In the early days of the industry, after Bitcoin launched the Lightning Network, it was further placed on high expectations at the payment level, and the team continued to explore in depth. In the second half of 2016, Andreas Antonopoulos, the author of "Proficient in Bitcoin" and a top blockchain developer, mentioned the concept of "flow payment", and hoped to further realize the early vision of "flow payment" based on Lightning Network.
Although this early vision has not been realized in the Bitcoin ecology, with the further development of Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana and other ecology, the secondary ecology positioned as "flow payment" has been continuously established, including the earliest construction in Ethereum The flow payment protocol Sablier on the Internet, Zebec Protocol and Streamflow built on Solana, etc., these early ecosystems in the flow payment track can currently make flow payments based on smart contracts in the form of flow payments based on cryptocurrencies.
Therefore, judging from the characteristics of the existing flow payment ecology, the flow payment ecology is mainly attached to the bottom layer of the existing public chain, and further builds a secondary ecology, which means that the flow payment protocol itself can inherit the advantages of the public chain itself. For example, the Ethereum ecosystem itself has top-level ecological matrix depth, asset liquidity and richness, and user scale, which can provide a more convenient environment for streaming payment protocols. The Solana chain itself has high scalability and high explosiveness, low transaction fees and a certain ecological thickness, which can provide a low-friction and efficient operation foundation for streaming payment protocols.
However, the underlying fundamentals of the public chain also determine a ceiling for the development of streaming payment protocols. For example, even though Ethereum has completed the 2.0 upgrade, the transaction gas fee still cannot be ignored, and Sablier, as an old streaming payment protocol on Ethereum, has always stagnated in development. From the perspective of Solana itself, although the operating efficiency of the chain is worthy of recognition, repeated downtimes have continuously brought blows to the development of the Solana ecology. Therefore, the streaming payment track in the Solana ecology, which is developing rapidly, urgently needs to make another choice. To seek more long-term and stable development.
From another perspective, streaming payment, as an emerging payment method, is expected to be widely used by traditional businesses and the Web3 ecosystem in the future. At present, flow payment is mainly used as a protocol tool with poor programmability, and it is usually difficult to integrate flow payment attributes for other applications. Therefore, a scalable and composable flow payment ecosystem will be a major trend in the development of this track, and a single flow payment tool with a protocol as its main feature will also be gradually eliminated.
Not long ago, the Zebec Protocol on the Solana ecosystem launched the Rollup chain Zebec Chain in the form of a general-purpose Layer 2 through the blockchain infrastructure Eclipse, and it is expected to be compatible with multiple L1 blockchains to build better performance and expand more. Good new Web3 stream payment ecology.
Zebec Chain, a Rollup Layer2 chain focused on flow payment launched by Eclipse
After the summer of DeFi in 2020, the surge of activities on the Ethereum chain further magnified the ecological disadvantages, so Layer 2, as a theoretically feasible solution for Ethereum expansion, has also received high attention. Among them, Rollup is the current Layer 2 expansion The main specific technical means (of course, Rollup will still differentiate into many solutions downwards).
Different from the Layer1 chain that packs each transaction one by one, as a two-layer network, when a transaction occurs on the Rollup chain, it will package multiple transactions and submit them to the main network as a whole for verification and settlement, so as to further reduce the Layer1 cost. transaction burden. As a currently feasible off-chain expansion solution, it has theoretically unlimited scalability, which lays the foundation for large-scale adoption in a future scenario.
Based on Eclipse, Zebec launched a new Rollup chain, Zebec Chain, to further build its own flow payment ecosystem. Based on Zk-Rollup, Zebec system is expected to further achieve higher transaction efficiency, user load, system burst, and lower Even transaction frictions that can be ignored. At the same time, Zk-Rollup further endows Zebec with native cryptography-based privacy features to match the needs of various business scenarios in the future.
We have seen that in the early days of Zebec's ecological development, 1/3 of the Solana projects used the Zebec system to pay wages, creating the largest ecosystem on the Solana chain. Zebec Protocol's early user scale has reached 30,000+, and without any pledge mining, TVL has exceeded 300 million US dollars. Zebec will achieve a revenue of 20 million US dollars in 2022, bringing more benefits to the ecology. Net profit of 2 million to 6 million, and it is expected to achieve revenue of 40 million to 50 million US dollars within one year (to August 2023). Therefore, with the further adoption of the flow payment ecology, the Zebec ecology will attract more business partners, and in the case of frequent downtime of the Solana chain, it is very important and necessary to shift the focus of the ecology (in addition to building the Rollup chain, At present, Zebec has also completed the cross-chain to BNB Chain).
