Léopold Wenger from Cometh on Becoming a Web3 CFO

[00:00:00] Umar: Welcome to the Accountant Quits, brought to you by the Web3CFO Club, a community by Request Finance, with a curated community of Web3 CFOs from companies like Aave, The Sandbox, Binance, Consensys, Ledger, and many more, joining this club will allow you to network and learn best practices on web3 financial operations.

[00:00:24] Umar: On The Accountant Quits podcast, we discuss how blockchain will impact the accounting profession and how accountants should prepare themselves for the future of work. My name is Umar, your host, and even if some might refer to me as the accountant gone rogue, my job is to provide you with the blockchain knowledge that you need that will be relevant for the accounting industry as a whole.

[00:00:47] Umar: Welcome to Episode 61, the 4th episode of the Becoming a Web3 CFO series. In this series, I'm delving into the inspiring stories of accounting and finance professionals who transitioned from traditional finance to the exciting world of decentralized finance. If you've previously worked as an accountant or auditor at a Big4 or other accounting firm, you've been through a rigorous and highly sought after working methodology and have a huge boost on your resume.

[00:01:16] Umar: You're now equipped to get your foot in the door of most firms looking to hire a Financial Controller, Head of Finance, or even a CFO. Being a product of Big4 myself, I have no regret looking back at the long hours and pressure my audit assignments meant, but in the long term, the lower salaries as compared to an industry role was a turn off.

[00:01:37] Umar: With opportunities in web3 for accountants surging, today I have the pleasure to be speaking with Leopold Wenger, the CFO at Cometh, a web3 development platform to build web3 games and dapps. Just like me, Leopold started his career as a financial auditor, and his desire to learn emerging technologies like blockchain and AI meant he was taking his career growth into his own hands and not remaining complacent.

[00:02:05] Umar: For our conversation today, I will ask Leopold to share his story, which can hopefully inspire other accountants and auditors from Big4 companies to also make that transition. In this episode, you will learn how Leo fell into the web3 rabbit hole, his challenges when first starting out as a CFO, how Leo has built his financial reporting stack at Cometh for crypto transactions, and the tool he uses, internal controls when transacting with digital assets, any advice for accountants to transition to web3 and much more. 

[00:02:40] Umar: Leo, welcome and thanks for making the time to be here. 

[00:02:44] Leopold: Yeah, thank you too. Glad to be here for the podcast and thank you very much Umar for the invitation. 

[00:02:50] Umar: You're very much welcome. Before we dive into your web3 experience, I'd like to start with how you first started your accounting career.

[00:02:59] Umar: And like I said in the intro, we both have that in common that we started our auditing careers at Deloitte. In your case, what's interesting is that you helped to deploy analysis tools for auditing during your time there. And you were at the forefront of digital innovation. You also wrote a paper on AI and auditing and how machine learning can be used for fraud detection.

[00:03:22] Umar: Can you share how your experience at Deloitte as a financial auditor, and you were also a digital ambassador in France, led you to blockchain and why you then became interested with web3? 

[00:03:36] Leopold: Yeah. Thank you for the question. Apparently the link between machine learning, fraud and web3 is not very obvious, but of course it was the beginning of a journey for me because I've studied corporate finance.

[00:03:48] Leopold: I was very focused on accounting and corporate law. And it was as my first job, I had to jump into the technological and the digital ecosystem, helping audit teams to implement that mining tools. So it was kind of a seed that was plant. And it was the beginning of something for me to interest to the technology, to see what was happening in the accounting ecosystem.

[00:04:13] Leopold: You know, when you work in a Big4 firm, they have a lot of resources, and when a company like Deloitte or Ernst&Young say we are going to make investments in research and development to improve our productivity and to have a better risk assessment. As they deploy a lot of resources, 

[00:04:32] Leopold: It was a very interesting playground with companies that you do not see if you are in classic audit firm or a little accounting firm, because you, often you have most SMBs. And, in Big4 company, you audit big listed companies with very specific problematic. So it was, it was the beginning of something very great.My technological education. 

[00:04:56] Umar: All right. So now we're in October of 2020, your interest in AI at the time and AI for accounting specifically led you to resign from your role at Deloitte and join Chaintrust as the Head of Finance, which is a platform for digital invoicing and automated accounting for your bank accounts.

