Building an Enterprise Crypto Accounting Software with Cryptio

[00:00:00] Antoine: This is a market that is commoditized. This is really what I would call like the sub ledger market where you have nearly as many software providers as you has like buyers. And here you need as a buyer, you need to go for the cheapest option, given that they have like all these providers that are going to them at the end of the day, they managed to get what they want at crazy prices sometimes. 

[00:00:20] Antoine: When you get to a certain level of complexity, it's not just like the accountants that want to push data to Xero, but it's the accountants, it's the people in the operations team that want to do reconciliation upstream. It's the compliance team that wants to automate compliance reporting.

[00:00:36] Antoine: It's like the risk management team that wants all this stuff for the risk management. When you get into that level of complexity, you know, like just representing that, that structure and that complexity on the pricing page and say, hey, you just can click on things and it gives you a price. It's just not possible.

[00:00:51] Antoine: So, because then you need really to adapt to the reality of all these companies. 

[00:00:55] Umar: Welcome to The Accountant Quits podcast, where we help accounting and finance professionals learn how to manage a business using crypto. 

[00:01:04] Umar: Today's topic is on building an enterprise crypto accounting software. 

[00:01:09] Umar: Crypto sub ledgers have evolved from their early days where they would only be required to categorize on chain transactions and calculate the realized gain or loss under the appropriate cost basis method.

[00:01:21] Umar: As the crypto industry matures, so do the demands on financial reporting. 

[00:01:26] Umar: To satisfy the existing customers and bring new players into the industry, subledgers have to adapt to new requirements from local GAAP and IFRS, regional regulatory requirements like MiCA in Europe or VARA in the UAE. Finding a subledger that only provides crypto bookkeeping features is no longer sufficient.

[00:01:48] Umar: You need one that addresses regulatory and audit readiness. 

[00:01:52] Umar: One company positioned to support institutional mass adoption of crypto under this vision is Cryptio. 

[00:01:59] Umar: For over six years, Cryptio has powered the crypto back office of more than 400 organizations, including industry heavyweights like Circle, Uniswap, Consensys, Gemini, Paxos, 1inch, and even the government of El Salvador. 

[00:02:17] Umar: And today I'm pleased to have Antoine Scalia, the CEO and Founder of Cryptio, to share how they're building their platform's third generation to meet regulatory, audit, and accounting requirements. 

[00:02:31] Umar: In this episode, Antoine will share how the new Cryptio Bedrock product is being built in line with global macroeconomic shifts, how their alliance with KPMG ensures they have the right expertise and the common struggles new teams face when first adopting crypto. 

[00:02:48] Umar: Lastly, if you're new to this channel, I'd really appreciate your support to help us grow by liking this video and subscribing to our channel. 

[00:02:56] Umar: Now, enjoy my conversation with Antoine.

[00:02:59] Umar: Antoine, welcome back and thanks for taking the time to be here. 

[00:03:04] Antoine: Thank you for the second invite. Great to be back. 

[00:03:08] Umar: So for the listeners, Antoine is a Returning guest. He first joined us on Episode 26, back on Feb 19, 2022. Back then, Cryptio was still in their first generation stage. A lot has changed since, and in late 2024, Cryptio launched their third generation platform, Cryptio Bedrock, that will go in more details later.

[00:03:32] Umar: And earlier this year, Cryptio announced a Series A extension raise. So with all these developments, I knew it was the perfect time to bring Antoine back. And since we already covered a lot of the fundamentals of Cryptio, and their sub ledger features in our first conversation, today's discussion would be a bit different focusing on their products new changes, and basically what's next for Cryptio.

[00:03:58] Umar: So I want to start with the Series A raise. 

[00:04:01] Umar: In 2021 Cryptio raised a seed round. In 2022, they did a Series A round and earlier this year, like I mentioned, they did a Series A extension round. 

[00:04:13] Umar: Now in crypto, there's a big fundraising impact on price cycles. And, I'd say you time your fundraising right during a bull cycle.

[00:04:22] Umar: I want to ask you, given the evolution of the crypto back office industry, and with so many other new subledger products on the market, how has the investor conversation shifted from your first raise back in 2021 to today? 

[00:04:40] Antoine: So in 2021, when we started, like the market was very, very early. We were one, actually we started before that because as you said, we started like six years ago.

[00:04:51] Antoine: But the market was very early. We had very few, we had very few competitors and we were very small, basically working with, small crypto startups at the time, but starting to have a bit of traction, but still very early traction. 

[00:05:04] Antoine: And so, the way investors thought about the investment was basically a bet on, obviously a bet on us and bet on me and bet on the team, but most likely like a bet on the market and a bet on corporate adoption of crypto as well.

[00:05:20] Antoine: And now, like in 2024, 2025, so two or four years later, obviously a lot of things happen, happen in the market and it happened for us as well. And here the, it's not just like an investment in the market, it's an investment in the sort of like the growing leader in the industry, you know, in the last three years, the market has evolved and we've shown our ability to kind of be the early dominant player in the, in the market, especially in the, in the enterprise world.

[00:05:50] Antoine: By closing a lot of you've mentioned some of the customers working with some of the biggest players out there and, have global alliance with KPMG. Like, we've done really amazing things in in the last few years. And so, the way investors now are looking at the investment is, betting on the category leader of a category in a market that they believe could be very big.

[00:06:11] Antoine: And so the way they stay seeing investment is a bit, is a bit different now. 

[00:06:16] Umar: So, what would you say are some of the macroeconomic shifts that have happened since that your investors are aligned with and they're confident in the next two to three years in terms of crypto adoption, like we could reach a certain maturity stage, let's say with crypto.

[00:06:36] Antoine: Yeah. So obviously like everyone is very excited about all the regulatory changes that have been happening in Europe for quite a while now and, and that are happening in the US currently, and that will happen this year. 

[00:06:51] Antoine: And so, yeah, everyone are excited about this and we believe that it will, and it is already like benefiting the company quite, quite heavily, and so we're very excited about that, but essentially, you know, one of the other things I think that we did very well in the last, in the last few years is to demonstrate our ability to grow our markets without relying on new entrants in a sense that the, these banks that now are allowed to build crypto products and distribute crypto products in, in the U S they won't, they won't release these products and they won't go to market tomorrow. 

[00:07:30] Antoine: And the startup world, sort of timeline is different in startup land, right?

[00:07:35] Antoine: Like, we don't have time. You don't have time to wait for them to grow and to grow revenue very significantly and very quickly. So what we've done and what we've done very well is to kind of extend the scope of what we're doing and move from like a core accounting sub ledger platform, to like a suite of products, like a data platform, that goes just beyond the core, the core accounting stuff.

[00:08:04] Antoine: So we're going to talk about Bedrock later, but it's it's moving from this like sub ledger positioning and sub ledger reality to being a data platform for accounting, operations, compliance. 

[00:08:15] Antoine: And I think this is, the investors are excited about the market, but they are way more excited about this and our ability to kind of increase the size of the pie without relying too much on new entrants, but new entrants will come.

[00:08:29] Antoine: I'm very confident about that, and that will have a massive impact on the business. And, in the meantime, we want to design and lead the category that is as big as possible. 

[00:08:41] Umar: Now, a topic that I don't often touch on this podcast is culture, like company culture. We mostly speak about the accounting, the technical stuff, but because you're a returning guest, Antoine, I also wanted to speak about how you've been able to create the right company culture at Cryptio.

