a16z leads $20 million round in Halliday, transforming from helping gamers “buy now, pay later” to building a Web3 “agent workflow protocol”

Halliday was founded in April 2022 and is headquartered in San Francisco, with Griffin Dunaif currently serving as CEO.

Author: Weilin, PANews

On March 18, Web3 workflow protocol developer Halliday announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing, led by a16z crypto, with other investors including Avalanche Blizzard Fund, Credibly Neutral, Alt Layer and several angel investors. This round of financing brings Halliday's total financing to $26 million.

Vision: Shorten the time to create smart contracts and prioritize the construction of payment applications Halliday Payments

According to the official introduction, Halliday focuses on building infrastructure that enables developers to delegate workflows to automatic systems when creating smart contracts. The company is committed to making the creation of smart contracts more efficient and easy to use, shortening development time.

Halliday also claimed that it is making secure AI systems available on decentralized networks and changing the way developers build on-chain applications. AI on blockchain is still difficult to popularize, mainly due to compliance and security restrictions. To run AI on the chain, a strong security infrastructure must be built to ensure that enterprises can supervise AI-driven automated processes. The Workflow Protocol solves these two problems and supports automation of any process, including:

▰ Access to new L1/L2/L3 networks

▰ Regular Payments

▰ Maximize Profits

▰ Fund Management

▰ B2B Agent

Halliday Payments is its current main product, which includes the following features:

• Fiat Deposit (Onramps): Through fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchange, cross-chain asset management, and a fully functional smart account built on ERC-4337, users can easily spend, manage assets and trade.

• Centralized Exchanges: Connect to hundreds of millions of centralized exchange accounts around the world, allowing users to directly use CEX balances to purchase your tokens.

• Bridging: Whether your chain has one or more bridges, or a native bridge or a third-party bridge, we can simplify the complexity of cross-chain bridging, allowing you and your users to easily transfer assets across chains.

• Cross-Chain Swaps: Users can use any existing cryptocurrency to pay, realize the exchange between any tokens, and are applicable to any chain.

• Offramps: Provide fiat withdrawal solutions customized for your tokens and blockchains, allowing users to easily realize asset monetization.

Since 2023, Halliday has been rigorously testing its self-developed workflow system. Teams such as DeFi Kingdoms, Avalanche, ApeCoin, StoryProtocol, Metis, and SHRAPNEL have used the engine to optimize payment processes. In the future, Halliday will cooperate with on-chain projects such as Frax Finance and Lens Chain.

Transformed from a "buy now, pay later" program focused on in-game purchases

Halliday was founded in April 2022 and is headquartered in San Francisco. It was co-founded by two entrepreneurs, Akshay Malhotra and Griffin Dunaif, with Dunaif currently serving as CEO.

Dunaif graduated from Stanford University with a degree in computer science in 2023, and his entrepreneurial journey was deeply inspired by blockchain and encryption technology. In an interview in 2024, he recalled: "I took a course called CS251, and I remember the first class, the professor showed a slide that said 'Cryptocurrency or blockchain is the intersection of distributed systems, cryptography, and behavioral economics'. When I saw these three combined on one slide, I thought, this course must be very interesting. This actually sparked my interest in the entire subject, and it was this course that gave me a deep understanding of this field. After that, I took a course on zero-knowledge protocol design, where I did some interesting experiments with a professor involving the construction and experimentation of protocols. Ultimately, these experiences prompted me to leave school and start Halliday."

Initially, Halliday's founding team was committed to creating a "buy now, pay later" financial product specifically for players who want to pay for in-game purchases in installments. In this vision, players can purchase in-game assets through Halliday's extension tools and use them immediately, but these assets will be managed by Halliday until the player completes the payment. This approach not only reduces the financial pressure on players in the game, but also provides flexible payment options. If the player fails to pay on time, Halliday will take back control of the assets and will not report the overdue record to the credit agency.

To achieve this goal, Halliday successfully completed a $6 million seed round of financing in 2022, with participation from a16z crypto, Hashed, a_capital and other investment institutions. However, with further exploration of blockchain applications, Griffin Dunaif realized that although the crypto industry culture is very rich, what is lacking is effective business infrastructure, especially in the process of exchanging value, owning and transferring assets. He believes that blockchain needs better business support to make the distribution of goods and services more automated and seamless, thereby promoting the construction of "digital cities".

Create a higher-level multi-chain programming model and plan to make profits through the computing power required by customers

As their understanding of blockchain technology deepened, Dunaif and his team decided to shift Halliday's focus from gaming to building a broader blockchain business infrastructure. Halliday's goal is to make the distribution process of goods and services more automated by reducing friction in transactions and interactions.

For example, Halliday wants to support the complex process of connecting fiat to L3 networks. "We're talking about Ape Chain, which is actually L3 on Arbitrum Orbit. Now the question is, how do you support connecting fiat to this L3? Stripe, as one of the main access methods, doesn't actually support L3, its coverage is very limited, but its product is very good. So what you can do in the end is that you can go to Base chain with fiat, exchange it, then cross-chain through the bridge, then exchange it again, and then bridge to L3, forming a multi-hop process, or you can go to the mainnet from fiat, exchange it, and then bridge it to L3. You will see a lot of different paths. In short, what we do is that if you want to connect to a fiat access method that only supports a few networks, we will automatically route and handle all of these processes on the chain, so that you can get a native access experience on L3 or L2. Whether you are using CCIP, LayerZero, or other access solutions, we will integrate these together at a higher level so that you can trade on your chain." Dunaif explained in an interview last year.

As Dunaif put it: “Think of us as building a higher-level programming model that knows how to interact with the fiat system, how to interact, but also knows how to abstract away the automation, composability, and complexity of the blockchain world. It’s almost like a virtual machine, it’s actually a higher-level virtual machine that can be programmed. You can build programs. We’re building these programs now and delivering them as products. But our vision is actually to open it up and see that multi-chain programs have become possible and simple. It may sound crazy now because no one wants to build a multi-chain program because it’s very complex, but our company is a multi-chain program and we want to make this complexity ten times less.”

Currently, Halliday has launched an early access product program and has received more than 11,000 applications. It is expected that the program will be officially launched in the second quarter to provide users with more customized functions and services.

In terms of profit model, Halliday will charge customers based on the computing power they need, and customers can purchase corresponding computing resources according to their needs.

Halliday is not the only company exploring blockchain payments and business automation. Other blockchain companies, such as Consensys, are also promoting automated workflows for financial institutions through products such as the CodeFi blockchain application suite.

Compared with the C-end, the expensive customer acquisition costs and difficult customer acquisition channels in the crypto market have caused many startups to turn to the B-end to seek growth opportunities. PANews recently published an article titled " A16z-invested 3A blockchain game Champions Ascension unexpectedly suspended operations, and the team turned to new projects to focus on customer acquisition ." This is also a company invested by a16z that turned to the B-end business to distribute games after hitting a wall. How to acquire C-end users seems to have become a problem for the entire industry.