[00:05:19] Umar: After two years in that role and in October of 2022, a new opportunity opens up for the first time in web3 and now, and you're now hired as the CFO at Cometh. What motivated you to transition from your previous role? And what I want to ask you is what were the prerequisites in terms of blockchain knowledge to get this job?

[00:05:40] Leopold: Well, I think that concerning the job, you have to distinguish two things. The first one is the fact that Cometh is a startup. And the second one is that Cometh is a web3 startup. Concerning the startup side that you have to contrary to a more traditional companies or big companies, when you are CFO in a startup, you have to accept that you have a lot of mission.

[00:06:06] Leopold: Most of the time, the CFO also obviously is in charge of the financing a strategy, but you can also have all the legal scope of the company. You also have the HR of most of the time you, take up the HR of other office management tasks, for instance, it's very diversified and you have to, to be flexible on your job.

[00:06:27] Leopold: So this is the first thing that is important to understand when you want to apply as a CFO in a startup and for Seed or SeriesA startup, most of the time. 

[00:06:38] Leopold: On the web3 side, what you have to know is when I applied to this job, I mean, if you take my experience as web3, it was absolutely, it was about zero.

[00:06:49] Leopold: I mean, I had no professional experience in web3. I only made some investment in Exchange four years ago, but no real professional experience. But it was something that Cometh liked because I had a risk based approach. And according to them, it was not something really hard to deep dive in, and they just wanted someone to be able to have a risk based approach, a kind of degen ecosystem.

[00:07:14] Leopold: Because if you take, for instance, treasury management, if you want to invest by yourself and to make some good investment and multiple on your investment, you maybe will invest in ETH or BTC. And maybe you can also invest in Memecoin if you want to make big multiple, but in the corporate context, if the crypto treasury is essential for your business, you have to take care of it.

[00:07:40] Leopold: You have to assess the risk of volatility and to balance your treasury with stable coin and so on. So this is something that guys at Cometh were searching, someone who were able to understand technically what happened in the web3 ecosystem, but with enough risk, risk based approach to protect Cometh from any risk in the web3 ecosystem.

[00:08:05] Umar: Okay. So that's very interesting and positive for a lot of accountants who don't have like web3 experience, so that's really a takeaway that I want the listeners to have today is, yeah, you don't necessarily to have worked at a web3 company before, but you can get your foot in the door.

[00:08:23] Umar: I want to ask you also for your first challenges you encountered when you started out, given that you didn't have any experience. So looking back on, let's say the previous TradFi role that you have at Chaintrust, you had very efficient tools with great UX and UI. And now you come in web3 and of course there are more and more tools on the market today.

[00:08:48] Umar: But how did you have to adapt and how would you compare that with the role of a CFO in web2? 

[00:08:55] Leopold: Yes. When I started at Cometh, you know, most of the time you talk with the CEO and you ask him about the, what happened before you arrived, the equity stories, the financing story of the company. And one of the first job I did is, it was about deep dive into the bank statement of the previous months and previous years to see how the company spend this money and what was the behavior, the cash burn analysis of the company.

[00:09:21] Leopold: And I was like, okay, where is the cash? And Jerome, the CEO said, oh, but we raise in crypto. Okay. So explain. So everything was like that because before I arrive, Cometh made a $10million seed round based on their great achievement and web3 game that called Cometh Beyond. And all the game was on chain and the game was plugged to a DEX, decentralized exchange and to staking mechanism. 

[00:09:50] Leopold: It was very impressive and all the economy of the company was on chain. So for me, who came from the traditional finance, as you said, with a classical API connection between your accounting tools and your bank account and so on I was like, okay, the bank statements do not tell me so much information, but the block explorer is so much insightful for me. And I had to deep dive on it to understand how does it function, how to read a block explorer, how the company managed the wallet address and so on. So the blockchain part was very, very hard. And the second part was to understand how the company, because how the company managed the wallet in Cometh, because the wallet is the, like your login on the web2, and you do everything with your wallet. I mean, the marketing team managed the NFT collection. The dev team needs to spend some ETH to deploy smart contracts and so on.

[00:10:50] Leopold: And the finance need to manage the crypto treasury. So you have to understand who have the right on what, who own what. It was a very, a very big challenge for me to understand how the traditional finance schemes function in the web3. 