[00:09:00] Umar: Speaking from an outsider's perspective, I would say that Cryptio, the way I see it, it stands out as a premium and elegant brand. A brand is not just a logo. A brand is a promise. It's a story that you're selling to customers and it kind of tells the customer what to expect when they're going to be engaging with you.

[00:09:20] Umar: So when I look at Cryptio's various brand touch points, including your platform, of course, but also things like your social media presence, your strategic partnerships, the annual Crypto Finance Forum that you organized now for the past two years, I'd say that you've created a culture, not only about the product's functionality, but you're also consistent on your brand's elegance.

[00:09:45] Umar: I know it's not coincidental. And I want to ask you how much is branding important to you as a CEO and how do you ensure this vision carries through across all the touch points with your team? 

[00:09:58] Antoine: Yeah, great question. Thank you for, thank you for the compliment. Yeah, indeed it's on purpose.

[00:10:03] Antoine: You know, the, the brand is obviously something that is very, very, very important, and especially in our market, right? Like, we are in a very early market where essentially what we're doing is we're selling trust, right? Like, we, we want to position ourselves to like the people that we are working with into the industry as trusted partner to solve their most complex data challenges and kind of the best experts out there.

[00:10:29] Antoine: And so this is who we want to be. And then your brands, the way I'm seeing this, like, branding thing is like the brand should resonate with who you are, how you behave, and also, like, who you want to be. And so, I think who we are, it's, it's we have like a very strong culture in the company and we have, the reason why we've been, we've been leading the way is really, it's not because we have like incredible vision on how the future should look like is because we have an amazing team and very consistent, in terms of, in terms of personality, in terms of attitude, in terms of what they bring to the business, we are like a team of very passionate people, smart, extremely committed to build.

[00:11:13] Antoine: There's like super big business. And yeah, we also are a team of people I think with very serious people, which kind of doesn't mean anything, but like, like very high level of integrity in a sense that it's not just a thing about being very ambitious. But it's being conscious about like, what's the way and what are the things that you need to do to be successful and what is very clear in our business.

[00:11:41] Antoine: And I think it's true in every business, especially in our business related to data, back office, accounting and so on is like, you need to behave and operate with like high level of, of integrity. And so kind of how we behave yeah, we care deeply about the companies that we are working with. When we, when we close a new customer, you know, we work like relentlessly so that we become that trusted partner to them.

[00:12:05] Antoine: And then that we can grow with them because the market is so early that if you don't build these type of relationships with people, And, you know, like you don't know where to go because these are the guys that you're going to build with, right. And so, I think that the brand is, is a representation of all of these things is the representation of who we are as people, like how we behave.

[00:12:28] Antoine: And also like, yeah, who we want to be, and so, yeah, this is very intentional and I'm glad that people can see it. 

[00:12:36] Umar: Yeah. I mean, if you hire people who like beautiful things, so they're going to be building like a beautiful product. So that's a good segue onto the next topic, which I want to touch on, which is about hiring.

[00:12:49] Umar: So at Cryptio, you have a hybrid work approach and I want to ask you on, about your experience on hiring. So when you're hiring in general, as an entrepreneur now, I also have to hire people. So you have two kinds of people. Those with a mindset of creating more value that they can capture. And those who are a little bit more transactional, they're trying to capture all the value for themselves.

[00:13:12] Umar: So I'm seeing that Cryptio is hiring a lot right now. And given your product's success, I want to ask you, what patterns have you noticed in someone in a successful talent that you ended up selecting and what learnings you've, you have from, let's say someone who turned out to be a bit deceptive. 

[00:13:31] Antoine: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:13:32] Antoine: Too harsh, the word. 

[00:13:33] Antoine: No, no, no. so yeah, I think again, one of the reasons why we've been, we've been doing doing well is, is the quality of the people. And there is definitely a pattern on type of people that works well, with us and that that can grow and have like a very strong impact and during in time, I think I'm not exactly sure, but what is the actual like metric, but we barely have like zero churn in our team.

[00:14:00] Antoine: Like, no one is leaving. We have a team of nearly like 90 people. So so there's something that works on how we do how we do hiring for sure. I would say that the traits that that work well is high level of autonomy. And curiosity in a sense that the, a lot of the problems that we are solving on the product side, on, on the tech side, on the, like orga like, um, organizational sorry, side, the, these are like, these are very complex and the, we hiring people that can navigate that complexity kind of on their own and also bring like an element of curiosity in how they're doing things. And so it could be an engineer that we are hiring that is, that developed like an amazing curiosity and passion for like the very complex like data management systems that we are building and can bring that passion and that intensity to the team.

[00:15:01] Antoine: It could be people that we bring in our customer team that have usually deep passion and interest for for crypto and for like these new use cases of companies that we are working with. And so you need to have this like extra energy that usually is comes from like curiosity for, for what you're doing.

[00:15:20] Antoine: And then the last thing is coming back to what I was saying earlier is, and I'm insisting on this because it's very important. It's the high level of integrity in a sense that we are looking for people that want to do things well, and I want to do things by the books because essentially this is maybe by taking shortcuts.

[00:15:40] Antoine: By being aggressive, by overselling, you can get somewhere, but then very, at some point you will pay the price for it. And we don't behave like this, and we don't want our people to behave like this, so, so these are the, the other, other personality traits. 

[00:15:57] Umar: And because, so at Cryptio you've adopted a hybrid approach, would you be against the fully remote kind of work, uh, approach?

[00:16:07] Umar: So we have 

[00:16:08] Antoine: we have a remote 1st company in a sense that no one in the company has to go to the office. So, but we have office spaces. We have one in Paris, we have one in London and very shortly, very soon we're going to have one in New York as well. And so we building these hubs and so the thing is more like, how can you, how can you build, how can you implement initiatives and create a sort of life around that office space, You know, so that people comes and they can come to work or they can come to events that you're organizing in the in these hubs. So this is this is how we this is how we seeing I'm seeing these like sort of like remote first culture.

[00:16:50] Antoine: I don't actually don't really believe of if it was like fully remote with no office. And no one meeting each other like ever, I don't really believe in that model. There's some companies that, that, that managed to do it, but I don't really believe in that model, especially in the environment that we are in.

[00:17:08] Antoine: But the model that we have, which is remote first, but then there's like loads of reasons for people to come to the office, I think, I think works very well, especially with the type of people that, that I described where you have like autonomous people that you can trust. 

[00:17:21] Antoine: You can, you can let them operate in a way from where they want, but, um, seeing their colleagues from time to time is actually very important.

[00:17:29] Umar: Yeah, I completely agree. Now, for the listeners, the remaining part of this episode today now will be focused more on Cryptio, the, I mean, the product and the first topic I want to touch on is about pricing. Because I interact with people of the industry, and sometimes I hear their feedback. So one of the common criticism that I hear is about subledgers' lack of transparent pricing.

[00:17:55] Umar: It's not just directed at Cryptio. Many of your competitors follow a similar approach. In the past, I remember you had this transaction based pricing slider that you could basically it would help you to determine your monthly cost of using Cryptio. I saw that's no longer in place. So for prospective customers who find pricing unclear or they don't really, really know how much it's going to cost, how do you respond to that pricing question? And yeah, how does Crypto basically structure their pricing for customers today? 

