Introducing Sablier Flow

| You can start using the new protocol on our interface.

Sablier Lockup, the leading battle-tested protocol for onchain vesting and airdrops, has been live on mainnet for exactly five years now. It’s been used by leaders in the industry like Uniswap Governance, Compound, Shapeshift, Axie Infinity, Fjord, Immutable, and thousands of other incredible organizations at the forefront of innovation.

Remarkably, Sablier Lockup has maintained an impeccable security record, with no breaches, all while pioneering onchain token streaming.

Five years later, today, we’re once again reinventing and pioneering a new payment primitive.

A brief history of Sablier Lockup

Sablier Lockup is an ideal fit for vesting and airdrops. The amounts distributed are fixed, meaning you cannot add funds to an existing stream, and streams cannot be extended either, the stream duration is fixed. This rigidity ensures a seamless and secure experience for these scenarios but falls short for more flexible use cases like payroll, grants, subscriptions, or other recurring payments where the sender and the recipient remain the same over time.

When using Sablier for onchain payroll, for example, users shouldn’t have to create a new payment every time they want to send over new funds to the same recipient. Similarly, subscribers of a service leveraging Sablier for payments shouldn’t have to create a new stream every time they extend their subscription. And finally, renters shouldn’t have to create a new stream every month to pay their landlord.

The Solution: Sablier Flow

Sablier Flow solves these problems, by allowing users to create streams that support “top-ups”, which can be extended, and which can account for debt when funds run out. This makes for an ideal user experience for use cases like payroll, grants, subscriptions, rent, and other recurring forms of payments.

An employer can create a stream per employee, and then top up each stream every week, every month, or every quarter, for example. No need to create a new stream every time. The employee leaves the company? Void the stream. They are on a temporary break, or are in-between tasks as a freelancer? Pause the stream. Did they receive a bonus? Top up the stream.

Crucially, Flow is not a replacement for Sablier Lockup; they are designed to coexist and serve distinct needs. Lockup remains the best choice for vesting and airdrops, while Flow excels in managing payroll, grants, subscriptions, rent, and similar recurring payments.

Flow is robust, battle-tested through extensive audits, and universally available across 20+ EVM chains. Importantly, its design is elegantly simple, avoiding reliance on wrapping tokens or liquidators—suboptimal architectural choices that can introduce security vulnerabilities.

The Why

Payments might seem boring, but just like computer processes communicate in bits, agents in our economy, both human and artificial, communicate through payments. When you pay someone, you offer that person capital, and by extension, agency. To the economy, it signals the recipient is a value creator. Payments are the backbone of our society, and one of the most popular forms of payments is paycheck.

We believe the only thing more outdated than cash is a bi-weekly/monthly paycheck. Why get paid every month? Why not every week? Day? Hour? Second? It’s completely arbitrary, and both employers and employees suffer from it.

Employers suffer because it’s time they have to spend every two weeks or month handling payroll, time that they could spend growing their business and ventures. Employees suffer because they are effectively giving a zero-interest loan every month to their employer.

The delta between a unit of work and its payment is technically a loan. In Europe, for example, where monthly paychecks are the norm, employees offer a 30-day loan to their employers every single month, interest-free. And this is without even mentioning the friction of having to wait 30-days for your paycheck to arrive in order to spend it. If you get paid in real-time, you can also spend in real-time. No waiting, just earning.

Security

As always, security is our top priority. Sablier has never been hacked in over five years, while being the leading onchain token distribution solution during that whole time. The protocol is battle-tested and has been a year in the making. It was audited by senior auditors at Cantina as well as through a contest on CodeHawks.

In a space where many protocols overlook security, we stand firm—prioritizing safety now and always.

To incentivize responsible bug disclosure, we offer a public bug bounty of up to $100,000 offered for critical bugs. More detail on the terms of the program can be found on GitHub.

License

Just like Sablier Lockup, Flow is licensed under the BUSL. This license is essentially a time-delayed General Public License v3.0-or-later. It restricts the use of the V2 source code in a commercial production environments for up to four years, after which it transitions into GPL indefinitely.

Please note that the BUSL 1.1 license does not impact integrations. We have licensed all code necessary for external integrations under GPL, including but not limited to interfaces and data types. This ensures that any protocol, web interface, mobile app, or other projects can seamlessly integrate with Sablier Flow.

Conclusion

This is a new step in our journey to becoming the universal payment layer for the web; a world where any payment (whether vested or instant) is made through Sablier, a world where employees are paid in real-time, where they spend in real-time as well, where the economy functions fluently and efficiently.

This is only the start. There’s more to come. 

If you are integrating and wish to get in touch, please fill out this form, and we will respond as soon as possible.

To get involved and stay posted:

• Use Sablier Flow at app.sablier.com/payments
• Follow Sablier on X and Farcaster
• Join the Sablier Discord server
• Subscribe to the Sablier blog

Happy streaming! ⏳