Going Pro: How to go corporate with your company's crypto

Transcript

hi guys so apparently this is the last talk for today so i hope that you guys still have some energy left so we're not gonna go very complex stuff we're not going to dive into protocols tonight i just you know wanted to share some tips about how you guys can if you're willing to build a business if you are already building one how you can use some tools and good practices to help your team grow without making the same mistakes as we did um i realized i didn't introduce myself properly so i'm tebow the ceo of multis so we're building a crypto management crypto treasury management platform for companies operating in the space we are helping hundreds of companies today manage their crypto better i'm not going to spend too much time

talking on us about us today i really want to focus on some quick tips um to help you guys so the good news is we are more and more builders in the space um you know just sharing some quick quick stats i find interesting because we have a lot of developers joining the ecosystem plus 250 growth so we're not here to talk about figures right but it's really exciting to see that a lot of people actually joining the space to build stuff they can even now obviously incorporate the dios um actually using the word incorporating for deo sounds a little bit paradoxical but still they can do that in wyoming so the good news is for us we have builders in the space building amazing

stuff we think that as a community we have an amazing opportunity to build an open financial system to help entrepreneurs all around the world strive thing is as builders today it's still super hard super hard to operate and it is very hard to scale your business as soon as you find some traction the uh you know what we call ups uh so operations today we we're just gonna say that those are all the very tedious tasks that you guys do on a daily basis whether it's running a payroll whether it's keeping track of expenses whether it's interacting with your lawyers or accountants those are ups it's basically making sure that your

company still moves forward and we believe that in the crypto space you know basic admirative administrative tasks today it takes so much time that they are the killers the slow killers of most companies in the space so one of the main reasons today is because contrary to the traditional um you know let's call it traditional entrepreneurship if you will um there's no tools um you cannot rely on new banks uh you cannot rely on fintechs on invoicing stuff on accounting tools like xero or quickbook to manage your crypto treasury we talked to over 200 entrepreneurs and sometimes their setup is super scary you have this feeling that everything will

break we most of those vendors i've got a couple examples here we have some funders who literally do not make any transactions to not run payroll after 3 pm because they're scared to make this transaction without being focused enough we have you know founders being kicked out of the banks multiple times so they have to you know rely on four bank accounts to make sure the company can still go we have founders um you know who spend weeks um weekends uh potentially weeks too but weekends um working on reconciliating transactions at the end of the quarter

because their accountant do not understand about everybody in the team about the transaction that everybody in the team did um even all those very tedious tasks takes a lot of time for sure but they created a lot of anxiety it is super stressful to build a crypto business today um i i can testify i mean i'm spending way too much time building this and i'm sure that i saw some smiles here i'm sure that a lot of you guys have experienced this it is working hard you know we're doing things it's like the the it's like we're building laser guns but we're just throwing them instead of using them properly um and one of the main consequences in the in the space is that we do not dock food how can the world adopt cryptocurrencies

if we don't use them to run a payroll if we don't use them to pay our contributors um so basic stuff with crypto is too damn hard for us to dog food today the so the the ambition of this of this presentation is to is really to share some tips some good practices this is the first time i'm presenting this kind of stuff last year i did a talk on the future of banking we we wanted to do something a bit more directly helpful to the community and this thing could first it relies on your feedback so feel free to ask questions at the end come to me share some recommendations ideas to make it better we might open source it

on the blog on google doc whatever just to make it more usable and spread it through the community again to share good practices and help company scale we've identified three main hurdles of course there are many others but we can have three main categories here managing payment and treasury tracking wallets and transactions and um toggling from crypto to fiat which we can even summarize in just banking relations right um one thing i want to remember it's all about the mindset here as a crypto builder i hate ops and that's something i was you know pushing away constantly i just wanted to focus on building my

thing on smart contracts and everything else and these things catch up and you wake up six months later it's a nightmare you have too much to do in terms of reconciliation in terms of understanding how your company is using crypto in terms of even understanding how much fees you spent um so everything starts with the mindset you have to believe that if you want to scale your crypto you have to start from day one with good practices and stick to them so first problem um storing crypto is risky so i'm gonna go super quick here but my point is everything starts with the right wallet you need a secure place to store your crypto uh you have multiple options but one of the most common pitfalls today is to use an individual wallet

most wallets today are used um are designed for individuals whether it's a meta mask whether it's a coinbase account there are no wallets really designed at the core for business one of the issues with those individual wallets is that you have to deal with with social risk social risk is basically relying on your teammates on your co-founders to manage funds just like you do you have to trust them blindly that they will not run away with your funds because you're sharing a single key so that's an issue second issue second reasoning is the counterparty risk say you are working with an exchange for example storing your funds there well i mean we all know the