[00:18:28] Antoine: So I understand that, that criticism on the fact that pricing some is not transparent. It's not something that is, only like that touch only the, our market is something true in the SaaS market in, in, in general.

[00:18:46] Antoine: And I also understand the price sensitivity to, some buyers out there, especially the very, the very early stage and the companies very simple use cases. 

[00:18:57] Antoine: I think here, like it's really, when it comes to Cryptio, like it's very important, we really differentiate two things.

[00:19:04] Antoine: As I just said, like the very early stage, very simple, low transaction, use cases where to me, like this is a market that is commoditized. There's like a lot of players that are, this is really what I would call like the sub ledger market where you have like a lot of companies, you have nearly as many companies like software providers as you has like buyers.

[00:19:28] Antoine: And, it's very commoditized and here you need as a buyer, you need to go for the cheapest option. And, even if, even if pricing and not transparent, eventually what buyers do is that they, given that they have like all these providers that are going to them, they play the providers against them and they managed to get at the end of the day, they managed to get what they want at crazy prices sometimes.

[00:19:53] Antoine: So we've seen this, we've, we've seen that sometimes we, we're part like long time ago of that of that game. We really don't do that anymore. And because, because we like, yeah, we, we have, we focusing more on like the more complex, like data challenges and the more complex use cases. 

[00:20:12] Antoine: And yeah, so we moving kind of away and when you're moving away and, and, I think that price is obviously an important, an important factor at the end, the buyer, like, you know, he solves a problem and the problem is kind of a value and he needs to put a price to that to that value. And this is not like this is not infinite. Like it's yeah, it's not infinite. But when you get to a certain level of complexity, in terms of like types of problems, in terms of who it touches, it's not just like the accountants that want to push data to Xero, but it's the accountants, it's the people in the operations team that want to do reconciliation upstream, it's the compliance team that wants to automate compliance reporting, it's like the risk management team that wants all this stuff for the risk management.

[00:20:58] Antoine: When you get into that level of complexity, you know, like, just representing that that structure and that complexity on the pricing page and say, hey you just can click on things and it gives you a price. It's just not possible. So, because then you need really to adapt to the reality of all these companies.

[00:21:14] Antoine: And so where you go a bit of market and you go into that into that world, the transparency is, you know, it's not really, it's not really a bug and it's not, it's not really because we want to high prices. It's just that the like, every situation is kind of is kind of different. And so it's very difficult to represent something, but high level.

[00:21:35] Antoine: Obviously, there is a structure. There is like, sort of like mechanism through which the pricing works, which is based on 2 main things. Is based on the modules that you are building. So today, Cryptio as I mentioned, is a data platform that will connect to basically all the different data points and data sources that you have in your company, which could be like crypto exchanges and wallets and custodians.

[00:21:59] Antoine: But it could be also like internal system. It could be OMS and PMS systems. It could be, it could be even like, data analytics systems or whatever. Like you would pull that data. And then you will, like, you will, you have like sort of a unique system of records and on top of that, you have module that can automate, stuff that can automate workflows, accounting, push data to your ERP system, reconciliation, compliance, risk management.

[00:22:26] Antoine: And so the more module you take, the more expensive you pay. And then there is like a transaction element of based on the number of transaction that we have to process, like the price moves basically. But, but yeah, it's, it's given the complexity of the use cases and it's difficult to present everything on the pricing page.

[00:22:47] Umar: Yeah, I agree with you. And for the listeners, you should also not be comparing all subledgers just by looking at the cost, but these modules that you're speaking of, because I mean, the theme of the conversation today is that subledgers now have, they're required to do more than just the typical accounting features.

[00:23:06] Umar: So, maybe I want to ask you what types of customers, because you mainly have two kinds of package, what kinds of companies would choose the pro package versus the enterprise package where you have all these different modules that you can add on? 

[00:23:23] Antoine: It's basically a matter of stage. So size of the of the business and use case.

[00:23:30] Antoine: Today basically we look at three types of customers. We're looking at large non regulated crypto companies. So think about the Uniswap, WorldCoin Consensys of the world, like all three are customers. We looking at governments have contracts in Europe. We have contracts, as you said, in government of El Salvador, and we're looking at like companies building regulated products. And usually the non regulated startups, will go more for like the pro package in a sense that there's some features that they will need less like the reconciliation, the reconciliation feature, for instance, which is really something that is more for like regulated players that needs to reconcile internal systems with, with on chain data and all that stuff.

[00:24:15] Antoine: So the non regulated crypto native startups will fall slightly more on the pro side and the, the governments and the regulated companies that needs a wider range of data ingestion capability, data reconciliation capabilities, and also reporting capabilities, because it's not just about accounting, it's about compliance, about sending reports to the regulators, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:24:43] Antoine: We'll go more on the, on the enterprise side of things. 

[00:24:46] Umar: Before we continue, let's take a quick commercial break to talk about something that every web3 accountant, DAO operator and finance professional can relate to, the chaos of on chain data. 

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[00:26:27] Umar: Cool. So last year, like I mentioned earlier, you announced Cryptio Bedrock, this third generation platform of Cryptio, it has a regulatory stack component to it, it helps companies to comply with regional regulations like MiCA in the EU, VARA in the UAE and more. 

[00:26:46] Umar: Could you walk us through a little bit more on what is exactly a Cryptio Bedrock, how it evolved from the previous versions and provide some of the use cases where we can use some of these new modules now? 

[00:26:59] Antoine: Yeah, sure. So Bedrock is the next generation, data platform for regulated institutions.

[00:27:07] Antoine: It's basically built on top of like three pillars. One is around scale. So what we've realized in the story of the company, and I think also one of some other players are realizing is that we're not, we're not only solving like an accounting or, or a reporting like use case a problem. We also solving like a data management problem. 

[00:27:30] Antoine: In crypto and especially, for like more regulated institution like exchanges and so on, these businesses are generating an insane amount of of data. And you know, if you want to do the reporting, the accounting, the cost basis tracking and all that stuff, there is like an insane amount of compute that needs to go through like these millions of rows so that you can, you can do the computation that you want and you have the output that you want.

[00:27:57] Antoine: And so the, what we've built this year is very unique data management capabilities. It's very like a, like a very tech heavy thing. Like it's a tech, it's a backend topic, so to speak. But we've built very unique, yeah, large data management capabilities that basically have helped us, you know, realize like amazing breakthrough when it comes to, data ingestion and, and, then compute.

[00:28:22] Antoine: And this is like a unique, it's not, it's obviously visible to the customer because everything is very fast. But it's, it's, it's a unique, like, it's a pillar that is absolutely essential to be able to serve like these, these large regulated institution. 

[00:28:37] Antoine: The second one is reconciliation. I've talked already a little bit about, a bit about this, but it's it's reconciliation. Actually, data ingestion. 

[00:28:46] Antoine: We entering this world where, you know, like it's not all the data that you need to do reporting is on chain or on exchanges. You need to mix this with internal system data, analytics data. So you need to connect to like the Snowflake instance of your customer that is tracking, like, I don't know, P&L, if it's like a fund or that is tracking like customer balances of users, if it's an exchange, you need to pull that information, in a automated and controlled way. 

