a16z leads Halliday's $20 million funding round, pivoting from "buy now, pay later" for gamers to building a Web3 "agent workflow protocol"
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a16z leads Halliday's $20 million funding round, pivoting from "buy now, pay later" for gamers to building a Web3 "agent workflow protocol"
Compared to the consumer market, the crypto industry's high customer acquisition costs and limited channels have driven many startups to turn to the enterprise market for growth opportunities.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Weilin, PANews
On March 18, Halliday, a Web3 workflow protocol developer, 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 brings Halliday's total funding to $26 million.
Vision: Reducing Smart Contract Development Time, Prioritizing Payment App Halliday Payments
According to official information, Halliday focuses on building infrastructure that allows developers to delegate smart contract creation workflows to automated systems. The company aims to make smart contract development more efficient and user-friendly, significantly shortening development cycles.
Halliday is also enabling secure AI systems to operate on decentralized networks, transforming how developers build on-chain applications. AI on blockchains remains difficult to adopt due to compliance and security constraints. Running AI on-chain requires robust security infrastructure so enterprises can oversee AI-driven automation. The workflow protocol addresses both challenges and supports the automation of various processes, including:
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Connecting to new L1/L2/L3 networks
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Recurring payments
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Yield optimization
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Fund management
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B2B agents
Halliday Payments is its flagship product currently in focus, offering the following capabilities:
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Fiat onramps: Users can easily spend, manage assets, and transact through fiat-to-crypto conversion, cross-chain asset management, and full-featured smart accounts built on ERC-4337.
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Centralized exchanges (CEX): Connects to hundreds of millions of centralized exchange accounts globally, allowing users to directly purchase your token using their CEX balances.
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Cross-chain bridges: Simplifies bridge complexity regardless of whether your chain has one or multiple bridges—native or third-party—enabling seamless cross-chain asset transfers for you and your users.
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Cross-chain swaps: Enables users to pay with any existing cryptocurrency and swap between any tokens across any chain.
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Fiat offramps: Offers customized fiat offramp solutions tailored to your token and blockchain, enabling users to easily cash out their assets.
Since 2023, Halliday has been rigorously testing its proprietary workflow system. Teams such as DeFi Kingdoms, Avalanche, ApeCoin, StoryProtocol, Metis, and SHRAPNEL have already used this engine to optimize payment flows. In the future, Halliday plans to collaborate with on-chain projects like Frax Finance and Lens Chain.
Evolved from a "Buy Now, Pay Later" Project Focused on In-Game Purchases
Halliday was founded in April 2022 and is headquartered in San Francisco, co-founded by entrepreneurs Akshay Malhotra and Griffin Dunaif, with Dunaif serving as CEO.
Dunaif graduated in 2023 from Stanford University with a degree in computer science, and his entrepreneurial journey was deeply inspired by blockchain and cryptographic technologies. In a 2024 interview, he recalled: "I took a course called CS251. I remember the first class—the professor showed a slide titled 'Cryptocurrency or Blockchain Is the Intersection of Distributed Systems, Cryptography, and Behavioral Economics.' Seeing those three fields combined on one slide made me think, 'This course is going to be interesting.' That moment sparked my interest in the entire field and led me deeper into the space. Later, I took a course on zero-knowledge protocol design, where I did some fun experiments with a professor involving protocol construction and testing. Ultimately, these experiences motivated me to leave school and start Halliday."
Initially, Halliday’s founding team aimed to build a "buy now, pay later" financial product tailored for gamers who wanted to pay for in-game purchases in installments. Under this model, players could use Halliday’s extension tool to purchase and immediately use in-game assets, while Halliday would hold custody until full payment was completed. This approach reduced financial pressure on players while offering flexible payment options. If a player failed to make timely payments, Halliday would reclaim control of the assets without reporting delinquency to credit agencies.
To support this vision, Halliday successfully raised $6 million in seed funding in 2022, with participation from a16z crypto, Hashed, a_capital, and other investment firms. However, as Griffin Dunaif further explored blockchain applications, he realized that despite the rich culture within the crypto industry, there was a lack of effective commercial infrastructure—especially around value exchange, ownership, and asset transfer. He believed blockchain needed stronger commercial underpinnings to enable seamless and automated distribution of goods and services, ultimately advancing the idea of a "digital city."
Building a Higher-Level Multi-Chain Programming Model, Monetizing via Compute Capacity
As their understanding of blockchain technology deepened, Dunaif and the team decided to shift Halliday’s focus from gaming to broader blockchain-based commercial infrastructure. Halliday aims to reduce friction in transactions and interactions, making the distribution of goods and services more automated and seamless.
For example, Halliday wants to streamline the complex process of bringing fiat onto L3 networks. "We're talking about Ape Chain, which is actually an L3 on Arbitrum Orbit. The question is, how do you bring fiat onto this L3? Stripe, one of the main onramp providers, doesn't support L3s—it has very limited coverage—but its product is excellent. So what you end up doing is routing fiat into Base, swapping, bridging over, swapping again, then bridging to the L3—a multi-hop path—or you go from fiat into the mainnet, swap, then bridge to the L3. You see many different paths. What we do is take a fiat onramp that only supports a few chains and automatically route and handle all these steps on-chain, giving you a native experience on your L3 or L2. Whether you're using CCIP, LayerZero, or other integration solutions, we integrate them at a higher level so you can transact seamlessly on your chain," Dunaif explained in a past interview.
As Dunaif put it: "Think of us as building a higher-level programming model—one that knows how to interact with fiat systems, how to interface, and how to abstract away automation, composability, and complexity in the blockchain world. It's almost like a virtual machine—an elevated-level programmable VM. You can build programs on it. Right now, we’re building these programs and offering them as products. But our real vision is to open this up and show that multi-chain programs are not only possible but simple. It might sound crazy now because no one wants to build a multi-chain program—it’s too complex—but our company *is* a multi-chain program, and we aim to reduce that complexity by tenfold."
Halliday has already launched an early access program and received over 11,000 applications. The program is expected to officially launch in Q2, offering users enhanced customization and services.
In terms of monetization, Halliday will charge based on the compute capacity required by clients, allowing them to purchase computing resources according to their needs.
Halliday is not alone in exploring blockchain payments and commercial automation. Other blockchain companies, such as Consensys, are also advancing automated workflows for financial institutions through products like the CodeFi blockchain application suite.
Compared to consumer-facing (C-end) markets, where high customer acquisition costs and limited channels pose significant challenges, many startups are turning to business-facing (B-end) opportunities for growth. As recently highlighted in a PANews article titled *"Champions Ascension," a 3A blockchain game backed by a16z, unexpectedly halts operations as team pivots to new project focused on user acquisition*, even a16z-backed ventures have hit roadblocks and shifted toward B2B models—such as game distribution—highlighting that acquiring end users remains a universal industry challenge.
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