the mantra here not your keys not your money um the last thing is it's still crypto cryptolandia is still jungle so when transaction when funds are out thunder out you are you cannot get your funds backed so you have to find the right storage solution before anything happens with your funds um so obviously and you probably guess because our name is maltese but we are big fans of multisignature wallets so very simply put a multi-signature wallet is a smart contract wallet where ownership of funds is shared several team members will use their own private keys to unlock funds right it's a team wallet

we think that those smart contract wallets are the best compromise between security and usability for several reasons the first they're self-custodial so you don't rely on an exchange they're secure against social risk that i described earlier they are because you rely on several private keys they're hard to compromise um so you you're kind of mitigating a bit the the hacking risk technical risk the software-based which means you don't have to carry around your ledger wallet in order to use your phones to run your company you can transact anywhere anytime from a browser and they're smart contract based which means um we can actually connect to d5 for example and provide additional tools that are described

later to scale your operations um well the best choice today is nose is safe it's a fantastic tool it's resilient it's robust it's storing billions the team there is fantastic um it's probably the best multisignature infrastructure there is it's built on ethereum for now the expanding to other chains multis is a solution that is built on top of the nozzle safe so we're relying on their best-in-class architecture and infrastructure and we're just providing a more business-friendly convenient interface so that team do not necessarily require technical experience before using them um second problem payments are time consuming

um we couple of comments here but essentially the main problem is that you need sometimes from the moment where you receive an invoice to the moment you pull the trigger and make the payment and actually report it to your spreadsheet you need 40 minutes it's fine for one payment say you start hiring people and running a payroll make it 10 payments so quickly you end up needing a full-time employee to manage your transaction good for you it means you have funds and you can hire people that's maybe not the best use of her or his time the second thing is because it's so tedious because there's so many frictions when making a payment um you know you're gonna check the address uh twice thrice um you're gonna uh you're gonna double check the amount

as well you're gonna you know move from one invoice to the application potentially use several wallets at the same time well it's tedious and prone to rear to error so again it's going to create a lot of anxiety when you're making this injection which also explains why people are spending so much time making them um it's a source of stress and again i'm using this this which really this this last sentence really struck me this guy works like hell but he stopped making payments at 3 pm because he's scared shitless of making those transactions um so pro tip here delegate even if you have three people in team just use a multisignature wallet and set up an approval workflow so that

all the people then you can actually make payments in total safety and security um you know it's it's pretty easy when you're using a multi-signature wallet you start by inviting people so you can use either their emails or you can use their public key public address if they have a wallet you set a transaction limit whether it's monthly or daily you create an approval workflow which means each time payments are bigger than this threshold well you have to approve the transaction and most importantly if you start delegating those payments you need to make sure that you share a contact book with your teammates so that people can use the same address say you're running a payroll well you

want to find a safe place where you're going to save contacts addresses of the employees same with partners counterparties etc if you need if you start making high volume payments my recommendations are to use an invoicing tool like request to use a mass payment tool like multisense so request basically is a convenient way for you to ask to be paid or the other way around and to pay without going through this constant double checking process multisend must be and you're sending up to 1000 transactions at the same time so if you're in if you're put strapping a

community starting to incentivize users this is a very convenient tool superfluid this is this is a smart control where you're going to basically store phones lock phones and gonna enable the app to continuously send money to the beneficiaries so for example you can run a payroll and say hey i want my employees to earn say five euros a minute and you can do that on a continuous basis um they have some recurring options too so if you start running subscription-based models that could be helpful too um problem number three too many wallets usually in a traditional space when you start your company you have maybe one bank account

and maybe one fintech account if you start transacting abroad transferwise for example well the average crypto company has between 5 and 20 wallets at multis we because we are building our own smart conscious contracts we even have 23 wallets last time i checked the reason is there are so many different use cases and there is no way a wallet can enable all of them so again i use wallets a metamask wallet to do some devops to you know use a wrinky buy you're going to use another one a party sweater for example to pull liquidity on the unit swap you can use another one for safety as an airdrop you're gonna you can have multiples of them because people want to

keep their privacy so bottom line you have too many wallets to handle and you have no visibility over your funds which which is a risk um i've also seen a lot of founders use their personal wallets um to store phones so it's like you're using your personal bank account um to store your company's funds it's fine when you're bootstrapping you two people as you grow this is not a way to run your business if you're using a multi-signature wallet and signing transaction with your own personal wallet it makes things even even more complicated so my recommendation here is just two separate wallets by our use case starting with personal and professional wallets and yeah just like i said at the