[00:29:16] Antoine: And you need to have, reconciliation workflow with other data sources could be exchanges could be on chain data, and you need to do that well, you know, control the way again, and you need to do that at scale. So that's that's a unique sort of new primitive that we've introduced with these, , with these Cryptio Bedrock.

[00:29:35] Antoine: There's a lot of flexibility. On how you can implement this reconciliation workflow, you can do balance level, you can do transaction level, you can do even like support token supply reconciliation for asset issuers. There's a bunch of different things that you can do. 

[00:29:49] Antoine: And the third pillar is all the compliance reporting.

[00:29:52] Antoine: So it's bringing all these capabilities. So that companies that now starts to have to report to MiCA regulator, VARA, ADGM, whoever, can have the reports that they need and the capabilities that they need to meet these reporting requirements. 

[00:30:09] Antoine: So this is, yeah, this is basically what, what, what it is in a nutshell.

[00:30:12] Antoine: So it's really to circle back with what I said earlier, it's, it's really the evolution of our platform from being sub ledger that tracks data onchain, process that data, push a journal entry to Xero to like, like a more wider data platform. I can do way more complex things on the ingestion side and on the, the processing side. And on the output side, 

[00:30:41] Umar: Now you also have a fair market value module. I noted and, under US GAAP. So I'm now referring to ASU 23-8 published in December, 2023, companies holding crypto must as of December 15th, 2024 report those at fair value, which, marks a shift from the previous cost-less impairment model.

[00:31:05] Umar: If my memory is not failing me, we had Mackenzie Patel from Hash Basis on Episode 55, if you want to learn more about that topic, but basically this new standard, it's not all encompassing for all types of crypto assets. The ones that are not there are wrapped tokens and NFTs, but, basically, there's a number of disclosure requirements that you need to file in your annual financial statements, including a roll forward schedule, the cost basis method you use, other significant crypto holdings that you have, and there's a bunch of others. So to prepare companies for this transition, Crypto has built this new fair value, fair market value module. Could you share with the listeners how this module works and whether Cryptio can generate this roll forward report and all the other US GAAP disclosure requirements?

[00:31:54] Antoine: Sure. so yes, indeed, we have I think we've been on the first to release like this fair market value module. We have an account, an accounting strategy team in, in the US with Jeff Rundlet that you know, and other people that I'm working closely with, that've been working closely with the FASB and, and the Big4 that we're working with, and the accounting firms that you're working with, you mentioned Mackenzie, we're close with her, and to basically 

[00:32:21] Antoine: design this fair market value module So how it works is fairly straightforward. Like, the way the, how we built it and also how we build product in general, we're trying to be the most flexible as possible. So give a lot of options to the users on how, how they can use and implement something so that they can, it could adapt it to the use case potentially to the jurisdiction and hear what it means in the context of, of, of the FMV module is that you have, you have the possibility to select the assets.

[00:32:53] Antoine: So it's not like one methodology fits all, you can select all of the assets that you have on your, on your workspace and you can assign different re evaluation methodology to these assets. So it could be impairment, it could be FMV, it could be nothing. So you can really be, yeah, you can be, be very granular.

[00:33:10] Antoine: And so you can also, that way you can also navigate this like gray area around like these tokens where you don't really know if they're like, you need to do fair market, fair market value or not. And so, you can make, we can help you also make a decision, but we won't make a decision for you, but you can, you can adapt and be flexible, flexible here.

[00:33:28] Antoine: Something also that you can do is you can. So before having this fair market value module, we had another where we have, we had like an impairment module that allow company to run impairments, and so a lot of our customers have been using these impairment module for for quite a while. 

[00:33:45] Antoine: And in this, in this new fair market value revaluation feature, we've also introduced, like a transacted transition sort of feature like feature to help people like fully that fully basically automates the transition. And so you can pick like a transition date, pick the different assets that you want to transition from impairment to fair market value.

[00:34:09] Antoine: And then like all the entries in the adjustment would be generated automatically.

[00:34:13] Umar: Now, I know that a lot of subledgers use pricing aggregators like CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, CryptoCompare, but let's say the company they would want to use, maybe they have a specific exchange that they would want to use as their principal market. Let's say it's Coinbase that they'd like to use as their principal market for pricing all their crypto assets in Cryptio.

[00:34:36] Umar: Is that a tweakable feature that I could instead link it to Coinbase pricing through an API? 

[00:34:43] Antoine: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it's, it's good follow up question because it's tied to this fair market value module as well. At the same time, when we started to design this fair market value feature, we, we did like a long sort of like study work, I would say, with, with KPMG on this, like, principal market topic to understand what is possible, like, what is basically the level of flexibility that you want to give your customer, so that they can do whatever they want, but still, be compliant, basically. And after that, we've basically, this is where we've introduced, like, more flexibility on the prices that you can, you can pick. 

[00:35:23] Antoine: So today on Cryptio, you have multiple options. You can use aggregators like, like CoinMarketCap. And you can also pick, you can also pick directly exchanges. And so all these exchange data, comes from our partnership that we have with Kaiko, which is a company that we are very, very, very close with. We know, very, very well. And so together we've been, we've built these, they are like experts in like market prices, basically, this is, this is what they do. And so we've built with them this like flexible module where you can select also with high level of granularity per asset, the specific exchange.

[00:36:04] Antoine: That you want to use to price these assets and you can, and you can have at the end also a hybrid set up where you want to say, okay, I have 10 assets on my, or 20 assets on my balance sheet. I want to use Coinbase for the 3 more material, the ones that represent like 90 percent of my balance sheet. I want to use Coinbase for this.

[00:36:26] Antoine: And then. The long tail or for the other long tail of assets, I wanna use CoinMarketCap, or CoinGecko. And so this is something that you can, that you can do in the system today. 

[00:36:35] Umar: Very cool. Thanks for sharing and probably, uh, would be a good idea for me to have Kaiko in the future on this podcast as well to discuss this topic, uh, at Absolutely.

[00:36:44] Umar: In more detail Now, we've covered the challenge of aggregating data from blockchains multiple times on this podcast. And of course, having complete and accurate data is the end goal for crypto accountants. I did a previous episode with a company called Noves. We explored the topic of managing data in a multi blockchain world and the proliferation of new chains.

[00:37:09] Umar: So Cryptio supports more than 60 chains. That's what I saw on your website. I want to ask you, how is Cryptio's tech designed to support a new chain on the market? Let's take, Berachain an L1, which has gained quite a lot of traction since launch. So you have, it's quite often right in web3 that you have a new chain that comes.

[00:37:29] Umar: So, yeah, how's the tech designed to quickly support that new chain? 

[00:37:36] Antoine: So it's, it's basically like a development, it's, it's a process thing, right? Like, so the, we have a team, like a blockchain data team that has been indexing chains for the last, the last six years. They've built like a very, very, very unique expertise on how to do this.

[00:37:55] Antoine: They've built a lot of like tooling to help them index chain like very quickly. Sometimes when is a completely what so today, if it's like a new EVM chain, for instance, we'll index it like right away. It's like very simple. 

[00:38:09] Antoine: When it's a completely new chain with like a completely new consensus mechanisms and a completely new setup that will require a little bit more of of like an investigation, but this investigation is we can't we can't go I think that our team is right. We want to when it comes to data indexing, especially for like reporting use cases, kind of the most knowledgeable team that that that exists. And so, yeah, with that expertise that they built and the tooling that they have, we are able to index and change very, very quickly.

