Back to home

The financial operating system for internet work.

Lisa Bechina · Founder, CEO

Paying creators comes with its share of struggles.

I've spent a year and a half building Loofta — and what I built taught me that the hardest part of running creator campaigns isn't finding creators, or matching them with brands, or managing the scope. It's getting paid, and paying others. The platform side works. The payment side is broken.

Since late 2024, we've run more than 300 campaigns with web3 brands, onboarded 4k+ creators and ambassadors, and processed hundreds of thousands of payments from micro-payments to bigger KOL payouts. Just like a tech team wouldn't push code to production on a Friday, you wouldn't want to mess up your weekend by starting to release payments on a Friday night — and I am not a fervent supporter of the "Monday to Friday" working week.

It's a process that involves a lot of manual steps: clients pay you on one chain, creators want to be paid on another network, they make mistakes communicating their wallet address, copy-pasting is prompt to errors. A lot of back and forth that would literally get on anyone's nerves. Some contributors would help collecting the payment details, but I'm the one clicking to process them, and a lot of spreadsheets are updated by hand.

We spent more time handling payments than running the campaigns. I talked with a lot of projects building in this space and I know it's a shared struggle, bulk payments, cross-chain payouts, and there's no perfect product out there to fix it. This is when we started to build our internal solution that is today Loofta Pay.

The payment infrastructure wasn't built for this.

And this is not just a web3 issue. The influencer marketing industry reached $32 billion in 2025. In the US alone it exceeded $10 billion, huge!

Brands used to work with a handful of large creators, but that model has changed. 73% of brands now prefer to work with micro or nano creators, the ones with 1k to 100k followers. Smaller creators have a smaller yet more engaged community, which drives more authentic growth. So a $50k campaign budget that once went to 3 people now goes to 300, and the payment infrastructure hasn't caught up with that change yet.

$200 to a creator in Jakarta, $100 to one in Buenos Aires, $500 to one in the UK, all payments processed separately, manually, across borders. Nobody doing this at scale is using bank wires, that would be absurd to spend a $20 flat fee on a $150 payment. The best go-to solution would be Wise, probably the fastest and cheapest corridor available today for cross-border payments. Wise covers around a lot of countries but the creator in India, Vietnam, or Nigeria might fall outside it, or face rates that quietly eat into what she earned.

Even when we have the perfect solution, the cost of the transfer is not only where the money disappears. It disappears in the 30 to 90 days brands take to send it.

  • 56% of creators have experienced late payments.
  • 62% say they won't work with a brand again that takes longer than 7 days to pay.
  • 74% have walked away from a brand entirely — and late payment is one of the main reasons.

I know creators can be real divas but they're also people who delivered work and waited a month to get paid for it.

And we also know that this delay isn't bad faith, just a whole workflow being inefficient. 1- Someone verifies the content went live. 2- Someone updates the spreadsheet/internal tool. 3- Someone batches the payout run. 4- Someone approves it. By the time money moves, weeks have passed, and the creator has already lost patience.

The stablecoin sandwich, and why it changes everything.

Now let's talk about the best payment rails for cross borders payments: stablecoins. And how using it in a "sandwich" can help. The architecture is simple: fiat in, stablecoin across the middle, fiat out at the other end. A USDC transfer settles in seconds at near-zero cost. On-ramps (Stripe Bridge, Transak, Ramp) and off-ramps have matured just as fast to make this possible. Rain's stablecoin-powered Visa cards let recipients spend USDC directly at any merchant globally; Mural Pay and Yellow Card handle direct local currency settlement across LATAM and Africa; and peer.xyz routes into PayPal, Wise, Revolut, and CashApp.

A creator in Indonesia can receive rupiah from a USDC payment in minutes. The chain is invisible to her.

A traditional international wire for a $200 creator payment costs $10–25 and takes days. The same payment over stablecoin rails costs under $3 and settles in minutes. For a brand paying 500 creators globally, that difference is meaningful, not just in cost but also for the creator experience, which determines whether those creators show up for the next campaign.

There is also a feature of stablecoin-native campaign management that traditional rails cannot replicate. Campaign budgets deposited ahead of payouts sit idle for weeks under the current model. On stablecoin rails, those funds can sit in yield-bearing positions (tokenized treasury instruments, conservative lending protocols) during that window.

Example

A brand deposits $100,000 to run a creator campaign via Loofta.