beginning stay consistent once you laid out processes just stick to them share them internally write them on a slide notion note [Music] so one of the the tips i'm struggling to implement actually with my own company is to prevent team members to just create wallets on the go it's so easy to open a new wallet that your developers for example or any people from the team will create them on the go and you're gonna end up at some point with wallets with maybe one dollar worth of crypto uh you're gonna have like 50 of them thing is because those are you know funds from the company you have to report them

you have to make sure that nobody is using them um divide it by use case and stick to them that's what i said earlier avoid having multiple wallets per use case keep a directory of wallets with name that could be a simple spreadsheet with labels and categories and a description of the wallet and use case and owners identified and uh lasting which is kind of related to the director thing but labeled label stuff label stuff it's super easy just have a column in your excel spreadsheet and keep doing it along the way um i mean honestly this has saved us so much time in terms of reconciliation at the end of the quarter as you can see here we have several wallets we have i wish we had so much money

we have addresses here some the networks amounts variation um and when you when you expand it we we can actually add some categories uh you can you can keep you can use a simple spreadsheet to do that problem number four um we have some bookkeeping issues with crypto and i'm sure that most of you are aware of this uh the the number of transaction in the space is maybe 10 times transaction i mean transaction parallel it's probably ten times the transaction you do with your regular bank accounts um everything is a transaction if you're building smart contracts you're gonna spend gas this is a transaction if you are um you know pulling liquidity this involves

several transactions from the initial swap to i mean using the pair and then you know pulling liquidity obviously all those transactions are very different than fiat from fiat transaction regular transaction that you report today one of the one of the things that we recommend is to start tracking a transaction from day one just like you do with wallet so have a very simple spreadsheet so we have a template that we can share we you know there is a we'll we'll provide the link at the end so basically you know this helped us save a lot of time as well so basic stuff we're not reinventing the wheel here so amount asset category notes category notes are extremely important because

they will help your accountant understand what you did with your transaction again start from day one because if you have to wait six months you're gonna need a month to understand what you did with your funds who who made some transactions etc etc um the you have some tools to help you do that so xerion is a great tool for mostly designed for individuals but if you have a low volume of transaction you can start with that team is great the product is great it's a little bit maybe a little bit too much design for defy but it's still a very very useful tool if you are scaling the company you can use multis so we have a tracking module where you can basically label stuff app

categories basically a little bit like the same like this but on the software that you can export and plug into accounting softwares if you are a trader uh if you are um dealing with exchanges for example uh crypto is another good tool they are supporting way more networks than we do or zhiyun does it's a great tool too if any of you guys are willing to build your businesses and need intros to the to these tools that's something i didn't mention feel free to come to us and we're happy to introduce you guys um another tip um find a crypto friendly accountant that's not an easy one we don't have any recommendations here i just start by

asking basic questions um how family are you with crypto um whether they have worked with crypto do they understand defy and not bitcoin because sometimes both of them are confused i mean they confuse both of them um make sure that those people are ready to work with you without overcharging you because very often they're gonna say it's okay we understand and then at the end of the month they're gonna charge you like thrice the regular amount so make sure that we do have a really good accountant we can recommend it's dead fiducial um it's a french company jad fiducian yeah sounds much better actually but there are they have a they have some some some outlets over the world including in the us we do not take commission fees when you

guys work with them they are amazing they helped us a lot and now they get crypto you can also use tools especially for tax token tax accounting.com coin tracker a great tool while she was a little bit more designed for individuals but in case of low volumes you can help too another problem um we're getting to the end so when you are a crypto it's very hard to open a bank account and it's even harder to keep it we i mean look at us we're still punks our people still think that we're not doing legit stuff you know whether we raise funds or hire a team or have contractors with alleged contracts well we'll still

deem different um which means most banks don't want to work with us especially since we're dealing with still great stuff when we're doing governance things those guys do not understand what we do um and we are at the mercy of them of their mood swings and we basically have this issue with uh with revolut so we open our bank account by the way we did not mention that we were a crypto company so that's a quick trick just just just just just say you're doing financial software it's a shame that we have to to do this in order to open a bank account but you know at the end you still need a bank account unfortunately today we got our we got a bank account shut down by revolut we had one million dollars