[00:11:06] Umar: That's very interesting. So you come in, you have no experience of using block explorers. The company has fundraised $10million in crypto. So the treasury is on chain. You've not really worked with wallets before, like a Gnosis Safe or an MPC wallet, like Fireblocks. 

[00:11:22] Umar: If you had to go back and maybe now advise someone just starting out their journey, where would you advise them to start? 

[00:11:31] Leopold: I think it depends about the company where the people apply. If you are in a developer's company, I think you will have the support of the team to help you to scrap the data, to understand how the blockchain functions, how to read an extract from a Block Explorer.

[00:11:47] Leopold: But if you are, for instance, in a consulting firm that advise companies in web3, I think that it depends of the maturity and the knowledge you have in house. And the more you have developers and experienced people in web3, I think the more you can trust them to help you in your task.

[00:12:05] Leopold: But if you are in company without these resources in intern, I think you should be helped by a software editors. I think that today editors like Cryptio, like Request Finance are we also have in France, Waltio. There are, I think that after four years of development, tools are, I mean, equal to traditional finance tools.

[00:12:29] Leopold: I do not use this tool because I have developers that help me on this subject at Cometh, but I've already seen demos and it's very impressive to see how web3 is on an equal footing in terms of UX compared to a Spendesk or a Pennylane or something like that. 

[00:12:46] Umar: All right, perfect. Next, I want to go through how you manage the financial reporting in crypto.

[00:12:51] Umar: So, like I mentioned in the intro, Cometh is a web3 development platform for developers to build web3 games. Now we spoke before and you just mentioned it right now that you don't use some of these tools. And so I think it's very interesting that how, so you don't use tools like sub ledgers, like Cryptio, Bitwave, Cryptoworth, and you've instead built an in house product for tracking and labeling your on chain transactions based on open source tools and free APIs.

[00:13:22] Umar: Could you provide us a walkthrough of your token inflows and outflows and the process you've laid out for your financial reporting? 

[00:13:33] Leopold: Well, yes, I can. It depends of the request, because if you just want to know at just now, for instance, if you, if we want now to know how much there is on our wallet, I just have to go for instance, on a browser like Ziff Debank, I don't know if you know them, it's a company financed by a Rabby wallet and you, you have, uh, or maybe Sonar Watch, maybe you know them.

[00:13:56] Leopold: This is free tools that allows you to have an idea of of what is the balance of your wallet at an instant, precisely, but if you want to build something with clean data and historical data, you have to go deeper in integration. I mean, you have to scrap the data on a block explorer. You have to scrap the price from an exchange or a provider like CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap.

[00:14:23] Leopold: You have to clean the data because now if you go to an Explorer, you can see that most of the time you have about hundreds of scams on your wallet. And then corporate context, it's the same. You, we have to clean, I think about 60 percent of the transaction are scams on our wallet. Then you have to choose the token you want to report because sometimes you have airdrop from other protocol or some airdrop from partners or sponsorship, but the value for the accounting is non significant.

[00:14:55] Leopold: So you will not lose your time to, to report them. And the last thing you have to do is to, as you say, to label each transaction, each address you have interaction with. Each protocol you have interaction with. So it's a very huge work for the first time you do it, then you just have to do it regularly.And it's okay. 

[00:15:20] Umar: How much time did you take to develop your own sub ledger? And what chains would you use? 

[00:15:26] Leopold: For the first time last year, we made it for the first time. And it was about three months. There were, there was a developer. Worked on this project during three months only on this project this year to report all the financial year, it was only two weeks because we only had to have a look at the address and the protocol. We didn't register in the book last year and to label the address that were not in the system. And what was the other question?

[00:15:57] Umar: I think I was asking you. What are the chains that you use? The chain, 

[00:16:02] Leopold: we are on EVM chain only, and we have most of our interaction are in Ethereum mainnet. We also had some interaction and Optimism because for our games for a moment, we, we were making a research and development to build our own Layer2 based on the optimistic rollup and the Optimism stack.