From a programmable point of view, Zebec, which was built on Solana in the early days, opened up APIs to developers, allowing other developers to integrate flow payment features for applications with a low threshold. Zebec Pay, launched on this basis, has become the most A popular Web3 payment tool that pays wages in a stream payment manner.
However, from another perspective, as the development bottom layer, Solana can provide less customizable development components, and it is still limited to build applications with streaming payment features only through the support provided by the Zebec ecosystem.
Eclipse itself is a blockchain development tool that allows developers to easily deploy code as customizable Rollups (especially supports the use of Solana VM to customize modular Rollups). The Eclipse execution layer inherits the characteristics of Solana's execution layer, including such as Solana's EVM (packet filter or eBPF), parallel processing of transactions (Sealevel) and streaming payments will enable Solana dApps to enter multi-chains and access inter-blockchain communication. Data on the original Solana will be able to Adopted directly by way of communication.
This means that Zebec builds the Rollup layer through Eclipse, and is expected to build more programmable ecosystems centered on flow payment, which is expected to bring flow payment features to developers in a native way. At the same time, as Layer 2, the Rollup layer is expected to further realize the interaction with Solana, so as to reduce the threshold brought by migration. As Zebec expands to more Layer1 ecosystems, the Zebec Chain in Layer2 form is also expected to further help the ecosystem to achieve better expansion.
Through this directional and privacy-oriented way to create an ecology, Zebec Chain is expected to further promote the development of the streaming payment track and expand its broader application scenarios. At the same time, Zebec Chain is also being used as an early use case of the Eclipse architecture.
Horizon Node Program
Zebec Chain has introduced a node validator mechanism (POS). Users who hold $ZBC and apply through the whitelist are expected to become Zepoch nodes through subscription, and the launch of Zepoch nodes is also known as the Horizon Node Project.
Becoming a Zepoch node, in addition to possessing governance rights, will also obtain many rights and interests, including: Zebec Protocol’s revenue sharing, invitation rewards, airdrop rewards, etc., and further becoming a validator on the chain is expected to obtain an additional return of about 4% to 7%.
As the largest flow payment service provider in the Web2 world, Zebec Chain is providing advanced salary solutions for Web2 companies, tailoring flow payment products according to specific needs , and helping these Web2 companies pay employees in the form of flow payment. As the main verifier, the Zepoch node will play a key role of independence, privacy, efficiency and risk reduction in the future payment application field, and will obtain additional benefits.
At present, the global payment market size is 40 trillion US dollars, and Zebec is expected to occupy about 2% of it, and the payment market will show an exponential rise with the growth of market demand (especially the rise of the African market), and Zebec Chain is expected to undertake More important responsibilities, and Zepoch nodes will also become the recipients of paying market dividends.
Continuous advancement of flow payment compliance
As a special means of payment, flow payment is backed by a large number of Web2 user groups. Zebec has launched Zebec Payroll, a system with tax-compliant on-chain processing functions, to further realize the compliance of ecological flow payment. Zebec Pay provides a compliance basis for employees receiving compensation in cryptocurrency. Users can allocate part of their salary to compliant encrypted IRA and 401k accounts for retirement and other purposes. Based on this, the Zebec ecosystem is expected to open up more markets for salary distribution.
Zebec's compliance program has also been recognized by traditional business giants represented by Visa, and has become the first Solana project approved to join the VisaFintech FastTrack program . Soon, Zebec will also launch a customized debit card with Visa, allowing users to Seamlessly convert their real-time liquidity to FIAT currencies. At present, Zebec has opened a physical store in Hudson Yards Mall in New York City, and is expected to be able to use Zebec Pay or Zebec and Visa co-branded cards to pay.
In addition , Zebec has acquired nearly ten Web2 payment companies, and has integrated flow payment features for these payment channels in a compliant manner, further promoting the large-scale adoption of flow payment methods.
In the six months since its launch, Zebec has become the largest commercial ecosystem on Solana, and it is currently one of the few Web3 projects that is actually making money from services as a service rather than speculation.
The launch of Zebec Chain has further built a technical foundation for the development of Zebec ecology, which is of great significance to the development of Zebec ecology and the development of streaming payment field.