on it so i was basically like one week away from uh running um out of funds to run my payroll um so you want to have backup plans um open two three four accounts in case you are stuck with this kind of situation um we do know of some crypto tolerant banks they're pretty expensive today but in the us for example mercury is pretty crypto friendly i can make intro there's i can make intros there if if you guys need help silicon valley bank super clunky 80s style but they're still accept crypto businesses um you're gonna need 40 minutes to make a

transaction though just like with crypto but still you'll have a bank account in europe bank freak and cigna are pretty useful um again crypto friendly very expensive but those are good options if you if you are in the in the if you are in the complicated situation here um one of the things that we learned is that it's not because you're doing crypto stuff that you want to avoid your banker this is extremely especially relevant to us as we're building online tools and i've always hated talking to my banker because i feel that building a fintech or whatever means that finally i will be able to do stuff on my own without relying on him thing is at least for now when you're

making transaction say you're building your business and you're scaling you're gonna have to convert crypto on enough from exchanges for example uh so you wanna you wanna build a relationship with him so that he or her can understand that you're moving huge crypto volumes um otherwise you're going to get your bank account flagged and you're going to you're going to get your bank account shut down just like we did um have backend plus so that's what happened to us um the those are the main tips i want to share i mean obviously i'm happy to share more we the thing is go incorporate when you start is a mindset and then you need for unit tools as you scale up

we are part of the companies that are trying to help so we really think that we're building not only a wallet but a financial operating system for companies dealing with crypto so right now those are crypto native companies obviously like all of us here we believe that crypto is eating the world so soon most businesses will need crypto and that's where we'll be able to help us um we um you know i had a demo but really today i think um i don't know how much time i have left [Music] oh actually i have i'm five minutes ahead so i'm going to maybe share very quickly what we can do um yeah i know i know that this is gonna this is gonna be a failure

like all the oh like all demos so essentially what you wanna do here as you can see is a very convenient interface with the dashboards to keep visibility on your phones so that's the tracking part i wanted to mention you have demo effect perfect settings so that's where you can basically set up transaction thresholds daily limits invite people obviously through emails so that they can join the wallet we i'm actually going faster than the demo so i was hoping that demo was so smooth that you guys will be impressed and i will be trying to catch up constantly not yet the case um we

have so that's a those are where you can add wallets so i mentioned the difficulty of having several wallets as a team so first consolidate them all try to have as few as possible and then for the remaining use cases you want to you know use a wallet with just aggregate them on a solution could be zero could be crypto could be multis but that's the way to do it add some descriptions so that your accountant can understand them um one of the [Music] yeah so that's uh that's a key thing here note that we we actually cover support exchanges so because we're not we're not we do not enable you guys to buy crypto with our interface as a as an organization uh you can still use coinbase

and connect your wallet to multis that you can have an overview of your balances we basically have some some additional some additional transaction so this is the dashboard again you know i realized we just added the this d more literally 15 minutes away uh before the before the before the talks i'm discovering as just as you do so this is a nice feature to you know you had an overview of the transaction you can add labels have details so that's extremely important to share with your accountant again and to create some more accountability within your team google ads we're not running google as yet

we might at some point and the last thing is the approval workflow um i don't think we show it here so i really recommend you to come to me if you want to have a look at the product uh it will be actually much more efficient at demo but long story short we're building this tool to help companies scale the operations obviously we are a very early product we right now we enable you to track transaction we enable you to explore them as a csv we enable you to make payments without the anxiety and frictions that are described that's about all and we have an ambitious roadmap we want to enable you guys to make high volume payments we want to give more granule granularity to

spending policies so that you can empower members of the team to spend without requiring approvals from the owners of the wallet each time from the founders and one of the big big breaks that is moving well is the integration of yet accounts right now you have to rely on the self custodial wallet on one hand for example and then an exchange so we want to be the first company in the world to enable you to own your own crypto but still be able to conveniently convert it against fiat i wish we could only build with crypto but at least for the five next years we're gonna have to pay taxes uh in euros or dollars so this thing will help the last thing we we're gonna the last thing we're gonna build is an accounting

software integration so that the transaction history that you guys saw could flow can flow seamlessly to an accounting software um and voila this is uh this is this is it i am super happy to have shared those tips we learned the hardware at maltese so i hope i hope really hope that this is going to be useful super happy to share the presentation so that you guys can use it i'd love actually to see you guys contribute to this work as you grow your businesses um we really want to have something that is convenient for businesses because we feel that the the only solution for the only way for crypto to get mainstream is to have crypto builders

