Go forth and build something that matters
For much of human history, effectively funding public goods has been a difficult problem with no clear solution. Flows presents a novel mechanism to effectively deploy capital to grassroots projects at scale.
No one has yet cracked how to move money online to the people who’ll use it best—whether in crypto or anywhere else. Judging quality of impact and honesty of the people involved is no easy task. Our hunch is a system that gives rise to effective capital allocation should emerge naturally from incentivizes, not from top-down central management or strict structure. Our main hypotheses for Flows is work that helps accurately allocate funds should be rewarded. People that verify impact and effectively allocate capital should have a natural incentive to do so, and their success should encourage more capital input and upside for them.
Today
Most crypto funding schemes ask too much of voters. As the pool of projects grows, so does the time it takes to check each one. Voters can’t keep up, so funders fall back on a handful of big, one‑off grants picked by small committees on a fixed schedule. DAOs run into the same wall. Their voters only have so much attention; in a good year they might fund a few hundred projects, and that’s it.
It is currently impossible to fund 100,000 quality projects.
Our hypothesis is that this unlock - funding millions of people around the world to make positive local impact - is the killer use case crypto needs to bring a billion people onchain. Flows positions crypto as a force for good in every local community it touches. So - how exactly does Flows fund public goods with a level of accuracy, fairness and open entry that at least approximates how markets fund private goods?
How it works
Flows steals Bitcoin’s main trick: pay people to protect the network. The value that protection creates is worth more than the cost of verifying. The work in this case is not hash functions, but verifying projects and impact. The unit is not hash power, but intelligence, the cost of which we expect to continue falling. Flows creates a system where the only economically viable thing to do is participate honestly and deliver. Instead of an electronic cash network that verifies payments like Bitcoin, Flows is a capital allocation network that verifies real world impact.
TCRs
Put simply, a flow is a Superfluid pool that streams money to projects on a Token Curated Registry. Funds come in, and every second a little flows out to whoever made the list. The real puzzle is choosing who gets on that list.
Take the Beach Cleaning flow as an example. It runs on a Token Curated Registry (TCR)—a token plus a pay‑to‑enter list. A team that wants funding pays the application fee in the Beach Cleaning token and joins the list. Token holders then vet every applicant.
Why would token holders bother to vet applicants? The list is the flow’s report card: the better its projects, the more outside funding the flow wins. TCR token holders earn a slice of that budget, so their income rises only when the list stays top‑notch. In short, curate high‑quality projects, get paid more; slack off, the flow—and their rewards—shrink.
Streaming funds
Approving good projects is only half the job; we also have to watch their impact as it happens. Traditional grants pay a lump sum amount either after the work (hard for new teams) or before it (easy for them to disappear). Flows solves this with Superfluid: money streams every second, like a live meter. Builders can withdraw from the stream whenever they want—so long as they keep shipping what they promised.
Streaming money cuts risk. Flows drips small amounts up front, and builders have to keep shipping to keep the flow alive. The mechanism meshes beautifully with the TCR: each flow lists clear rules, and curators can challenge any project that slips. Fail the test, you’re off the list and the stream shuts off immediately.
Our builders
For builders, the process is smooth. Send a short application with a small fee—you get the fee back if you’re accepted. Once approved, post your progress on Farcaster instead of filling out long reports. Those public updates, plus verified summaries on the Flows site, show curators who’s shipping and who’s stalling.
Flows to the future
The result is a self‑correcting system that keeps the funding bar high. We’ve paid out nearly $200k to over 250 projects, and the rug rate is less than 10%. The impact per dollar is also much higher for small grants vs. large. Many folks just need a bit of money to cover fixed costs and build what they’re already passionate about.
We recognize we will need to make adjustments as Flows takes in more capital. It’s no small feat that with our current setup it already pays more to be an honest builder, and our hunch is that with the right tweaks the system will get more secure with scale, just like Bitcoin. One thing top of mind for us: we need a stronger incentive flywheel for verifying impact, as we currently default trust builders. We are also exploring more mechanisms like revnets to encourage more capital input into Flows.
We have a long way to go before Flows is accurate enough to deploy billions of dollars in capital. We must continuously improve the incentive game, curation tools, and ultimately work to help projects become sustainable.
That being said, the impact we’ve seen all around the world so far is a sight to behold.
Fund a flow, change the world.