Hey! I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of other crypto entrepreneurs on HN on this issue because I've come to believe that the "dirty secret" of the crypto business is basic administrative tasks.
I speak from experience. I founded a startup https://multis.co/ that provides financial and business services to companies with crypto. I'm super bullish on crypto and was full steam ahead on dogfooding. But, as we started to grow this became harder to do. It turns out that cool things like paying salaries in crypto was too time consuming and dealing with assorted admin (bookkeeping, the time it took making payments) was too much effort and would prevent us from scaling. So for the moment a lot of the stuff we would normally like to do in crypto is happening in fiat.
Speaking with my peers, I noticed a pattern, stuff like tracking transactions and balances across wallets, setting up a payment workflow and fiat offramps were swamping founders, COOs or CFOs. Companies involved in DeFi had it worse- cutting edge protocols are notoriously difficult to account for with new coins being minted daily and new liquidity pools springing up. Proper tools still don't really exist and time and ressources get funnelled towards manual administrative work. What's more, there is a constant anxiety that the bank might shut out your account due to funds coming from an exchange (again, all too real for us- we regularly call out our bank on Twitter due to unexplained lock outs).
This is frustration lead me and my team to radically change our current product and start building a crypto wallet designed specifically for businesses with digital assets. The goal here is to solve the problem of business ops in crypto.
Here are some features we are currently integrating.
- An automated payment workflow where users can set spending limits and get payments confirmed by the right people on time
- The ability to make bulk payments
- A USD/EUR account that allows users to go from crypto to fiat seamlessly
- A BTC and ETH compatible wallet where users can upload all company wallets and track spending.
- Our holistic dashboard provides shows your company's digital assets and transaction history all in one place. We even track complex DeFi protocols and provide a banking-like transaction history that adds up.
- Users can monitor financial performance of all currencies across all wallets
- Labels make it easy to categorize expenses for easy automated reporting.
- Users can give their accountant reading rights which saves time on getting an accountant up to speed.
- All data can be exported as a CSV
- We are currently at work on an integration with Quickbooks and Xero accounting softwares
On the technical side, we have been moving to a more scalable wallet architecture and are pleased to say that network fees will be significantly lower.
We want to make Multis helpful to companies with crypto so I would be curious to know what tools founders would like to have that would help them tackle their business operations? Thanks!