, and yeah, what we do is we are a token distribution platform in the EVM space. I'm personally an Ethereum developer. I've um joined the industry in 20 2018 late 2018 and I've been developing a solidity. Um and I started this company um it was first established in 2019. It was initially just a project.

Um it was a very simple app that was like handling payments and we introduced this um notion concept of money streaming um which means you know this continuous by the second distribution of of uh of assets um over time we've expanded into a more general purpose platform for um distributing tokens to your team and um in you know we're like VC back now and we have a team of of nine people uh working fully remotely. Um I'm Romanian, my is Romanian too, Razan. Um and our stats so far are um and I've just uh calculated them before the talk. Um we have 20 2900 um K like uh like alltime users, 1.78 million Ethereum transactions that our smart contracts have processed.

um not a single hack um and we're quite proud of that uh occurred in all of these like metrics and um we are the number one vast protocol on on EVM and we're deployed on 25 plus um EVM chains many many layer 2s and if you're building a layer 2 and want to solution like sabier please reach out to me after the talk um as I said we're backed by by by VC's we've been through uh unders and horitz uh CSX accelerator in London. Uh this was uh last year was a great experience. I can I can highly recommend it. I can recommend you to join uh CSX if you can if you can apply. It's it's like a really top-notch advice and and like investor feedback you'll get there.

And uh a capital GD1 and factor and many others engines of course. Um, and let's start with the the the the problem we're solving, right? Is um what do you need to do and like know before your TG which is your token generation event and you need like a way to vast that token to yourself as a founder and you know to your team to your investors um because you know if you have the liquidity on day one people will dump it and that's that's what happens in this in this industry. Um and you have three ways to go about it like you can do offchain token and vasting you can use custodial services like anchorage bit go the problem with this is that they keep control of your assets right it's like you know this is not crypto this not web 3 it's just like you give you you you give your tokens to a bank um the other option is you can build you you you build the onchain investing tools so you go on chain you use smart contracts but you do it in house you ask your developers to build this um and this can easily get complicated if you want to do at scale if you want to have your own UI um and you know that will eat into your runway u or you can just use our service we've been developing it for many years now it's it's it's solid it works as a nice UI um and it's on chain and this is the beauty like if you're supporting Sablier you're supporting yourself because if you're building a web through company and you are working with a web3 company like us, you know, you're just growing the pie, right? It's like we're doing more business on chain.

Um, and we provide the the the first product we provide is the onchain investing one. And we basically enable you to have any kind of distribution curve you can you can think of. You know, it's like monthly analogs, linear streams. Um, this was the original, you know, by the second idea thing. Um, but now you can have any of these like curves.

You can put them on chain. you know, typically it's like four year vesting with like like a year cliff. We support that. Um, and we also support now like airdrops. So, if you want to do like a mass campaign with up to 1 million recipients, you just upload your your CSV file.

Um, and we will handle the process of like deploying a contract that that keeps your claims for for for users. Um, in terms of the pricing, like the the way it works is that creating these uh payment streams is is is free. Um, but to to claim to claim the assets, we charge a flat fee between like one and $2. Um, depending on the product exactly you're using, of course, we're happy to give discounts based on, you know, how many like how big your campaign is, but the the the starting price is like between$1 and $2 for like claiming the assets from from protocol. and that is charged in ETH.

So your users don't need to have like USDC or something. They just like pay the gas fee and we add a small fee on top for the uh you know stable service basically. Um so it's our even our bis like billing model is fully on chain and I encourage you to not take money if you're building a business do not use stripe just please do it on chain because we you know we want to grow the pie again. Um, and we also offer the ability to if you want to have a custom claim page where put your own brand, we we can do that for you. And uh, this is a demo.

Uh, this is a static image just in case the video wasn't working. But we also have a video. So let's hope it will work. Yeah, it works. Um, so the beauty of blockchain is that we don't have to do the like boring monthly um, uh, like monthly unlocks.

What we do is that on every block you have the ability to distribute the assets. So if you know if you have like a like 3,000 tokens per month that would be like uh you know like 100 tokens per day like a 30-day month. Um and even from that like like 100 per day a small amount will get unlocked every second. And that's just the beauty of blockchain that is that we can do things like this. And this is one of the ways you can structure your like onchain distribution with with Sablier.

