Real-Time Salary Streaming on Celo: A Technical Architecture for Per-Second Payments
This whitepaper presents CeloFlow, a decentralized protocol for streaming salary payments in real-time on the Celo blockchain. Traditional salary systems require employees to wait for monthly payday, creating financial uncertainty and cash flow challenges. CeloFlow enables employers to stream salaries continuously to employees on a per-second basis, providing financial flexibility and immediate access to earned income.
Built on Celo's mobile-first blockchain and leveraging cUSD stablecoins, CeloFlow combines smart contract automation with accessibility, enabling salary streaming that's fast, transparent, and inclusive. This document outlines our technical architecture, security model, and economic incentives.
Traditional salary systems operate on a fixed monthly or bi-weekly cycle. This creates several inefficiencies:
Solidity contracts deployed on Celo handle stream creation, token transfers, and withdrawal logic with per-second precision.
React/Next.js interface with ethers.js integration for wallet connection and transaction signing.
Proof-of-Stake blockchain with 5-second blocks, sub-cent transaction costs, and native stablecoin support.
// Core Stream Structure
struct Stream {
address employer;
address employee;
uint256 amount; // Total amount to stream
uint256 startTime; // Stream start timestamp
uint256 duration; // Duration in seconds
uint256 withdrawn; // Amount already withdrawn
}
// Per-second calculation
function accrued(uint256 streamId) external view returns (uint256) {
Stream memory stream = streams[streamId];
uint256 elapsed = min(now - stream.startTime, stream.duration);
return (stream.amount * elapsed) / stream.duration - stream.withdrawn;
}The smart contract maintains precision through fixed-point arithmetic to ensure accurate per-second calculations. All state changes emit events for transparency and off-chain indexing.
Checks-effects-interactions pattern and OpenZeppelin's ReentrancyGuard prevent reentrancy attacks.
Only employers can create/cancel streams. Only employees can withdraw from their streams.
Solidity 0.8.0+ with built-in overflow/underflow protection ensures calculation accuracy.