[00:38:38] Umar: Now, one of the other topics I want to discuss is your audit module. So, or rather your audit readiness modules. So one of the high risk areas for auditors reviewing companies with crypto is ensuring completeness and accuracy of onchain transactions. And Cryptio is SOC 1 and SOC2 Type I and Type II compliant. 

[00:38:59] Umar: On episode 71 with David Byrd from EY, we actually discussed how, when a subledger has these SOC reports, how basically that impacts the external auditor's scope of work and pricing. So that's another factor for you guys to look into. You should not just look at pricing. You also, you should also see whether the, that subledger has all these reports, because basically that will, that will have an impact on the, the auditors invoice, at the end of the year. Now, I want to ask you, could you walk us through this audit readiness module? What is it exactly? And how does its use basically change the scope and workload of an external auditor? 

[00:39:41] Antoine: Yeah, great question. So I think before I just talk about the module itself, I just want to say a word on this on these like SOC reports. And then it would be a good segue to the to the readiness module. But what I was saying earlier around company culture and this idea that we want to do things right and well, and we don't take shortcuts. I think this is a good, a good example.

[00:40:05] Antoine: When it comes to SOC reports, you have two options. Basically, you have the, the easy options. We can, you can go to whoever out there and any auditor and you can say, hey, I want a SOC report and they will issue a SOC report. And then 95, 99 percent of SOC reports out there and nearly 100 percent of SOC reports of like companies building, doing kind of operating kind of the same space as we are, are the same. And, and, and funny enough, sometimes they're even the same as like another software company that has nothing to do with back office or crypto. Because they're just like firms, audit firms that are just like, they're just auditing these reports and just pay them 20k and they will issue the report.

[00:40:51] Antoine: And then you answering one problem, which is, the buyer will always, especially like the more enterprising type of customers, they will always ask for the SOC report. And so you will answer the problem of not feeling, not being dumb and say, hey, I don't know what a SOC report is or I don't have a SOC report. 

[00:41:08] Antoine: And then you could be lucky, you could be lucky because a lot of these people are asking SOC reports, asking SOC reports because the auditor is asking them to get SOC reports and actually no one never reads that SOC reports. And so you can get through it that way, but the people that are not reading it are basically like the smaller, the smaller guys.

[00:41:29] Antoine: And so if you want to get to the bigger guys, you actually have people that will read that thing. And this is where actually you can make the difference. And so when we started to, when we started building this company, we've starting onboarding companies that went through their first financial statement audits and really including like the very, very first financial statement audits in like crypto history, like years ago.

[00:41:52] Antoine: And at that time, you know, we realized, okay, like it's the first problem that we wanted to solve is you have data on a wallet, you have a wallet, and so we need to move data from the blockchain to Xero. But then very quickly, we realized when these companies went through the first audits that the, there's actually a bigger problem, a more complex problem to solve, which is doing this, like moving that data from, from the blockchain to Xero, but in a, in a transparent way.

[00:42:22] Antoine: In a way that everyone understands and in a way that at the end, you as the operator, as the account, the person who actually closed the book, you're very confident that things have done well. And then it's, it's not like a black box. And when the auditor comes, he can look at the different controls that you used to make sure that this thing work well.

[00:42:42] Antoine: And so what we've been doing for years is working with people like David, for instance, the David Byrd from EY and a bunch of others. So Big4, but also from smaller firms because you have smaller audit firms that are not Big4, that are actually more active. And so a bit more knowledgeable, find knowledgeable, I don't know, but at least they have, you know, like real life audits, they do more of them.

[00:43:05] Antoine: And so it's working with them and doing really the work that doesn't pay off is like me spending like hours and hours and hours, like spending time with them, trying to understand how they work, how they think. And this doesn't bring any business in the short term, but it kind of brings this lot of expertise on on on how you should how you should do this, and it also then it enables us to do two things.

[00:43:28] Antoine: Enables us to build like a front facing customer facing internal control management tool within the system. What it means is you have a set of controls and tools that the user can leverage and implement part of their reconciliation process.

[00:43:43] Antoine: So there is, for instance, like, a balanced reconciliation testing tool. There is like a pricing tool. There is like, there's a bunch of things that you can implement. So that's like the, the whole process from, from, from beginning to end is done with control, then there is an audit trail of how these tools are being used. That's one thing that we did. 

[00:44:01] Antoine: And the second thing that we did is design. We actually did that a lot with KPMG design controls in the SOC reports in our SOC reports that are extremely, like, they're very unique to what we do that are very unique to how we index chains that are very unique to how we process data, how we compute cost basis, like things that really didn't exist before. 

[00:44:23] Antoine: We just sat down with these guys and say, okay, like as an auditor that is like completely downstream, if you're reading this thing, like what we want to read. And they didn't know, like, and so we sat down and like, we thought about it and we designed these controls and that, and now they have these, like we have these very unique controls, very specific to what we do.

[00:44:42] Antoine: In these SOC reports, which really has enabled to, like, close these, like, big customers and build that confidence and build that trust with these big players. And also we spend, we're not spending 20k. The con side of this is that we're not spending 20k like a random auditor, like we spending way more with a Big4 auditor that is doing the SOC report.

[00:45:05] Antoine: But at the end of the day, this is, this is what you need. This is like this type of initiative and this is what you need. If you want to work with the big guys and if you want to like, you know, like work with like integrity, integrity and be very like, yeah, focused on solving customer problems. 

[00:45:22] Umar: One of the follow up questions on this, so for the listeners, the auditor, when they're going to receive the client's financial statements, let's say they look at the P&L, they're going to see realized gain or loss, and then they're going to say, okay, so how did you generate this realized gain or loss?

[00:45:39] Umar: The client will say this was realized gain or loss from crypto. You're going to ask, how did you calculate that? They're going to say, oh, the sub ledger calculate that, uh, calculate that for me. It's automated. I don't even know. So then they're going to ask, okay, so how did the sub ledger calculate that? So these SOC reports really, they help the auditor to place reliance on the different controls that the sub ledger has used to calculate all these different values that essentially lands in your financial statements.

[00:46:08] Umar: Is there another example that you can give like realized gain or loss is one that basically if, or if your SOC report can give the auditor assurance that, okay, there's a third party that has come, that has signed off on this report. And therefore we don't need to do like, it doesn't increase our scope of work.

[00:46:26] Umar: You have another kind of example like that. 

[00:46:28] Antoine: Yeah, absolutely. Not on the reporting side. I have plenty on the reporting side, but one that is. The one that is very, very important that we that is part of our SOC reports is the data indexing and the controls that you implement. To attest completeness and accuracy of the, of the actual on chain data that is being ingested upstream in the, in the system.

[00:46:51] Antoine: So what we have is, so there's something kind of unique, at least, at least in the early days to our company is that talking about like not taking shortcuts very in like, like six years ago, basically, when we started to build, you know, our first, onchain connectors. We had the option to use Etherscan or to do it ourselves, and we decided to do it ourselves.

[00:47:17] Antoine: And the reason why is it's because at the end, if you want to, like the problem that we are solving, as I mentioned, is, is not just like moving data from one place to another place is doing this with control, transparency, and being able to, at the end, attest on like the, like the accuracy of the process, basically.

