Lasso

🌎 THE WORLD TODAY 🌎

“Subscriptions are the only business model that is entirely based on the happiness of your customers.” ― Tien Tzuo

Subscriptions are one of the most popular ways of monetizing products and services on the internet. As consumers, it’s an easy way for us to pay for services that we use everyday in a set it and forget it way. But today there is no good way to way for subscriptions using crypto.

Most services only accept credit card fiat payments for recurring subscriptions. Even with Stripe’s new product launch, merchants can get paid in USDC but users are still paying via credit card. Services that do accept payments often require a hefty upfront amount to mitigate churn risk and transaction cost (ie, you can only pay with crypto for our annual plan).

Any business that wanted to set up a crypto subscription payment channel would face the following paid points today:

👉 High-friction and churn risk: Because subscribers can’t make automatic payments they must make manual ones. That means subscribers would need to return to the service every months and go through the many motions of makes a renewal payment manually. This is extremely high friction for subscribers and greatly increases churn risk.

👉 Economic viability: Not only would a set up like this be high friction but users would have to pay gas every time they made a renewal payment. Imagine paying $12 gas (on a good day) for a $10 renewal payment every month on mainnet.

👉 Administration friction: There’s no system today that lets you manage subscribers that have made payments to your business in order to service them. This now requires building custom solutions or increasing administrative over head.

🤠 INTRODUCING LASSO 🤠

Lasso is an on-chain crypto-subscription platform built on Polygon. Think Stripe’s subscription products but for crypto. We enable merchants to start subscription businesses in one click, get a unique shareable link where their customers can set-up automatic payments using stable coins. Built on superfluid. Subscribers make one transaction to set up their subscription and start paying a continuous stream of funds by the second to the merchant.

How it works:

• Merchants indicate how much they want to charge per month, what type of business they want to start, and give their service a name. When they click create, they are prompted to sign a message confirming they want to start a subscription.

• Once the message is signed, Lasso generates a unique sharable link the merchant can share with customers and start getting paid from. They will also be able to manage their subscribers from a services dashboard.

• Once a subscriber lands on the link, they are prompted to connect their wallet, share a user identifier (ie discord handle), and wrap their DAI into DAIx: the streamable ERC-20 which acts as the medium of exchange. Once the user has sufficient DAIx and info, they create their subscription stream by submitting a transaction on-chain which immediately starts streaming payments to the merchant's wallet in one-second increments. Cancellable at any time. Set up from any wallet.

Example merchants:

• SaaS tools (think Nansen, Uniwhales, rarity.tools, etc)

• Independent content creators (think paid newsletters, private discords/twitters/telegrams, vloggers, etc)

• Online publications (think Messari, New York Times, etc)

• eCommerce subscription businesses (think ButcherBox, etc)

The app's subscription flow / payments is built on top of Superfluid to create and manage streams.The app manages subscription + service data using Firebase currently which is not ideal, but had we had more time we would've utilized our own smart contract relayer to keep all the data on chain. The frontend is built using React + Typescript+ Ethers with Chakra UI for styling/UI.