Before Superfluid, Michele D’Aliessi was working with robotic bartenders on cruise ships. Not exactly the expected path into financial infrastructure. But for him, it was always about systems, how they move, how they scale, and why they break.
He moved to London in 2015 and fell into fintech just as Ethereum was getting its footing. The idea of unstoppable applications hit hard. So did the realisation that financial architecture could be rebuilt entirely from scratch. By 2016, he was attending every crypto meetup he could find, writing about Ethereum and watching one of his blog posts go viral on Medium’s homepage. He wasn’t investing. He was learning.
That learning eventually became building. He met his Superfluid co-founders during Berlin Blockchain Week in 2019, where an early experiment with streaming DeFi interest sparked a bigger idea. What if you could stream any token, in real time, natively on-chain? Not just earning interest, but receiving actual payments continuously, second by second, like water from a tap.
Superfluid launched to do exactly that. It is a new financial primitive for streaming payments on-chain. Instead of being paid in one lump sum, users can receive a constant, uninterrupted flow of tokens. It is ideal for subscriptions, salary payments, token incentives, or programmable treasury management. Michele sees it as infrastructure for the modern internet economy. Fast, composable, and native to how people work and earn today.
What excites him most right now is the idea of reverse token distributions. Instead of static, retroactive airdrops, projects can use Superfluid to reward contributors dynamically and programmatically, based on on-chain actions. You hit a metric. You earn tokens. Immediately. It solves one of Web3’s core problems: too many tokens chasing too little loyalty. With streaming rewards, alignment becomes real-time.
But building a new financial primitive is never smooth. Launching the Superfluid token took years of work, and the team did not push it unilaterally. The protocol was designed from day one to involve third parties (validators, operators, and contributors) who now run the system independently. The launch had to reflect that. It required coordination, governance, legal structure, and a huge shift in mindset from “founder-led” to “community-owned.”
Michele is open about the challenges. Building something this foundational is slow, expensive, and full of rejection. What helped was a trusted co-founder dynamic, tested early through something as literal as rock climbing. “You’re tied to each other,” he says. “One mistake and you both fall.” The metaphor holds.
His advice to other founders? Do not underestimate the communication side. Launching a token is not just legal and technical. It is also emotional and communal. You’re asking people to care. That takes more than a white paper.
Superfluid is now being used for everything from recurring contributor payments to DeFi treasury flows and DAO incentive programmes. It is still early. But Michele believes the logic is inevitable: if money represents value already earned, it should move at the speed of the internet, not once a month.