[00:47:35] Antoine: And so what we have is so we, we basically all the blockchains that we have, we have on like inhouse indexes and everything, and we've built on how we index the chain. We've built with KPMG some very unique controls that we, that we implemented at the indexation level, like post indexing level, as well as on the data ingestion level in the system of basically balanced reconciliation controls.

[00:48:02] Antoine: And so what we do is that the, when we index the blockchain and where we hiding a new transaction to, to like our, our database, there will be a check where we'll ask an independent node of the balance of the wallet that we are testing. And we'll compare that node external node balance with the balance that we have according to our transaction history that we've that we've just indexed and we will do that control.

[00:48:28] Antoine: It's not just like one thing that we do on time to time. It's like something that is real time that we do like millions and millions of times per day, but the system does millions and millions of time per day. And we also having another control downstream that is more like user facing, where we can do also this type of control.

[00:48:43] Antoine: So this is like a unique thing that is being designed with KPMG, added to the SOC report, and they can, they can attest this because at the end of the day, if you don't have this, and maybe I'm sure you've done this, you will start at the, as the auditor or the guy like checking the work, what are you going to do?

[00:49:00] Antoine: You're going to open Etherscan, and you're going to do this reconciliation yourself. And imagine you have hundreds of wallets, like it's, it's impossible. And Etherscan is not a source of truth because Etherscan does not have a SOC report. So like, okay, so then where do you go? What do you do? Right.

[00:49:14] Umar: Yeah. And these are stuff that the user, sometimes they won't actually see, but all those are all checks and balances going in the background. We diverted from the questionnaire I was asking you about the audit readiness module of Cryptio. Oh, 

[00:49:29] Antoine: yeah, yeah, yeah. So the audit readiness module basically is built, it's these like customer facing internal controls system that we have in Cryptio.

[00:49:37] Antoine: And so you have a few, you have the the balance reconciliation that I, that I mentioned, so the user is able to run tests run because they are completeness and do, but these balance reconciliation and log the test or approval if there, if there's like different people that are in charge of, like, the reconciliation and the closing process and also for review auditors, you can do the balance reconciliation.

[00:50:02] Antoine: You can do pricing checks around principle market. You can select some, some, some specific transaction and, and verify that your valuation policy is actually respected, that when you're saying they're using CoinMarketCap for Bitcoin, you can take a Bitcoin transaction randomly and verify that we're using a CoinMarketCap, price.

[00:50:22] Antoine: You have a lot of controls around cost basis as well. So you mentioned that it's difficult to test also, because cost basis, there's some like a lot, sort of a lot testing tools as well as, verification that, you know, the cost basis is like running properly. So you have also like checks like this, which the same you can do.

[00:50:41] Antoine: There's a tool that you can use to do the testing and then you can log the thing. And then one of the other one that is, that is nice is, is the cross wallet, control. So what we've seen is, a lot of the finance team, they leave, unfortunately, sometimes a bit far from like the product team and they realize a little bit too late that oh, actually, we just released a new contract on this new chain and we didn't know and they realize this like 3 months later when the product guy is actually sending them the address or actually saying, telling them, hey, actually, we're live on Berachain.

[00:51:16] Antoine: And so, yeah. What we have is a control that basically analyze the wallets that you have imported in the system, analyze them in sort of real time, and see if these similar addresses are live on other, on other protocols, and send you some alerts when we're seeing that something, that a wallet that you're tracking that is active in Ethereum is also active on Arbitrum, for instance, it's the same thing.

[00:51:40] Antoine: There is a control internal control here. So you've come, you check before you do the closing, and you can log also the, you can log also the, do the testing, log it, put in the audit trail and that's kind of, yeah. And maybe I think I'm missing a few, but it's like, is a lot of these different controls. We not, we're not necessarily advising our customers to use all of them, but the way we like to think about it is in terms of risk, right?

[00:52:03] Antoine: So based on your business, what are, what are the most risky areas? What are the things that can go wrong first? And, and let's just implement this control, that control to kind of mitigate that risk. And for instance, if you are like a DeFi company that is like collecting fees on smart contracts, this idea of having like new contracts that could be released by your team on new protocols is really like a very big risk. Like it happens, it happens all the time. So we will recommend to use that test, to use that tool, part of the closing, part of the closing process. And maybe less, I don't know, like the pricing one or something like that.

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[00:54:21] Umar: Yeah. Hearing you I mean, it's such a complex task building a sub ledger. And sometimes when I hear people complaining about the pricing, I'm like, yeah, but this product is completely different to like the traditional accounting softwares that you have, and you're not only doing this for one chain, you have to do replicate this for all the different chains that you support.

[00:54:41] Umar: So, maybe that's a good segue to the next topic I want to cover is that there are a lot of sub ledgers on the market today. I mean, there are a few offering also invoicing and payment capabilities. Yeah, there are sub ledgers that want to offer the main ledger features, basically you don't have to export that data then into a Xero and to, into a Quickbooks, you can have your chart of accounts inside the subledger and prepare your financials. What's your perspective on this? Do you think subledgers should aim to be this all in one solution? 

[00:55:15] Antoine: So, yeah, I have a pretty strong opinion in this. Like I, so first of all, I don't think that the the world will fully come onchain tomorrow and maybe, maybe ever.

[00:55:30] Antoine: What does that mean? It means that we will live for a very long time. It's not forever in a hybrid world, in a hybrid world, basically. And in that perspective, at Cryptio like we believe that it's not we're not here to reinvent the existing accounting stack infrastructure. So you have all these general ledger tools.

[00:55:50] Antoine: They doing a lot of great thing. Accountants and and finance team know how to use these tools and we will never compete with these guys. And we will never, yeah, we'll never try to reinvent what these guys, what these guys are doing. Because if we were like, I understand that in some capacity for some types of use cases like DAOs and small companies, it's a bit handy to have everything in the, in the same platform, but essentially at the end of the day, you just marginally improving the existing financial operation workflow you and you also kind of can bring costs down because you don't have to have like a Xero subscription and so on. But you living in a world is like very early stage.

[00:56:35] Antoine: In fact, this is a world that is very, very, very early stage and when to come back to the pricing conversation, the main thing that actually at the end matter is price. So it's not our area of focus. Like we, my view and our vision of things is we are building the financial integrity layer of, of crypto.

[00:56:56] Antoine: And what it means is that we're building data solutions that are unique to crypto that are solving problems and challenges that are unique to, to a team that is like operating a business in crypto, whatever this type of businesses, if it's like, it could be, it could be Uniswap. It could be an exchange.

[00:57:16] Antoine: It could be a trading firm. Anyway, the, the fact that these companies have like run crypto operation comes with like very unique challenges when it comes to data ingestion, reconciliation, valuation, reporting, compliance, all of that stuff. And this is what we're here to do. We, we're here to solve these complex problems.

[00:57:39] Antoine: So that we can bring that level of integrity to these people, and therefore it's not like a marginal optimization of of workflow. It's kind of like a 0 to 1 on things that they can't do today. That is having a big impact on their business that is preventing them sometimes to operate in a compliant way that is sometimes completely preventing them to to scale into and to hire.

[00:58:03] Antoine: And so this is like the world that we operate in and that we're focusing on is building these financial integrity layer of crypto solving these very complex data challenges that are unique to crypto. And this goes from back office to middle office, from accounting to risk management and looking at these very big things that are very, very unique to crypto and maybe I'll finish with this.