actually using it as part of the business there is a square code here so we have a community so if you guys want to share tips um if you discover a new you know a new bank um accepting crypto companies well do say it so on the slack channel it will help a lot people in the space there's also some samantha who is doing onboardings so we're still a closed beta product we will be releasing our public version in the coming months but in the meantime coming week sorry but in the meantime if you want to get a sneak peek out of the of the product feel free to reach out to samantha she's awesome she will help you a lot this is it for me thank you

thank you so much cheer is there anyone who has any questions yes that was a great talk thank you very much thank you do you have any suggestions as to how you can pay salaries anonymously if you're paying people in crypto so it's still a little bit of a grey area um so basically where where are you incorporated or where do you plan on incorporating the uk all our assets are stalling crypto we don't even have a bank account well the the most convenient way to do it right now is to hire them as contractors because you're not in that case they're not you're not subject to employment laws sorry i mean so that they can't see each other's salaries by looking at a block explorer that's what i mean sorry so at the moment we're just turning to an

exchange and then withdrawing from an exchange yeah but that doesn't seem like a very graceful solution that's that's one of the things we want to build as well yeah probably a little bit further down the road but that's a privacy issue right yeah the you have to use a mixer for now so an exchange or tornado turn out to now the cache for example um we we have plans to integrate with solutions such as aztec or hopper to enable this private transaction but there's there's nothing we there's no solution unfortunately right now unless you're using multiple wallets but if somebody is really really willing to find the source they will find it and they're going to see the salary and then you're going to fall back into the problems i described earlier which is where are my phones because i have too many

wallets so yeah hopefully i will be able to provide an answer next year at the same talk anyone else oh yes thank you for the tips you mentioned uh the crypto friendly banks but i've been told today you can almost do everything with the fintech like revolut in your mind do you think you can do everything or you have problems i mean look at what happened to us we're super legit uh it's not even mentioned crypto no on a business but we got shut down um so you you the the the banking landscape is increasingly more open to crypto revolut because you know for example

revolut tells you that they're they are enabling crypto transaction for b2c right they're none they're just giving you exposure but they're holding the cryptos um transferwise we got rejected um eban first we got rejected um we had to we managed to open an account with konto in france because we know personally the the co but there's still there's i feel that there's a world between what they say and what they do and if you manage to get a to to open an account if you're making too many transactions you're gonna get flagged and they have no incentives to actually understand what you do

um because you just we're just such a tiny community there's too much compliance cost involved sorry you guys rejected by revolut transferwise uh e-band first all of them so it's hard it's hard to find one and yeah i recommend having several of them because you never know when you're gonna get stuck hopefully we you will be able to open an account with us in in six or seven months hi very good presentation thank you very much my question is how about the gas so transaction fees for you so you are sending a lot of

salaries for example every month so especially during the hype on return you know was very expensive so are you planning to solve this problem through some layer 2 solution for example on your platform so the good thing right now uh ethereum gas is so to be honest with you we we depriorized a little bit the the l2 uh solution we were working on so we were experimenting with the zika sync optimistic relapse we deplorabilized a little bit because we felt that our main use case today is to enable payroll to enable basic basic payments and gases are way lower than they used to be thanks to you know polygon thanks to many other l2 solutions

we we will have to build it anyway uh so probably using zika relic zika sync um or potentially integrating with the other chains as well that could be another option uh now that everybody uh you know everybody is launching chen i mean they call it you know l2 solutions or they are just separate channels with bridges we we will expand support to other chains to enable low low gas transactions as well the one one of the solutions though if you're making a lot of transactions to the same counterparty is to use tools like mass senders because in that case you're only paying gases for one transaction thank you first for those very very

valuable talk my question is which country in europe would you recommend who made the company because i'm for example we are from germany and trying to build a crypto company in germany it's it's it's a hell yeah nothing in there it's hell yeah because you um don't get the bank accounts um because of taxation if you make profit out of um cryptos you you have to pay taxes on on on that and at the end you're just getting losses by it and it's very complicated and then the the tax organizations are not aligned to it and that's a problem as an example what what's your what's your what's your business what do

you do i t consultancy consultancy so i mean i might be biased but i feel that i i i first incorporated in france um so usually we're not necessarily the main the best uh um the best country to incorporate your startup uh but the good thing with crypto is that there is now a regulatory framework right um you you don't get taxed when you do crypto to crypto trading uh just like in the us so um i mean i mean unless you go to switzerland switzerland is amazing but you have to have a local representation

there so you have to have an office and people on the ground so unless you unless you can afford this um i'll recommend go to france so uk is is okay too but i'm less familiar so maybe you can potentially tell us more about this in the u.s the u.s is quite cool actually anyone else thank you guys thanks for being here thank you so much you