Typical campaign timeline:

  • Campaign funded: day 0
  • Content delivered over: 2–4 weeks
  • Payouts released after verification

If the funds earn 4% annualized yield, and remain deposited for 30 days, the yield generated is approximately:

$100,000 × 4% × (30 / 365) ≈ $328

This yield can be used to:

  • Subsidize payment processing costs
  • Reduce platform fees for brands
  • Generate additional revenue for Loofta

At scale, this becomes meaningful. If you process $100M of campaign deposits annually with an average 30-day holding period, the yield generated could exceed $300k–$400k per year without increasing fees for users. This is a great structural advantage over traditional payment rails, which cannot capture yield during settlement windows.

The tools that exist today were built for adjacent workflows.

I've spent enough time in this space to know the tools that exist. None of them solve this.

The closest thing to a direct competitor is Tipalti, a web2 platform offering mass payouts across 200 countries and 50+ payment methods. It's well-built, enterprise-grade, and genuinely solves the accounts payable problem for large companies. But it runs entirely on traditional banking rails. No stablecoins, not yet. Which means it still assumes every recipient has a bank account, is willing to go through lengthy onboarding, and is comfortable waiting for wire transfers to clear. The creator in Vietnam with a crypto wallet and no US banking relationship is simply outside its model. And conditional release, pay only when the post goes live and meets the brief, was never part of its design.

On the stablecoin card side, Rain and Kast have been ramping up fast, stablecoin-powered Visa cards accepted at 150M+ merchants globally, with Kast running natively on Solana. Impressive volume, real infrastructure. But that's the spend side. Getting money out, not getting it to the right person at the right time on the right condition.

Deel and Remote do global payroll well, recurring salaries for full-time workers under employment contracts. Deel recently integrated MoonPay which is interesting, but the model is still built around employment relationships, not campaign-based work with hundreds of one-off contributors.

Request Finance has been a go-to in crypto, invoicing, B2B settlement for DAOs. It fills a real gap. But private payroll, conditional release, campaign-level orchestration, that's not what it was designed for. I don't think that positioning lasts long as the market matures.

In agentic payments there's been a lot of activity, Stripe's Agent Toolkit, Coinbase's x402 protocol, Skyfire. X402 in particular is a genuinely interesting innovation for agents paying for API access. We'll come back to agents later. But all of these are built for commerce, agents as consumers, booking services, executing purchases. The workflow of coordinating conditional payments across a distributed network of people, that's outside their scope. It wasn't what they were designed for.

And that need goes well beyond creator campaigns. The same problem applies to any organization paying distributed contributors: bounty hunters shipping code for a protocol, developers winning a hackathon, freelancers delivering a project, community moderators getting rewarded for their work. All of them are waiting on someone to update a spreadsheet, batch a run, and click approve. The infrastructure that fixes campaign payments fixes all of it.

Creators are the distribution.

Every payment infrastructure company faces the same cold-start problem: you need both sides of the network before either side sees value. Loofta is aiming to solve this.

We have 4,000+ creators onboarded. They've already been paid through us. They know what it feels like to receive a payment instantly, in the currency they want, to the wallet or account they prefer. Getting paid correctly, quickly, without chasing anyone is an experience rare enough in this industry that it becomes something creators talk about.

This is the same mechanism that built PayPal into a payments giant. eBay sellers started accepting PayPal because it was the fastest way to get paid. Buyers had no choice but to create accounts to complete purchases. The sellers were the distribution. Every transaction a seller completed pulled a new buyer into the network. PayPal didn't need to convince buyers to sign up since the sellers did it for them.

This is not a theoretical distribution advantage. We already have the supply side. Every creator we pay well is becoming an advocate for the rails they were paid on. The question is how quickly the brands they work with follow.

Own the creator's payment experience, and you own the brand's next platform decision.

Beyond web3: where the infrastructure goes next.

Web3 is the proving ground. Multi-chain, global, pseudonymous, high-frequency payouts to thousands of contributors, if the infrastructure holds there, it holds anywhere. How do we go from web3 -> to web2. I made an experiment with ZeDeal in Algiers, Algeria, a prototype where we hired nano creators to review and post about local spots (coffee shops, brunch places, spas) in exchange for micro-payments. The finding was interesting: when the offer is there, creators at this scale adopt whatever payment method comes with it. They're not loyal to Wise or PayPal or bank transfer. They're loyal to fast and frictionless. Loofta becomes their default not through a sales process but through a single good payment experience. At the micro and nano level, the product sells itself at the moment of payout.