[00:58:29] Antoine: The what allows us to do this is like, these problems are not obvious. The problem of I need to push data from my, like the Ethereum blockchain to Xero is kind of an obvious problem. It used to be maybe not that obvious, but now it's an obvious problem. Everyone can relate to this, but the, it's once you're deep in the trenches with the biggest players, the one that really are the forefront.

[00:58:54] Antoine: Like the one, the ones that don't have any choice of just like figuring this problem out by themselves. This is where you're working with like the so called Circle of the world and the Uniswap of the world or the governments, exchanges like Gemini and so on, that you kind of have this exposure on this very unique, very sticky, very complex data problems.

[00:59:18] Antoine: And you also kind of realizing that all of these problems are based on the same set of, issues and challenges, which is how to get data from the blockchain as we said in a complete and accurate way. How to have like a scalable data management platform that can operates complex reconciliation.

[00:59:36] Antoine: And how can build a very modular like reporting capabilities on on top. And so this is what we are, this is what we're building. And this is the vision for the company and the product. 

[00:59:47] Umar: And for the listeners, if they'd want to know some of the upcoming features and milestones, I know you usually announce you have a big announcement at the Crypto Finance Forum.

[00:59:57] Umar: We are a few months away from that. So maybe some of the smaller, upcoming milestones that you have until the conference. 

[01:00:06] Antoine: So one of the, one of the very big feature that we're releasing, that we are very excited about, it's maybe it sounds not that exciting, but the people who understand that problem would be excited about it.

[01:00:20] Antoine: It's, it's what we call in the multi inventory feature, which is basically a way to build virtual inventories. And so to segregate different assets that are part of the same wallets and the same inventory. 2 different inventories, I give you a concrete example and you understand better. If you are a custodian, if you're an exchange, a lot of the time you commingle your assets with the assets of your customer.

[01:00:46] Antoine: This is a very big problem. And in the kind of the normal non crypto world, it can't happen, right? But in the crypto world, it can happen because of how blockchains are made, because of how you need to, how you need to pay fees, etc, etc. And so you have a lot of like this commingle problem.

[01:01:04] Antoine: And so it's multi inventory feature, one of the use case is to be able to segregate customer assets from client assets and run these different inventories in parallel with different cost basis methodology, including very advanced ones, like, being able to do, like, spec ID and one to one matching and that type of thing.

[01:01:27] Antoine: These already exist, but this multi inventory feature is, is, is actually a very, very, very important primitive that is yeah, very needed is in this like regulated enterprise world. 

[01:01:40] Umar: What does that mean? Let's say I'm using Gemini as a crypto exchange. So when they're using Cryptio, if I have funds there, they would be able to in Cryptio see, this is Umar's account line, my line for each client. Is that what you mean? 

[01:01:55] Antoine: So the idea is that you, you know, if you're looking at, if I'm, if I am an exchange, if I am Gemini and I'm tracking, let's say I'm doing custody on whatever custodian like Copper, for instance, I'm doing custody on Copper and I have all my client assets on Copper, it could be on omnibus accounts.

[01:02:16] Antoine: It could be where you have one wallet that makes all the customer assets. It could be segregated, whatever And on top of this, within these wallets, I also have my corporate assets. Where does these corporate assets come from? It comes from various places. One is the, the fees that, you need to pay to move funds from one wallet to one wallet to the other.

[01:02:42] Antoine: And these fees are not paid by the customer, they're paid by you. So you will send from your treasury wallets, you will send, you will send assets and these assets will cover the fees. That's one use case.

[01:02:53] Antoine: And the second use case is when this, when your customers are trading on the Gemini platform, you're making money, right?

[01:02:59] Antoine: Like there's a, there's a revenue, there is a revenue, like you're getting trading fees. And these trading fees are kind of virtual in a sense that the, you have your internal system when you're recording all the trades of your customer and you know that when you're trading this and this, I have this asset, this asset, this asset as a fee.

[01:03:16] Antoine: And so your pool, your inventory of customer assets as these customers are trading would be like, gradually split between like, part of it will become actually your money. Because it's the assets that it's the, the fees that you're getting to all these trades and so you're facing a problem as, Gemini or as well, whatever company is that you would want for accounting and cost basis purposes, but also for balance tracking purposes, which is more the compliance side. You will wanna segregate the two. So you will want to have a view, an inventory where I can see only my assets, my, my corporate assets, the one that I'm, that I'm collecting from my customers, so to speak, as the trading on my platform. and I wanna put also the, the assets that belongs to me because these are the assets that I send to fund all the gas fees.

[01:04:10] Antoine: And these should leave in their own inventory, and they should run their own cost basis, and they should not, they should, customer assets should never be involved in the computation here. And same thing, I want to do the same thing with the customer assets, and potentially run cost basis, even though it's like, it's not necessarily always needed.

[01:04:28] Antoine: And so I want to also have a very easy way to say at any point in time. Okay according to, according to the system, how much customer asset do I have? And does that tie with my liability basically. So that enables us to do that. 

[01:04:41] Umar: Yeah. Wow I guess, yeah exchanges, market makers, those are the complex use cases.

[01:04:50] Umar: I'm looking at the time. There are two last topics that I wanted to cover with you Antoine. The first one is, so the gaps in crypto accounting education. 

[01:04:58] Umar: As you know, at The Accountant Quits, we launched this Crypto Accounting Academy to help to close the gap basically. And we also have a practical class how people can use subledgers. So it's a topic I'm obviously passionate about. I'd love to hear your, your perspective on where are some of the big gaps in crypto accounting education that new teams onboarding to crypto consistently struggle with. 

[01:05:27] Antoine: Yeah. I think that the, there are, like, there are definitely some gaps.

[01:05:33] Antoine: They are like not that much on the, on the core accounting side. I think that the gaps is because the accounting side you can teach it and like a good accountant that is not a good crypto accountant will obviously will understand like the will understand like the different issues and challenges that comes with like crypto accounting, especially when it comes to the topic that we discussed around like the valuation and all that stuff.

[01:05:58] Antoine: So I don't think there's that much of a gap here, but there is definitely a gap on on on the use case. So the thing that I just described, for instance, like this, like, multi inventory thing, and they need to segregate these inventories. This is where, like, the gap is to really understand all the different edge cases, to understand the controls that you need to put in place so that you can, at the end of the day, do the output is what you want, like, all the all the complexities around around the use case and therefore, like the data management and the way you should think about it, that I feel is, is really where, where the gap is, you know. And then obviously there are some complexities, even more upstream on reading blockchain and reading explorer and that type of thing, but it's true if you are like, if you are operating or doing accounting or reporting for like the DeFi company or DeFi fund, obviously the biggest gap that you will that you will face is understanding, understanding that world, like, understanding what the liquidity pool token is and understanding how to display the data and why the thing is different in Uniswap and it is in 1inch.

[01:07:10] Antoine: Like, this is what a complexity is, but, when it comes to more like regulated use cases, like the exchanges, the stablecoin issuers and so on, it's a bit more vanilla on the blockchain data side, but on the core use case and accounting and reporting side, like how to manage the data, how to reconcile and clicking, you know, so that it's like the, the accountant can sit down with the customer and understand this right away.

