Web3 Leader Spotlight: Vijay Michalik
This week, we caught up with Vijay Michalik, Head of Product at Superfluid, an asset streaming protocol that brings subscriptions, salaries, vesting, and rewards to DAOs and web3 businesses worldwide. We're excited to hear from Ahmed to hear about the prospect of mass adoption, user experience in crypto and of course a healthy dose of advice for aspiring builders in web3.
As the Head of Products at Superfluid, you've expressed a strong belief in crypto's potential for mass adoption. What do you think is required to achieve this?
I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about what practices we can improve on in web3 the most and I keep coming back to designer experience as an underserved practice. We have a lot of UX conventions in web3 that come from early teams who never really had to justify themselves, and it’s clear to anyone with fresh eyes that we can do much better. There are also still very few applications that cross the chasm from being useful in a niche way to generally useful for a significant chunk of the general population. It isn’t likely to be telegram trading bots, it’ll be things like PoolTogether and passive investments like on-chain DCA with Aqueduct. Web3 social platforms like Lens and Farcaster have a great opportunity here too.
Superfluid's asset streaming protocol is gaining popularity within various verticals of Web3. Where have you found the most traction and can you highlight some of the reasons for this?
Our main users today are teams paying for long-running operational payments like payroll and vesting. What better employee benefit could you add to getting paid in crypto than to get paid every second? Paying with Superfluid streams can massively reduce the admin overhead to sign dozens of transactions every month. We have a huge volume of usage in gaming too, though you might be surprised to hear it. Superfluid powers rental game mechanics (and soon some other fun game mechanics) in the biggest game on Polygon, PlanetIX. It’s a really clean way to add recurring payments to any app, and it’s permissionless so there’s stuff happening all the time we don’t hear about right away too. We’re also shipping a lot of new features and our best UX examples yet for accepting crypto subscriptions, which you can try today without writing a line of code.
With your experience in the crypto industry, what advice would you offer to builders looking to create their own innovative solutions in the space?
There are a lot of great tools out there from new wallet experiences like Privy and Capsule to relaying and account abstraction that help us unpack entrenched interaction flows and simplify them further than ever before without losing the key benefits of web3. Don’t build from the tech towards the user experience - build from the user experience back towards the tech. Talk to your users and aim for real needs, not just novel experiences.
Crypto often faces criticism for its complexity. How is Superfluid making crypto more user-friendly for newcomers?
We’ve spent much of the past year moving closer and closer to end-user use cases from the protocol, and we’re working to throw as many preconceptions out the window about the technical barriers to end users’ ideal workflows to achieve them. We’re doing all of this open source and aiming for clear design documentation for our ecosystem of builders - so when we level up a component or flow, all our community levels up too. We want to collaborate as much as possible to solve our common UX challenges.