[00:16:23] Leopold: But finally, we, we build our Layer3 on Arbitrum on L3 Orbit technology. Okay. So now most of the transactions are on Ethereum, Arbitrum, 

[00:16:34] Umar: uh, All right. So once you've now labeled all your on chain transactions, how would you be exporting all these information into your accounting software? I know in France, a lot of companies use an accounting software called Pennylane.

[00:16:49] Umar: Would you be outsourcing this function for preparation of the annual financial statements to an external CPA firm in France? 

[00:16:59] Leopold: Of course, I have the help of my chartered accountant. But the transaction as a translation from block explorer to accounting standards is done by our developers. As we said in introduction, I used to work in data mining at Deloitte.

[00:17:14] Leopold: Then I worked for a software editor in accounting automation. That's called Chaintrust. So I had, it was a chance for me, but I had a strong knowledge in how to manage accounting data and how to standardize operation and to automate operation and accounting data sets. And another fact is that in France, I don't know how it is in other countries.

[00:17:37] Leopold: But in France, we have a standard, the fiscal administration said that the accounting general ledger have to be in a specific format. So you just have to take your, your extraction from the block explorer and to give the some rules to your script, to your Python script. And to say that this kind of context, you define context.

[00:17:59] Leopold: And you say that when you have this context in the data set of the block Explorer, it will be translated into this kind of accounting operation. And then you make the, the, the transition and it's done on a spreadsheet. And then you just have to import the spreadsheet on Pennylane. 

[00:18:16] Umar: Okay. Very interesting.

[00:18:17] Umar: When I used to work in the Netherlands, when we had to file it to the tax authorities, the format used there was something called XBRL. I know it's like an international format as well. I'm not sure whether you'd be using XBRL in France as well, but anyway, 

[00:18:34] Umar: Next, I want to go into setting internal controls. So as a former auditor, you will agree with me on the adage of auditors which is if it's not documented, it's not done. 

[00:18:47] Umar: For companies transacting in digital assets, it's important for them to have a wallet management policy where basically you would document the process on who can generate new keys, storage, encryption, and who are the signers of a transaction, let's say.

[00:19:02] Umar: In terms of setting internal controls for safeguarding the company's assets and to ensure the accuracy of your financial statements, in your experience so far, do you have some best practices to share when companies start to transact in digital assets? 

[00:19:19] Leopold: Yes, I think that more generally speaking, you have to, to have a good cyber security policies in your web3 company because as you said, there is all the risk around wallet.

[00:19:30] Leopold: But when you have a wallet and you use, for instance, a browser wallet, like Metamask, you can have some people, I mean, a hacker is able to catch your key in some condition. So this is very important to have a global cyber security policies and at Cometh that we do is. First, we raise awareness about the best practice about how you should manage your keys.

[00:19:58] Leopold: Why is it important to set a screen lock on your laptop? Why it is important to not to copy, anywhere, your key on your, your seed phrase and how you should manage your secrets. Of course, there is a, also we do recommendations to our employees saying that, okay, there is a multi sig, but the multi sig is managed by a signers like your Ledger and your Metamask. 

[00:20:24] Leopold: We offer a ledgers in the welcome pack to all our employees to allow them to have something very secure to sign the transaction. There is also the problem of gas fee, because if the market team needs to send an NFT, if the developers need to pay gas for a smart contact deployment, they need gas fee and we've put in place earlier inside Cometh.

[00:20:47] Leopold: Meaning that you can not spend much than you need to pay a transaction and to save the treasury of Cometh. Yeah, this is, I mean, we try to, to have a large scope of, of policies. As I said, awareness, hardware, providing, security of the laptop, best practices and to separate people who need to sign to the function.

[00:21:10] Leopold: So the people have a signer like an EOA or a Ledger and the function, I mean, a developer, a marketing teammate, have a Safe Multi-Sig to operate. Because one of the, the most important risk in web3 company is also social engineering. And if someone leaves the company and the access are still someone can still have access to his email or so on.

[00:21:34] Leopold: It's the beginning of your problem in the company. So you have also to think to social engineering, to the fact that people leave the company and you can cut the access to the multisig by revoking the key and so on. This is very complex to put in place. 

[00:21:49] Umar: Before we continue, we'll take a quick commercial break from our sponsor.

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[00:23:32] Umar: This morning I was speaking to one previous accountant or auditor at a Big4 company who told me he also quit his job and a few months ago he had someone from Consensys come and give a talk on blockchain and he became a bit tired of audit and he wants to quit and learn blockchain. 