[01:07:36] Antoine: This is what takes a lot of, a lot of time. And so what we have is, we, so we have different teams in the company, we kind of splitting the problem into, we had some teams that are, we call them accounting solution consultants. So they are like accounting professionals and they're very, they're, they're very, very good on the accounting side.

[01:07:56] Antoine: They're actually good on every topic, but they're very strong on the accounting side of things. And we have other people that we call enterprise solution consultant, which are very, very deep on the use case side and, and here, like finding these guys and onboarding these guys is quite a, it's quite a challenge. 

[01:08:15] Umar: Yeah, I agree with what you said and for the listeners, so, because like Antoine mentioned, every business has different use cases, different business models. That's why I think if you're, if you want to learn crypto accounting. If you are at an early stage in your career, joining like a crypto accounting firm would be great because you'd be actually working on very different use cases each time before you actually maybe want to go into the industry and, you know, work on that career path to maybe one day becoming like a CFO or something.

[01:08:47] Umar: Now, this is the last question I wanted to ask you, not related to Cryptio, but more about how you take time off and how do you continuously learn? So as an accountant myself, I really think sub ledgers are the most exciting product for crypto mainstream adoption, but this environment is so fast paced and, I want to ask you what learning habits have you developed along the way to make sure you're always kind of updating your knowledge.

[01:09:16] Umar: You have like a circle of other CEOs, other entrepreneurs you regularly connect with, are their specific resources that as a Founder and CEO has impacted your growth. 

[01:09:29] Antoine: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, yeah, I do the, the, like the normal stuff I would say that kind of everyone does what everyone should do, which is listening to podcast.

[01:09:40] Antoine: It's something that I do quite a, quite a lot and I do it on some of them on crypto, but most of them actually on company building. Because as I, as I mentioned, like, I think the reason why we are like where we are is, is mostly due to the right thing that we did on how we, we hired and how we structured the company and so on.

[01:10:04] Antoine: And so there's more success that comes from that side of things and doing this right. Than having an amazing vision on where crypto will go and making a big bet. Obviously, this is part of it. And we're passionate about crypto. And I think that we are very, very deep expert, especially when it comes to the, the, the regulated side of things and the data side of things, but yeah, like podcast podcast are definitely my go to thing and then we have kind of the chance to operate in like different, different countries.

[01:10:32] Antoine: And so I kind of live between 3 cities basically. Paris, where I'm originally from, London where I live and New York, where I spend a lot of my time. And so I have in these three cities, I have also like group of friends and, and, and, you know, like fellow CEOs and Founders that I'm very, very close with. Could be crypto, in crypto.

[01:10:55] Antoine: It could be not in crypto and spending time with these guys, it was also kind of like a way to, to, to learn about others, to understand, to see problems before they come and also a little bit, sometimes it's a way to like to confess and tell stories that otherwise like not a lot of people will understand.

[01:11:13] Umar: Are you sometimes surprised by how successful you've been over? I mean, 2021 is not a long time ago. Think about what you were doing like in 2020, are you sometimes surprised? And, you're a first time Founder. You don't have a Co Founder and, you know, a lot of these startups have Co Founders.

[01:11:33] Umar: How have you, navigated also without a Co Founder? And that's the last question. 

[01:11:38] Antoine: Sure, so I don't have a Co Founder, but I have like incredible people that are across the company, but especially, especially in our, in our leadership team, very early on, they are like a couple of a couple of people that joined that joined the team around 2020, 2021, like our CTO, Luca, our CRO Hemant that had like a very transformative impact on, on, on the company and without them, you know, like it's, the company will not be where it is today.

[01:12:13] Antoine: And then with the people who join after that and the other people that we have in our, in our leadership team, we have an amazing leadership team with incredible people. 

[01:12:24] Antoine: And yeah, without them, without them, you know, I would be nowhere. So like, I'm very, very grateful to, to, to have them. I think that the solo founder thing, I think it's, It's good.

[01:12:36] Antoine: It's good because it's especially when you are like in the very, very, very early markets like this, when you require a lot of like conviction on, on things like, it requires just to it's it's easier to just go, go, go, go, go and don't so you don't have any like constant debate with your Co Founders. And should we do this?

[01:12:52] Antoine: Which we do? Should we do that? Because it's when the market is especially in like 2020, 2019, the market was so early, like you had all the reasons of the world to not do what we're doing. And, and actually at the very early days in the company, there's a guy who was working with every guy that was kind of owning tech.

[01:13:08] Antoine: And, and he left after a few months because, because of this, because he was kind of always debating on like, should we do this? Should we do that? Do you think crypto would work? Like, you know, it's like, fuck that. Like, should we, we're not here to ask these questions. Like, let's go, go, go and see, see what happens.

[01:13:22] Antoine: And so the solo founder enables to go fast and don't, don't spend too much time having like unnecessary conversation. But then the team, and especially the people that I mentioned, it's like without them, we'll be, we'll be nowhere. And so, yeah, am I surprised? Yeah, I'm surprised and grateful. And, but, you know, I'm also conscious that this is just the beginning.

[01:13:44] Umar: Yeah, thanks for sharing and people listening. If you want to work for Cryptio, which is a great company, they have 14 open positions. I'm currently seeing this on the website. And I mean, these are like all the roles, but the non technical roles, you, you also have like quite a few roles there.

[01:14:00] Umar: So do check it out. Antoine, thanks a lot for coming today. Has there been anything, we've spoken for a little bit more than one hour, but has there been anything that we didn't touch on that you'd like to mention to our listeners? 

[01:14:13] Antoine: No, I think that we covered a lot indeed, if you want to.

[01:14:17] Antoine: If you want to work, if you want to work with us, feel free to ping me or anyone in the team anytime. If you can't, if you don't see on the website, a job that like kind of clicks with you might have others. So like, it's maybe also worth, pinging us and, um, Yeah. I think that we talked about it.

[01:14:36] Antoine: It was a, it was a pleasure to, to be back on the, on the show and I'm looking forward to coming to come back maybe in a few years. 

[01:14:44] Umar: Yeah, definitely. You know, usually I like to end the podcast by asking the guests about their favorite quote or Maxim. The first time you were here you shared that you shared a maxim that resonates within the company, which is, having a curiosity mindset.

[01:15:00] Umar: So that's like a mindset that you try to preach or implement to everyone. I'm not sure if I have to ask you for a second one today. If you have one, that's floating around in your head, please do. Otherwise I'll ask you if you could share, how could people reach out to you and where should they go to learn about Cryptio?

[01:15:18] Antoine: Yeah. Do we have a new Maxim? I don't know. Well, we have this kind of, it's not like a Maxim, but it's like, it's, it's part of the culture and value thing that we have in internally, but when you're doing something like it's worth like doing it well, basically, so, as I mentioned, we have this culture around like autonomy.

[01:15:42] Antoine: And, we're expecting people to execute and to execute well, and be and be transparent when they have limitations. And so it has people that when it's you're doing something, it's worth doing it well, Yeah, they can reach in, they can reach out on LinkedIn. They can reach out on Twitter. And they can reach out to anyone in the team and to me as well.

[01:16:00] Umar: Perfect. Well, thanks a lot for your time Antoine today and, we'll be in touch. 

[01:16:06] Antoine: Cheers, Umar. Thank you very much.