Introducing Loop Crypto

Enabling recurring crypto payments — autopay for web3.

Loop Crypto
4 min readApr 13, 2022

One of the most powerful features of web3 is full control over your assets, i.e. self-custody. Every transaction is signed and approved by you, ensuring that you are always in control and that no one can access your funds unless you grant permission. However, this killer feature also poses a difficulty: burdensome approvals each time a transaction is made. Every single subscription payment, token swap, employee salary payment, donation, etc. requires confirmation — there is no “set it and forget it.”

For the individual user, these barriers are already burdensome, but at the organizational level (DAOs, multi-sigs, etc.) the coordination and logistics around transaction approvals grows exponentially. And this is just from the payer’s perspective; receivers — both organizations and individuals (e.g. employees) — must spend time monitoring, following up on, and troubleshooting missed payments.

Manually approved transactions may have started off as a feature and not a bug, but it’s impossible to imagine mass adoption of a web infrastructure that doesn’t automate such routine functionality on a larger transactional scale. The problem today is that the necessary web3 infrastructure does not exist — and thus neither does the optionality for automated processes.

That’s why we built Loop, the first smart contract solution that enables automatic recurring crypto payments without locking up funds — it’s autopay for web3.

We (Eleni and Shane) have worked in crypto over the last 5yrs and have experienced firsthand the time and frustration spent due to the lack of autopay. We deeply understand this problem and the work required to solve it.

In supporting this journey, we are proud to announce an important step — we completed a $4M seed led by a16z, with participation from a_capital, Alchemy Ventures, CoinList, Lauren Stephanian, Paul Veradittakit, Imran Khan, Alex Svanevik, and dozens of angels who are builders and founders themselves, a round that was only made possible because Archetype bet on and incubated us during our earliest days of envisioning Loop. We are thankful for the support and to be on this journey with amazing partners.

We’ve already built the Loop smart contracts — the necessary tooling that companies need to adopt Loop — and are deploying it with alpha customers. We aim to release our first version publicly in the next few months.

Vision

We believe in a decentralized, interoperable future and are building the tools that allow companies and users to automate recurring payments. Having worked at startups in the past, we know that tooling needs to be flexible. That’s why we’ve built our smart contracts as templates that can be customized to meet unique business needs. Even further, we’ve built the necessary tooling that companies require to integrate from APIs to dashboards to backend services. Loop is built so integration can be as easy as adding an html snippet to one’s website.

Our vision is for the Loop smart contracts to become a part of the core web3 infrastructure, an infrastructure that is user and builder owned, token governed, and designed with interoperability at its core.

We’re just getting started.

The vision of how autopay can integrate into someone’s life is much bigger than in the web2 world because of the interoperability that underpins web3. Companies enabling autopay can use the on-chain record of incoming accounts receivable to get financing, end users can build on-chain reputations as good payers and get discounts or credit, recurring buys can automatically be staked to earn additional yield — the lego architecture of web3 unlocks endless use cases. And the beauty of the web3 infrastructure is Loop’s users can become its owners and anyone, without asking permission, can incorporate Loop.

We’ve been inspired by the architecture of decentralized projects such as MakerDAO that use rewards to incentivize on-chain keepers to ensure the protocol runs efficiently. We aspire to introduce this into our network to fully leverage the power of decentralized economies while ensuring Loop is truly open infrastructure.

And this is just the beginning. Unlocking this core piece of infrastructure can usher in web2 companies to the web3 world. Streamlining the crypto payment process lowers the barriers for mass adoption. This is why we’re so excited about adding such an important missing piece to the web3 infrastructure.

New frens.

We have built and launched projects together in the past and are building solutions to problems we’ve faced firsthand for problems that are large enough to make an impact.

If you think you can use our product — you’re a SaaS business, wallet, work with donations, AMM, portfolio management platform, loan originator, etc. — please fill out this form and we’ll reach out ASAP.

If you’re interested in Loop and want to stay informed on its availability, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter at www.loopcrypto.xyz.

-Eleni & Shane

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