a16z Leads Halliday’s $20 Million Financing

On March 18, Halliday, a developer of Web3 workflow protocols, announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round led by a16z crypto. Other participants included the Avalanche Blizzard Fund, Credibly Neutral, Alt Layer, and several angel investors. This round of financing brings Halliday’s total funding to $26 million.

Vision: Shortening Smart Contract Creation Time, Prioritizing the Development of Halliday Payments

According to official information, Halliday focuses on building infrastructure that allows developers to delegate workflows to automated systems when creating smart contracts. The company is committed to making the creation of smart contracts more efficient and user-friendly, thus shortening development time.

Halliday also claims to be applying secure AI systems on decentralized networks, changing the way developers build on-chain applications. AI on the blockchain remains difficult to popularize, primarily due to compliance and security constraints. To enable AI to operate on-chain, robust security infrastructure must be built to ensure enterprises can regulate AI-driven automated processes. The Workflow Protocol addresses both of these issues and supports the automation of any process, including:

• Accessing new L1/L2/L3 networks
• Regular payments
• Maximizing returns
• Fund management
• B2B intelligence

Halliday Payments is its current flagship product, featuring the following capabilities:

• Fiat Onramps: Through fiat-to-crypto exchanges, cross-chain asset management, and full-featured smart accounts based on ERC-4337, users can easily consume, manage assets, and transact.
• Centralized Exchanges: Connecting millions of centralized exchange accounts globally, allowing users to purchase your tokens directly using CEX balances.
• Bridging: Regardless of whether your chain has one or multiple bridges, whether native or third-party, we simplify the complexity of cross-chain bridging, enabling you and your users to easily transfer assets across chains.
• Cross-Chain Swaps: Users can use any existing cryptocurrency for swaps, applicable to any token across any chain.
• Fiat Offramps: Providing fiat off-ramp solutions tailored for your tokens and blockchain, allowing users to easily liquidate assets.

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

Transformation from a ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Project Focused on In-Game Purchases

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

Dunaif graduated in 2023 with a degree in computer science from Stanford University, inspired by blockchain and cryptographic technology. In a 2024 interview, he recalled, “I took a course called CS251, and I remember the first class where the professor showed a slide that said, ‘Cryptocurrency or blockchain is the intersection of distributed systems, cryptography, and behavioral economics.’ Seeing those three combined on one slide made me think this course would be interesting. It sparked my interest in the entire discipline and was what led me to delve deeper into this field. After that, I took a course on zero-knowledge protocol design, where I worked on some interesting experiments with a professor involving protocol construction and testing. Ultimately, these experiences drove me to leave school and start Halliday.”

Initially, Halliday’s founding team aimed to create a ‘buy now, pay later’ financial product designed for players wanting to pay in installments for in-game purchases. In this concept, players could purchase in-game assets through Halliday’s extension tools and use them immediately, but the assets would be held in custody by Halliday until the player completed payment. This approach not only alleviated the economic pressure on players within the game but also provided flexible payment options. If players failed to pay on time, Halliday would reclaim control of the assets without reporting late records to credit agencies.

To achieve this goal, Halliday successfully completed a $6 million seed round in 2022, with participation from a16z crypto, Hashed, a_capital, and other investment institutions. However, as the exploration of blockchain applications deepened, Griffin Dunaif realized that while the crypto industry culture was rich, there was a lack of effective commercial infrastructure, especially in the processes of exchanging value, owning, and transferring assets. He believed that blockchain needed better commercial support to make the distribution of goods and services more automated and seamless, thus promoting the development of ‘digital cities.’

Building a Higher-Level Multi-Chain Programming Model, Planning to Profit from Customer-Required Computational Power

As their understanding of blockchain technology deepened, Dunaif and his team decided to shift Halliday’s focus from the gaming sector to a broader construction of blockchain commercial infrastructure. Halliday aims to automate the distribution of goods and services by reducing friction in transactions and interactions.

For example, Halliday wants to support the complex process of integrating fiat into L3 networks. “We are talking about the Ape chain, which is essentially an L3 on Arbitrum Orbit. The question is, how do we support fiat integration into this L3? Stripe, as one of the primary onboarding methods, does not actually support L3; its coverage is very limited, but its product is excellent. So ultimately, what can be done is to enter the Base chain with fiat, exchange it, then bridge across chains, exchange again, and then bridge to L3, forming a multi-hop process, or you could first enter the mainnet with fiat, exchange it, and then bridge to L3. You will see many different paths. In short, what we are doing is that when looking to integrate a fiat onboarding method that only supports a few networks, we will automatically route and handle all these processes on-chain, allowing you to experience native onboarding on L3 or L2. Regardless of whether you use CCIP, LayerZero, or other onboarding solutions, we will integrate these at a higher level, allowing you to transact on your chain,” Dunaif explained in an interview last year.

As Dunaif stated, “You can think of us as building a higher-level programming model that knows how to interact with fiat systems, how to engage, while also understanding how to abstract automation, composability, and complexity in the blockchain world. It’s almost like a virtual machine; in fact, it’s a higher-level virtual machine that can be programmed. You can build programs. We are now building these programs and offering them as products. But our vision is to open it up and see that multi-chain programs have become possible and easy. It may sound crazy now because no one wants to build a multi-chain program due to its complexity, but our company is a multi-chain program, and we hope to reduce this complexity by tenfold.”

Currently, Halliday has launched an early access product program and has received over 11,000 applications. The program is expected to officially launch in the second quarter, providing users with more customized features and services.

In terms of revenue model, Halliday will charge based on the computational power required by customers, allowing them to purchase the corresponding computational 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 driving automated workflows for financial institutions through products like the CodeFi blockchain application suite.

Compared to the C-end, the high customer acquisition costs in the crypto market and the challenging channels for acquiring customers have led many startups to turn to the B-end for growth opportunities. A recent article by PANews titled “a16z Invested 3A Chain Game Champions Ascension Unexpectedly Suspends Operations, Team Shifts Focus to New Project Concentrating on Customer Acquisition” also highlights how a16z invested company faced setbacks and turned to B-end business for game distribution, suggesting that acquiring C-end users has become a challenge for the entire industry.

This article is collaboratively reprinted from: PANews