Happy Sunday! I was blown away by the reception of the first Sunday Shipment—still amazes me how fast you can ship production code that manages hundreds of millions USD worth of crypto.
Everyone wonders how Ian is able to ship so much code. One of his trade secrets for focusing in is listening to the same song on loop for literally weeks. Song of the week is Face Off, but just The Rock’s verse (10 Hours).
It’s Venko, not Venmo.
Today’s drop is Venko—Solana’s rails for realtime finance. Generally put, Venko is a protocol for issuing streams of tokens. It is designed for a variety of use cases, including:
Token lockups. Venko allows anyone to issue contributor and investor tokens streamed in realtime, irrevocably. The issuer can also set a cliff period for when the tokens begins streaming. For example, as a founder I can issue my protocol’s tokens to investors with a 1 year cliff + 3 year linear release all on-chain.
Revocable grants. There are some use cases where the issuer may want the stream be revocable, such as for milestone-based DAO contributions or employee token packages. With Venko, an issuer can easily cancel someone’s token stream in the case of termination.
Escrow. The biggest pain point of crypto payments UX is how easy it is to accidentally mistyping the receiving address, thereby accidentally burning the payment tokens. Because of Venko’s escrow system, it’s possible to cancel a payment if the receiver hasn’t accepted. This is very useful for large size payments, such as an investor sending USDC for an investment.
The most interesting part of Venko is how it can be integrated with the Ship Capital ecosystem. Now DAO payments, such as contribution grants, are possible within the Tribeca governance framework. Goki multisg wallets are able to receive and manage team and investor lockup tokens.
An extension for lockup tokens is the ability to manage streams of Tribeca’s voting escrow tokens (e.g. Curve or Saber). A frequent argument for short (or no) lockups for teams is that it disables the core team from participating in governance. However, using ve tokens, a team member would be able to participate in governance while keeping the illiquid nature of token cliffs.
Right now the only user interface for Venko is in the Goki Private Beta. However, a standalone Venko application is on the team’s roadmap. I would be most excited this integrated within a user friendly mobile app (hence the name’s similarity to Venmo!). Due to Solana’s high speed and very low transaction cost, payments seems like one of the best use cases for mainstream Web3 adoption.
You can find all of the Venko code open-sourced on Github.
Across the Shipverse
The Ship Capital Podcast
We launched a podcast! First episode is with Uddhav Marwaha, one of the co-founders of Friktion. Friktion is bringing sustainable yields to DeFi, starting with automated options strategies like covered call selling and cash secured puts.
Topics include: DeFi structured products, Friktion's meteoric rise to $100M TVL, how Friktion can help DAOs better manage their treasuries, breaking into the crypto industry as a non-dev, and more.
Watch the full video on YouTube.
welcome venko onboard