Frequently Asked Questions
You can access Sablier through our branded web interfaces:
pay.sablier.finance (streaming money)
app.sablier.finance (withdrawing the streamed money)
We're working with a number of teams to make Sablier accessible through more interfaces.
A term coined by us to emphasise the wide-ranging use cases for the Sablier protocol. We like to think about work as an attempt to rethink the way trust is established in financial contracts.
An alternative wording, coined by Andreas Antonopoulos in 2017.
Just like you can stream movies on Netflix or music on Spotify, so you can stream money on Sablier.
Sablier is built on top of Ethereum, a global, open-source platform for decentralized applications. You can read more about it on their official website.
Permission-less scripts that:
Run on Ethereum
Cannot be modified once deployed
Do exactly what you tell them to do
Stands for the "Ethereum Requests for Comments" number 20. It is the most popular technical standard on Ethereum and can be used for printing a currency.
Sablier is compatible with ERC-20 tokens only, such as DAI or USDC.
A real-time payment, made up of six properties:
Name | Description |
Sender | Ethereum address |
Recipient | Ethereum address |
Lock-Up Value | How much money to stream in total |
Token | ERC-20 token address |
Start time | When the money streaming starts |
Stop time | When the money streaming stops |
Imagine a salary worth 3,000 DAI paid by a company to an employee over the whole month of January 2020. The start time would be Jan 1, 2020 and the stop time Feb 1st, 2020.
You may have noticed this term in our marketing campaigns. In general, a relayer is an entity that has the right to perform an action in the name of a user. In the context of Sablier, a relayer is any Ethereum account that has been whitelisted by the protocol administrator to perform withdrawals for our end users.
You need an Ethereum wallet, some Ether and an ERC-20 token like DAI. Then, choose your favourite interface for accessing the Sablier protocol (such as pay.sablier.finance) and fill in the recipient's address, the lock-up value and the duration.
Alternatively, head to our documentation to learn how to interact directly with the smart contracts.
You have full control over the start time - a unix timestamp measured in seconds. The Ethereum transaction that creates the stream must be processed by the blockchain before this start time, or otherwise the smart contract throws an error:
start time before block.timestamp
In our web interface, the start time is automatically set to ~6 minutes after the moment when the user hits the "Submit" button.
Dividing the lock-up value by the difference between the stop time and the start time gives us a payment rate per second. Sablier uses this rate to transfer a little bit of money from the sender to the recipient once every second.
For instance, if the payment rate was 0.01 DAI per second, the recipient would receive:
0.01 * 60 = 0.6 DAI / minute
0.01 * 60 * 60 = 36 DAI / hour
0.01 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 864 DAI / day
In our smart contracts. You can verify this statement by going to Etherscan or any other blockchain explorer.
As the money is being streamed at the smart contract level, recipient can consider Sablier their real-time wallet for digital currency.
To make withdrawals, recipients can:
Call the contract directly on a blockchain explorer
Use a web interface (e.g. app.sablier.finance)
There's a third option to upgrade to our premium plan, where we automate withdrawals via our relayer network. If you're interested in this, you can email us or reach out on Telegram.
Yes, but only you as a sender.
If the stream is cancelled before the start time, the locked-up money is returned in full to you.
If the stream is cancelled while the stream is active, the smart contracts calculate how much has been streamed, transfer that to the recipient and return the remainder to you.
Finally, if the stream is cancelled after the stream has stopped, the smart contracts transfers all the remaining funds (if any) to the recipient.
No. Once a stream is created, it is set in stone on the Ethereum blockchain. However, in a future version of the protocol, we may add the option to refill an active stream and even extend it.
Yes! You can use Sablier with ERC-20 tokens like cDAI or cHAI. If you wish to keep a percentage of the "in-flight" interest to yourself, you can do it with the createCompoundingStream function (see our API for more details).
The security of the Sablier protocol is our outmost priority. Our team, accompanied by external auditors and consultants, has invested considerable effort to create a protocol that is safe and reliable. All contract code is publicly verifiable in our GitHub repository, and Quantstamp, a third-party auditor, issued an audit certificate.
As transparent as it can be. Verify the smart contracts by yourself in this GitHub repository.
Sablier Inc., the developer of the protocol, currently controls the Ethereum address 0x7c25bB1dd0FB91C69664c461909161A14DEE9782 , which is the protocol admin.
The admin has the right to:
Pause the creation of new streams
Pause withdrawals from active streams
Update the cToken fee
The admin does NOT have the right to:
Cancel active streams
Transfer funds to itself or other Ethereum addresses
Our goal is to become fully decentralised. Over time, the protocol admin will be swapped with a DAO, governed by the community.
We came up with a few ideas in this discussion on Twitter, but the limit is your imagination.
Anyone in the world with an Internet connection and an Ethereum wallet.
The Sablier protocol is "always-on", but, in the event that MetaMask or our web interfaces are malfunctioning, you can access Sablier manually on Etherscan:
Proxy