[00:23:51] Umar: And you have a lot of past colleagues at Deloitte who today they look at you, they're like, wow, Leo, we saw you going to speak at Ethereum foundation last year at Mazars. We see you coming on The Accountant Quits podcast. Like they look up to you and they want to know, how did you do it? So for, yeah, any accountants, auditors listening, if you had any advice to share to them, if they want to reinvent themselves basically or change their career, where should they start?

[00:24:25] Leopold: Most of the time when people are reluctant to leave these firms like Big4, this is because they love the comfort. Even you heard that you have 70 hours work per week and so on. It's true, but, but it's very comfortable to work in this kind of company. Because if you work hard, I mean, the resources are here.

[00:24:46] Leopold: You know, where you will be the next week. You know, who will be your customers the next month. If you work tonight, you can eat to the restaurant and to make the, to submit the expense to the firm and you will be reimbursed. It's very comfortable. Maybe when you have a family life, it's different, but when you are young, it's very comfortable. 

[00:25:05] Leopold: And you learn a lot of things. You meet a lot of financial direction in big listed companies. So it's very interesting. But when I talk to my friend and especially the one who are still in this kind of companies, they just, they just love the comfort and they fear to, to leave this company and to be in the chaos.

[00:25:25] Leopold: Because the absolute opposite of Deloitte is start up. Start-up is chaos, Deloitte is the army. It's comfortable, it's very structured. This is just a question of personality. And you just have to try and believe me, if the startup is not for you, you just can come back to the company and obviously another Big4 will hire you.

[00:25:47] Leopold: So no problem. 

[00:25:49] Umar: Okay. Very good advice. So if they hate their job currently at the Big4, stop complaining, take a leap of faith, join a startup, learn new technologies like blockchain.I want to move on to regulation in France.

[00:26:02] Umar: So in France, where Cometh is based, if your business offers digital asset services or you're a token issuer, you would qualify as a digital asset service provider, or in French, I will translate it. It's prestataire de service sur actifs numériques. So short form for PSAN. For example, such companies would be exchanges, custodians, on and off ramp providers, and even I noted portfolio management services for crypto.

[00:26:32] Umar: Can you explain how Cometh would fall under PSAN, the regulatory burden it places on the company, and the different requirements for reporting? 

[00:26:43] Leopold: Yeah, Well, the subject of PSAN is, is quite obvious for us because most of the customers or potential customers we are talking to are big companies with great ambition.

[00:26:57] Leopold: And when you talk to big companies, they will choose apparently the provider with the most advanced technology, but also the most secured companies and regulation is a way for us to have an argument saying that, okay, we are PSAN, you can trust Cometh. We have internal policies to ensure cyber security, to ensure anti money laundering risk and so on.

[00:27:24] Leopold: So it reassured them, they say, okay, we can trust Cometh both for the regulation and both for the technical problematic. So for big companies, it's very important, for institutional, because one of the trendy activities in 2024 for this bull run is RWA, a real world asset. And companies like BlackRock are very interesting and they start to invest in this technologies.

[00:27:52] Leopold: These people will be interested in having a custodial regulated partners to support their, their wallet needs. So this is the first part of the, of the answer. And you, you are talking about regulation and it's for me, the opportunity to talk about is this schizophrenia in France. Because what is very interesting, all the people three or five years ago said, okay, France had put in place a regime, which is PSAN.

[00:28:17] Leopold: It's very interesting. We will establish our headquarter in France, in Europe, it will be okay. And finally, when they arrived in France, okay, there is a PSAN, but no bank want to open an account for web through company. No insurance want to provide you an insurance. It's very complex for us to have a tooling like payment service provider, because we want to provide people a solution to let them buy NFTs with credit card.

[00:28:44] Leopold: So, we were talking with Stripe, with Checkout, with Mollie, with all the PSP in Europe, and they all say, okay, you are a web3 company. You are, you raise red flag everywhere in my AML matrix, I apologize, I can't onboard you. So even you have a regulator that said, yeah, yeah, there is a PSAN coming in France.