There's another vector of expansion, it's mid-market agencies. An agency managing thirty brand campaigns simultaneously is running the same spreadsheet hell described above — multiplied across every client, every quarter. They are the ones blamed when a creator doesn't get paid on time. They are the ones stuck in the middle when a brand disputes a deliverable. They have no clue about web3 but they do have an operational problem that compounds with every campaign they are working on.

This is where our conditional release and dispute layer become a direct product sell. An agency that can tell its brand clients that payments are held in escrow, released on verified delivery, with a structured process if something goes wrong is also selling trust alongside the campaign. That's a meaningful upgrade to what they can offer. Also having one agency partnership doesn't bring just one brand — it brings an entire roster. That's the distribution lever that makes web2 expansion a business decision rather than a creator acquisition problem.

Agents will run these workflows. The trust layer matters more, not less.

Campaign management is one of the highest-probability early targets for agent automation. Scouting creators, tracking content delivery, verifying that posts meet specifications — these are well-defined sequential tasks with clear inputs and outputs. Agents are already handling parts of this. The last step in every campaign workflow is payment. An agent that can verify a post went live and meets the brief should be able to trigger the payout directly.

Today it can't, because the payment infrastructure isn't designed to be called that way. There is no API that accepts a structured deal object, monitors conditions against real-world events, and executes releases autonomously with a full audit trail. The payment step remains a human intervention point in an increasingly automated workflow.

But the more important point isn't automation speed. It's trust.

When a human campaign manager pays a creator late, the creator emails someone. There's a relationship, however strained. When a brand sends a human to negotiate a dispute, both sides can read the room, apply judgment, make exceptions. Human workflows are full of informal trust mechanisms that nobody explicitly designed — they just accumulated over years of people working together.

Agents have none of that. When an agent triggers a payment, or withholds one, there is no relationship to fall back on. No phone call to make. No goodwill built over previous campaigns to spend. The trust has to be encoded in the system itself OR it doesn't exist at all.

This is precisely why the dispute and conditional release layer becomes more critical in an agentic world, not less. An agent operating a creator campaign needs to be able to make commitments on behalf of a brand that creators will actually trust: this deal object says what you'll deliver, what you'll be paid, and what happens if either side doesn't perform. The creator doesn't need to trust the agent. She needs to trust the infrastructure the agent is calling.

The programmable deal object — campaign structure, release conditions, dispute rules, audit trail — is not a feature that makes agentic payments more convenient. It is the feature that makes agentic payments possible at scale.

The product brands adopt now to manage human-run campaigns is the same product agents will call next year. The transition doesn't require rebuilding anything. It requires the same trust layer and infrastructure with a callable API.

The moat nobody is talking about.

There is something that comes with owning the payment layer that goes beyond processing fees and yield.

When you hold the escrow, verify the deliverable, and control the release trigger, you become the natural place where disputes live. Upwork understood this before anyone else did. Its moat wasn't the talent marketplace. Thousands of competitors built talent marketplaces. Upwork's moat was the dispute resolution system sitting on top of the marketplace. The escrow. The structured contract. The formal process for when things went wrong. That infrastructure is what convinced a brand to hire a stranger in a different country, and what convinced a freelancer to do the work before the money cleared. Remove the dispute layer and the whole trust model collapses.

Nobody has built that for creator campaigns. There is no formal process for when a brand refuses to release payment. No structured escalation when a creator misses the brief. No neutral third party holding the funds and applying rules both sides agreed to upfront. The creator who got stiffed has no recourse. The brand that got low-quality content has no leverage. Both sides enter the next campaign with less trust than before.

Loofta, by owning the conditional release, is positioned to build exactly this. The deal object encodes what was agreed: deliverable type, deadline, content specifications, payment amount. The escrow holds the funds. The release trigger fires when conditions are met — or doesn't fire, and opens a dispute workflow. Both sides know the rules before the campaign starts. Neither side can be ghosted.

Once both sides trust the system, they don't have to trust each other. The platform becomes the trust layer. And trust layers are hard to displace.

Payment infrastructure that works the way internet work actually works: conditional on delivery, private by default, instantly routed to whoever the creator is and however they want to be paid — with the dispute layer that makes both sides trust the system enough to use it.

The creator economy has no borders. The payment system still thinks it does. The brands running creator campaigns today, from crypto-native projects paying KOLs across ten chains to Web2 marketing teams paying 500 micro-influencers across forty countries are all hitting the same wall. The infrastructure to fix it now exists. What remains missing is the workflow layer that ties it together and the trust layer that makes both sides willing to use it.

The window to build this is open now. It won't stay open long.

pay.loofta.xyz · Loofta Pay · March 2026 ·