a16z Leads $20M Funding Round for Halliday
On March 18th, Web3 workflow protocol developer Halliday announced the completion of a $20 million Series A funding round, led by a16z crypto. Other investors include the Avalanche Blizzard Fund, Credibly Neutral, Alt Layer, and several angel investors. This round brings Halliday’s total funding to $26 million.
Vision: Reducing Smart Contract Creation Time, Prioritizing Payment Application Halliday Payments
According to the official introduction, Halliday focuses on building infrastructure that allows developers to delegate workflow tasks to automated systems when creating smart contracts. The company aims to make smart contract creation more efficient and user-friendly, reducing development time.
Halliday also mentioned that it is enabling the use of secure AI systems on decentralized networks and changing the way developers build on-chain applications. AI on the blockchain is still challenging to implement, mainly due to regulatory and security concerns. To enable AI on-chain, robust security infrastructure must be built to ensure enterprises can oversee AI-driven automated processes. The Workflow Protocol addresses both of these challenges and supports the automation of any process, including:
- Connecting to new L1/L2/L3 networks
- Regular payments
- Maximizing yield
- Fund management
- B2B smart entities
Halliday Payments is its current flagship product, with the following features:
- Fiat Onramps: Through fiat-to-crypto exchange, cross-chain asset management, and full-featured smart accounts based on ERC-4337, users can easily spend, manage assets, and make transactions.
- Centralized Exchanges: Connects to hundreds of millions of centralized exchange accounts globally, enabling users to directly purchase your tokens using CEX balances.
- Bridging: Regardless of whether your chain has one or multiple bridges, native or third-party, we simplify the complexity of cross-chain bridging, enabling easy cross-chain asset transfers for you and your users.
- Cross-Chain Swaps: Users can swap any tokens across any chains using existing cryptocurrencies for payments.
- Fiat Offramps: Provides fiat withdrawal solutions tailored to your tokens and blockchain, allowing users to easily liquidate their 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 this engine. In the future, Halliday plans to collaborate with on-chain projects like Frax Finance and Lens Chain.
Transformed from a “Buy Now, Pay Later” Model Focused on In-Game Purchases
Halliday was founded in April 2022 and is headquartered in San Francisco by two 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, and his entrepreneurial journey was deeply inspired by blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. In a 2024 interview, he recalled, “I took a class called CS251, and I remember the first class, where the professor showed a slide that said, ‘Cryptocurrency or blockchain is an intersection of distributed systems, cryptography, and behavioral economics.’ Seeing these three elements on one slide, I thought, this class is going to be interesting. It actually sparked my interest in the entire field, and that class helped me dive deeper into it. Later, 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 led me to leave school and start Halliday.”
Initially, Halliday’s founding team focused on creating a “Buy Now, Pay Later” financial product tailored for gamers who wished to pay in installments for in-game purchases. In this concept, players could use Halliday’s extension tool to purchase in-game assets and use them immediately, but these assets would be held by Halliday until the payment was completed. This approach not only alleviated the economic burden on players but also provided flexible payment options. If players failed to make timely payments, Halliday would reclaim the assets but would not report overdue records to credit agencies.
To achieve this goal, Halliday successfully completed a $6 million seed funding round in 2022, with participation from a16z crypto, Hashed, a_capital, and other investment institutions. However, as Halliday further explored blockchain applications, Griffin Dunaif realized that while the crypto industry was rich in culture, 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 driving the creation of “digital cities.”
Building a Higher-Level Multi-Chain Programming Model, Planning to Profit from Customer-Needed Computational Power
As their understanding of blockchain technology deepened, Dunaif and his team decided to shift Halliday’s focus from gaming to broader blockchain commercial infrastructure construction. Halliday’s goal is to reduce friction in transactions and interactions, making the distribution process of goods and services more automated.
For example, Halliday wants to support the complex process of integrating fiat into L3 networks. “We’re talking about the Ape chain, which is essentially an L3 on Arbitrum Orbit. The question is, how do you support fiat integration into this L3? Stripe, one of the main access methods, doesn’t actually support L3; its coverage is very limited, though its product is excellent. Ultimately, what can be done is to first enter the Base chain with fiat, exchange it, and then bridge cross-chain, exchange again, and bridge to L3, creating a multi-hop process. Or you can enter the mainnet with fiat, exchange it, and then bridge to L3. You’ll see many different paths. In short, what we do is take a fiat access method that only supports a few networks and automatically route and handle all these processes on-chain, allowing you to get a native access experience on L3 or L2,” Dunaif explained in an interview last year.
As Dunaif said, “You can think of us as building a higher-level programming model that knows how to interact with fiat systems, how to interact, while also abstracting the automation, composability, and complexity of the blockchain world. It’s almost like a virtual machine, but in fact, it’s a higher-level virtual machine that’s programmable. You can build programs. We’re building these programs now and offering them as products. But our vision is to open it up, showing that multi-chain programs are now possible and simple. It may sound crazy now, because no one wants to build a multi-chain program because it’s so complex, but our company is a multi-chain program, and we aim to reduce that complexity by ten times.”
Currently, Halliday has launched an early access product plan and has received over 11,000 applications. The plan is expected to officially launch in the second quarter, offering users more customized features and services.
In terms of its business model, Halliday plans to charge based on the computational power needed by customers, allowing them to purchase the necessary computational resources based on their needs.
Halliday is not the only company exploring blockchain payments and business automation. Other blockchain companies, such as Consensys, are also driving the automation of financial institution workflows through products like the CodeFi blockchain application suite.
Compared to the consumer side, the high customer acquisition costs in the crypto market and the challenging customer acquisition channels have led many startups to turn to the B2B side for growth opportunities. PANews recently published an article titled, “a16z Invests in 3A Chain Game Champions Ascension, Unexpectedly Pauses Operations, Team Shifts Focus to New Project and Customer Acquisition,” where an a16z-invested company pivoted to B2B business for game distribution after facing setbacks in the C-end. How to acquire C-end users seems to have become a challenge for the entire industry.
This article is republished with permission from PANews.