[00:29:04] Leopold: The other actors regulated by other instance, like the Banque de France and so on saying, are saying that, no, I don't want to open an account. I don't, I don't want to give you an insurance. So it's very hard to be tooled with a PSP and so on, to have a bank account, to be, like could be in traditional finance.

[00:29:22] Leopold: It's very, it's very strange. How do you say, schizophrenia? 

[00:29:27] Umar: In the end, were you able to open a bank account? And if so, which bank account did you go with? 

[00:29:33] Leopold: Yes, the chance we have is that one of our investors, VC investors, invested in a new bank called Memo Bank, which is a French neo-bank. And previously we had a bank account in traditional bank like the BNP.

[00:29:50] Leopold: And when we made the seed round, part of the round was in the fiat. So we received millions euros, in a bank account and the bank keep the fund during, I think it was six or eight months because, they were saying, Oh, you're a web3 company. It's very high risk of, AML. We can't give you the money now.

[00:30:08] Leopold: We are like, okay, we have corporate documents saying that we made a fund raise, so this money is absolutely legit. So we tell our, one of our investors says, okay, I'm going to talk to the CEO of the bank I've invested in and we'll have a bank account. But most of the time that's what web3 startup do is that they lie saying they, they are just technical provider or just advisor, but they do not mention web3 or blockchain just to open the bank account.

[00:30:41] Leopold: And then they wait a few months and they, they write on their landing page. Okay. We are crypto. We are blockchain. But before that, at the beginning, you, you don't say anything. 

[00:30:52] Umar: Yeah. Never mentioned the C word. How do you spell the name of the bank again? 

[00:30:58] Leopold: Which one? Memo bank. Okay. Memo Bank. Okay.

[00:31:05] Umar: Because, yeah, I had someone the other day ask me for crypto friendly bank in France and I wasn't sure which one to, to tell him. 

[00:31:13] Leopold: Yeah. But you have another one, which is a Banque Delubac, which is very crypto friendly, but the counterparts is that they are very, very expensive. I mean, five times the normal market price of the bank.

[00:31:26] Umar: How do you spell it? 

[00:31:31] Leopold: Delubac I guess.

[00:31:34] Umar: Thanks for sharing. I want to ask you, are payments in crypto allowed in France? For example, at Cometh right now, would you be paying employees or other vendors in crypto? 

[00:31:44] Leopold: Employees, no, because most of our employees need cash to pay their rental. We have very high seniority and most of our employees have children.

[00:31:55] Leopold: So we are in a context where everybody needs cash. So we do not have any payments in crypto for employees, but for suppliers, we do have, especially on the gaming activity. We have two type of actors. That want absolutely to be paid in cryptos. The first one is a sponsorship for the gaming tournament and so on.

[00:32:16] Leopold: They all want cryptos in the gaming, web3 gaming ecosystem. When you, you organize a tournament and you are sponsored by anyone, they, often they ask cryptos and the other suppliers that always ask us for cryptos are freelance. I mean, we outsource most of the artistic production of our game and artists are all around the world.

[00:32:41] Leopold: I mean, we have artists, we worked with artists in the East of Europe, in Asia, in South of America, and all asking for cryptos. So we pay them with USDC, USDT. 

[00:32:54] Umar: Perfect. For the last topic of today, Leo, I want to ask you how you are seeing the Metaverse industry shape up for the upcoming year. So in 2022, we had an explosion of Metaverse companies.

[00:33:08] Umar: We also then saw the emergence of the play-to-earn model. We saw VCs flocking to Metaverse builders in 2022. And I was reading a report by the S&P Global Market Intelligence, which reported that this went down by 87 percent in 2023. On the other hand, reports from McKinsey suggested that by 2030, the metaverse could generate 4 to 5 trillion in consumer and enterprises use cases.

[00:33:36] Umar: I'm a big believer that we're moving towards this future. We already in the metaverse right now, but right now we're just looking at it. Soon we'll be fully experiencing it. You have any predictions, let's say on the upcoming M&A cycle for gaming companies and good token economics ensure mainstream adoption for gaming.

[00:33:57] Leopold: Well, this is something we didn't mention previously when we, we talked about the skills and the knowledge you have to, to work in startup, but of course, surely you are talking, to it now. There is a financing strategy of the startup concerning the prediction for M&A and fundraise in the web3 ecosystem.