Um, and yeah, we also have a new product for like real-time onchain payroll. Um, basically allows you to have the same team that you're paying over time. You have your 10 employees or contractors and you pay them with USC is the same thing, but it's just designed for um for like, you know, payroll, not necessarily for for for vesting. And some of our users um the biggest one being UNISOP governance. If you know, UNISOP a few years ago had uh has has had some legal processes to handle with the state of New York.

Um and the US government actually during the Biden administration times and we are glad to to say that uh Sablier is the platform that they're using to pay their legal advisors called the D5 education fund and it's something like between I think like four four or five million in in UNI tokens that uh they initially deposited through Sablier and we're we're obviously glad to have them as as like users and customers and some other um projects you may have heard about like like NAO exactly protocol and Shape Shift, Maple Finus, Fjord, and more recently um Instad Fluid also using Sablier. So, you'd be in good hands if you decide to go with us. Um and that was it. Was a short talk, but I hope you liked it and of course happy to answer any questions.

Awesome. Thank you very very much, Paul. Um, if anyone has any questions, do feel free to put your hands up or go through the app as well, which is a good way of, uh, putting things forward. Um, I see some people are putting their phones up to do just that. Um, in the meantime, Paul, um, can you talk us through one of your case studies?

I mean, those are some pretty big companies you've worked with there. What's been the most interesting one where perhaps maybe you guys, you know, fixed a big problem or save something bad from happening? Would love to know more. Uh can I go back or no? Yeah, I think I I I do want to talk about this like maybe the first one and the second one but to continue with the unis swope thing um what was amazing about it was that it was fully permissionless like you know typically in web 2 and BD you have some head of BD from company A talk with some head of BD from company B.

But the way Unis swap governance started using it, we just heard about it from Twitter. Like there was no interaction between us and and UNISOP. They just found out about us. They made a governance proposal on the Unisto forum and somebody said, "Hey, Sablier is good." Like this guys have this product.

Let's use it. And um you know that was that was another thing like typically in web two you have you know this like corporate structures where people talk and it's like long-winded discussion negotiations debates um and with web 3 because it's like global and permissionless you can just use the product just connect your wallet and that's it no email signups we don't have any emails like we don't track you like just like put your wallet like web 3 wallet and that's it um so that was a nice thing to see and you know I hope that with time more and more um companies will go on chain for their like asset allocation because it's like just cool. Um and the first one is is you know just like um it's more boring but you know it's like a nice business like business case study for um it's like how we can supercharge your growth. Uh Fury founder is is a token launch platform. So you go to them you want to launch your own token um and many of their users wanted a vasting solution and they they heard about Sablier.

So we just made an integration where um Sabler is basically like a backend provider for fjord. So if you're using Ford and you want like a vast module in fact it's Saber under the hood and that was a nice growth hack for us. Awesome. That's really cool. Um can we go back to the questions page for now as well?

In the meantime um what would you say are the most the biggest mistakes you see teams um making with their vesting schedules because it's such a big topic of conversation at the moment. Is there any anything you've seen that kind of speaks to you?

Well, there are many mistakes. I mean, um the first and the biggest one is just have like a too short like a like a period like a vesting period. Um we have many users who do like six months. It's like not enough. I mean guess what will happen in six months, right?

It's like people will leave, they will dump your token. Um go over like I don't know years. Um you want to have people committed, you want to have people um you know stay with you in the long term. Uh there's that. Uh the other thing is that sometimes they they they make the uh uh they make the payment the the streams non-cancellable.

Um either through a safe that they cannot access anymore and you know mistakes happen. So you should still have like a treasury manager that can change your addresses um over time if you know if investor loses access to their wallet or something. Um but I think the biggest one and I I'll end with this is um maybe you heard about the icon layer story uh where uh something like three or four million igon tokens were lost because they were using offchain vesting and they were using email based vesting and somebody sent an email saying that hey I'm this investor can you please change your address for me I want to receive my tokens at like this new address and they were like oh yeah sure I will I will help you I will because it's like a centralized company changing everything. It's like not publicly verifiable on chain. Nobody could spot the error before it occurred.

Um so they just literally sent 3 million worth of tokens to uh somebody's emails like the address shared over email. And that's like that's what happens when you use you know offchain investing and like custodians is that it's very easy to make mistakes. Whereas with Sablier you know it would have been put on chain. there would have been a distribution process over time um and you would have lost you know say tokens vested for a few days weeks maybe when somebody would have said hey this is not my address the investor would have said this is not my address and that is the beauty of onchain so just put your vesting plan on chain and do not do it over email

do you have an idea how how much those three million tokens are worth now

well much less because the token tanked anyway but

okay uh

good good to No. Um, one more question actually from me. Um, do you think that the future of payroll solutions in web 3 is one where mainstream payroll infrastructure ends up uh working with companies like yours? Um, or do you feel like you're going to kind of carry on building within web 3 and there won't be much overreach onto the other side?