[00:34:16] Leopold: For the metaverse and for the web3 gaming ecosystem in general, it will be the next trendy investment in the ecosystem. I mean, if you were at NFT Paris, everybody's say at the end of all talk that the mass adoption will be through gaming. It was a case at ETH Denver. It was also the case in many, many talk and in many events.

[00:34:39] Leopold: Gaming is I think one of the, with DeFi, one of the most promising topics for mass adoption on, on blockchain. As you say, it will be, something that VCs and investors will take of it. And, if you go to the news, you will see that Immutable and Polygon have opened a venture fund of 100 million to invest in web3.

[00:35:03] Leopold: Also, Arbitrum announced one or two weeks ago that they are launching a 400 million fund for web3 gaming. So this is something very big in the ecosystem. And I think that they will have some very good news in the next coming month. And especially for Cometh, approached by a listed company in France, who was very interesting in the web3 mechanism for gaming. 

[00:35:32] Leopold: And we, I can't tell now the name of the company because we are still under negotiation and signature. But I can say that listed companies in entertainment are really interesting in the, in the web3 gaming. 

[00:35:48] Umar: In terms of token economics, do you know some games right now who've come up with, let's say a different approach as to the ones we knew of with the play to earn model that exploded in two years ago. 

[00:36:00] Leopold: I don't know if tokenomics and play to earn will, continue to, to attract people because most of the time it's like meme coin. You have to be about the first people you have to be a very, very quick. And this is the past years shows that it's not a sustainable model most of the time. 

[00:36:18] Leopold: And in addition, regulators, for instance, in France, we will have a specific legal framework for Web3 gaming that we'll call, Jonum. And in the Jonum context, you are not, you should not put ERC 20 or DeFi mechanism into your games because it will be very restricted. But I think that NFTs and collectibles are more promising than ERC20 in games.

[00:36:45] Leopold: I mean, people come in a game, they spend with a credit card to buy a collectible or digital asset. They spend hours and hours playing your game. And then they go to the marketplace and they sell their NFTs in the marketplace. And I think this is the most logical economy of a game for now. Maybe some editors will show us something different in the coming months.

[00:37:10] Leopold: But for now, I think that that brings value to, to you as a player is the time, the time you spend to your, to the game, that value next to your NFT, you can sell on the marketplace and so on. 

[00:37:24] Leopold: Yeah. I completely agree with you. 

[00:37:25] Umar: Leo. I'm looking at the time. The time is passing. I'd like to thank you for, for coming on the show today and sharing your experience, and the tips and tricks for being a CFO in web3.

[00:37:36] Umar: There's a last question that I like to ask my guests before they leave is, do you have a favorite quote or let's say a maxim that you live by? 

[00:37:44] Leopold: Oh, very interesting. I think that the one I love is wait and see. It's specific to the startup context because in a startup, you have a lot of interaction with your ecosystem.

[00:37:55] Leopold: You have some big deals on the table, but you don't know if it will be signed or not. You have a huge discussion with investors, but you don't know whether they will invest or not. So my favorite, my favorite maxim in the context of startup is wait and see, because you can't predict the future. You can just give all the resource you have and to, to make all the effort you can to give value to your, to your company, to your business, and then see if it's a return on investment or not.

[00:38:27] Leopold: But yes, this is my favorite quote. 

[00:38:31] Umar: It reiterates the fact that you're a risk taker and, I hope for the listeners today, your story has inspired them and yeah, they can look up to your transition from Deloitte to web3 and being very successful today in your role. 

[00:38:45] Umar: If people want to reach out to you, they want to learn more about Cometh, how should they do so? 

[00:38:51] Leopold: I think if you are from the traditional world, you can go through LinkedIn. I'm pretty accessible, but you can also reach me through a telegram or WhatsApp or whatever. If you have my contact, or if not, you can just send me maybe an email at leopold@cometh.Io. And, uh, maybe I will answer you if I have the time. 

[00:39:14] Umar: Perfect. Thanks a lot for sharing. And thanks for coming in today. Thank you. 

[00:39:18] Leopold: Thank you Umar.

[00:39:19] Umar: I would like to thank everyone for listening to this episode. You will find all the links of the episode, show notes, and transcript on the website of The Accountant Quits at theaccountantquits. com. 

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