Well, I definitely hope that that will happen. Um I think it's a matter of with pay peril it's a matter of like govern like governments accepting stable coins for for business and I think it's inevitable because um it's just like so many benefits for for for like you know for business like trading for commerce international commerce especially um uh privacy is the elephant in the room obviously you don't have your like salaries on on chain uh but smart people are working on that I used to work at AIC if you know privacy solution network. Um, great guys, great team, great product. Um, so hopefully with time once we bring privacy on chain and governance, governments like realize how um how much bigger like world commerce trade can become, you know, with with stable coins. Um, that will happen eventually and yeah, we will be there to serve them.

Okay, good to know. And a a slightly different question as well. You're um you're building in the UK, is that right? So the company is UK based. It's like set up there, but we're like actually fully remote.

I'm Romanian. I've often come back to Romania. Yeah. So um we're remote global.

Fully remote. Okay. My my question was going to be about building a web three company in the UK, but maybe that doesn't apply then.

Uh it used to be better.

Fair enough. Okay. So go global sounds like the advice there. Any other questions from the crowd? Anyone?

Oh, right over there. The one sec. No, no, I'll give you the mic just so that we can get you recorded. Hey, thank thank you for the the presentation. I have one short question and one that uh wish you going to spill some alpha here.

Uh first question, can you expand on the the fluid decks uh collaboration and second question uh do you have any plan regarding stable coin integration uh directly uh on Sablier or or yeah launching your own CDP maybe for for with Sablier in the back end. Um the first question I didn't understand the hear the the name you mentioned who disabled

fluid fluid fluid I I think you you mentioned it in

Oh yeah yeah yeah so I mean just fluid has their own token um and they're using sablier for vesting and you know they're the the instab fluid um investors are being paid through our platform um and the second one yeah that so the idea is basically just to make sure I understand to to use disable your funds to create credit to enable credit. Um, and that idea has been sitting on the backlog. It's probably something we'll do after our series after our series A. We need more developers to do it. But the the idea is pretty cool because what it can do is, you know, you have this like onchain source of funds and it can potentially connect it to like a credit card that will um, you know, enable you to to spend from that real-time stream.

And the hope is that you know if you have like two or three years worth of credit on chain uh people will will even give you uncolateralized credit based on the trust you have earned over time through sier but that obviously complicated TBD um but yeah it is on a road map you know thank you for your questions

nice any other questions for Paul oh right here

uh it's very cool of you that you have your revenue on chain I'm not sure if you can answer this question but do you plan to do something with that I don't know to develop it further some kind of distribution in the future maybe but it's kind of sensitive I'm not sure if you can answer to use like the revenue your revenue on on chain somehow

uh in what ways to use it like

to maybe distribute it through sublier to investors or something like that or any other creative use of it because it few companies have their revenue on chain and that's somewhat of a unique position Maybe that is um so the question is if you know we have our own chain revenues whether we can distribute them back to our investors that is security land and that would very quickly pass the howi test in the US and we don't want to do that we don't want to pass the test um and I again I'm hopeful that governments will create a legal environment where we don't have to create these like meme coins where we have to say they're like governance tokens they're not securities when in fact they are securities is um so it's a matter of like legal just legal issue like we can we can do it we would like to do it but we can't do it and um yeah so sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry to say no but

okay good to know any other questions oh okay Mr. baseball cap.

So given that SAR is the number one investing platform on the EVM chains or or Ethereum, what did you guys do that others did not to be successful? Like is there anything that you did that other vesting platforms did not? Um I think it's a combination of just um obsession with good products like building a good like a good product and um and top-notch security. Uh our competitors were hacked on several occasions and when they were hacked I was getting dozens of messages on telegram saying hey guys we want to move our assets to you. Um and yeah building secure smart contracts as you know is is like not easy and uh yeah I would say it's like just good good security and good uh product building obsession that uh both my co-founder and I we share that passion for building products and yeah I I I do encourage everyone like our app our UI is at app.

sablier.com savior.com um if you want to have a look and yeah I can show you a demo after the talk but yeah those would be the two things. Thank you.

Okay thank you.

Awesome. Thanks very much Paul. Everybody let's put our hands together one more time.