Episode 82

Managing Data in a Multi-Blockchain World with Noves

Managing Data in a Multi-Blockchain World with Noves

What we discuss with Ben Roy

As the number of new blockchains and protocols continues to surge, accountants face an increasingly complex challenge in reconciling on-chain data. 

With no universal standard for blockchain data, and significant variations in how different chains operate, the task becomes even more daunting.

Accountants are not engineers, they rely on tools like sub-ledgers and tax tracking platforms to handle crypto accounting and tax compliance. 

To remain efficient, they need to bypass low-value data processing work and focus on delivering actionable insights for their organization & clients.

Noves offers infinite scalability in on-chain data coverage, enabling seamless retrieval and transformation of data from any chain. 

Instead of merely providing raw data, Noves enriches and standardizes it into useful formats tailored for accounting and tax purposes.

To help us understand how to navigate through managing data in a multi-blockchain world, I spoke with Ben Roy, the CEO & Co-Founder at Noves

With the number of blockchains & protocols expected to explode in the years to come, learn how accountants can manage onchain data through standardization for accounting & tax purposes. 

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Ben Roy
CEO & Founder @Noves
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Episode 82 | Managing Data in a Multi-Blockchain World with Noves

[00:00:00] Ben: The way that I see this problem is right now, I think most of the subledgers are kind of tackling multiple layers of a problem because there was no alternative in order to build the accounting part of things, namely being fetching raw data and then trying to turn it into something that's more usable.

[00:00:24] Ben: And my take on that is that we don't need the subledgers to all be doing that because they're all doing the same thing. I mean, you can be better than other people at it, but only up to the point that you basically have the data, right? And so to me, data providers need to tackle to sort of handle that conversion from this like technical format into a more normal world format.

[00:00:47] Ben: And then from there, subledgers and auditors and tax people can kind of take it and do the layer of things that they do. 

[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. Today's topic is on managing data in a multi blockchain world.

[00:01:08] Umar: As the number of new blockchains and protocols continues to surge, accountants face an increasingly complex challenge in reconciling on chain data. 

[00:01:18] Umar: With no universal standard for blockchain data and significant variations in how different chains operate, the task becomes even more daunting. 

[00:01:27] Umar: Accountants are not engineers. They rely on tools like subledgers and tax tracking platforms to handle crypto accounting and tax compliance. And to remain efficient, they need to bypass this low value data processing work and focus on delivering actionable insights for their organization and clients. 

[00:01:49] Umar: This is where Noves comes in. Noves offers infinite scalability in on chain data coverage, enabling seamless retrieval and transformation of data from any chain. Instead of merely providing raw data, Noves enriches and standardizes it into useful formats tailored for accounting and tax purposes. And to help us understand how to navigate through managing data in a multi blockchain world, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Ben Roy, the CEO and Co Founder at Noves.

[00:02:22] Umar: In today's episode, Ben will help us understand the current state of on chain data and how the different products can help you to retrieve, transform, and deliver data from any blockchain. Lastly, if you're new to this channel, I'd really appreciate your support to help us grow by liking this video and subscribing.

[00:02:41] Umar: Now enjoy my conversation with Ben.

[00:02:43] Umar: Ben, welcome. And thanks for taking the time to be here. 

[00:02:47] Ben: Hi, thanks. I'm happy to be here.

[00:02:49] Umar: To start, can you share your background, how you became interested in blockchain and what was the origin story of founding Noves?

[00:02:59] Ben: I'm a software guy by trade. I've been in software basically my whole life and quite, quite a while back, early days of Bitcoin, one of my friends gave a talk at a small event we were at and kind of pitched this, thing to everybody. And like a lot of people, I think I just found it to be a really

[00:03:18] Ben: intriguing, interesting kind of new idea and sort of been around the crypto space ever since. But for Noves, we were we were actually originally looking at operating a couple of funds in the space primarily on chain. And we bumped into this thing where none of the service providers were able to deal with any of the stuff that we were doing, I mean, any kind of like DeFi stuff or anything sort of interesting on chain you know, we were actually being told.

[00:03:52] Ben: That we could manage a $50million on chain fund by sending a spreadsheet over to the service provider that had all of our data in it. And then they would have people type it in and honestly, that just sort of like blew my mind that we were going to deal with money like that from a perfect digital record of everything we were doing by having humans, then type it into another system somewhere. And we started building a bunch of tech to support that. And ultimately we're really builders and creators and not money managers. So we ended up on the tech side of things and kind of let the fund, management side of everything go.

[00:04:31] Umar: Thanks for sharing. I want to start the episode with your take on the current state of blockchains, protocols and tokens. So Donald Trump just launched a meme coin, if no one listening heard about it and that meme coin is currently worth 7 billion.

[00:04:47] Umar: And that happened in the span of just a few days. So this might be like a watershed moment for every company and individual brand that crypto can now be used as a capital formation and customer bootstrapping mechanism. We're recording this episode to at the onset of what I anticipate can be a surge of new tokens and the same applies for blockchains. Avalanche, for example, is now pumping L1s like crazy. There's another project I recently came across called fluent.xyz. They support multiple EVMs. WASMs Solana virtual machines, all within a single execution environment. So without the need for bridging, I want to ask you, Ben, how do you see this landscape for new blockchains, protocols, and tokens shaping up and what additional challenges will accountants and taxpayers face to translate this raw on chain data?

[00:05:44] Ben: Okay. I'm going to start with the end of that and say that I think that accountants, tax, anybody working on any kind of reporting is definitely going to be staring down a long road of things getting worse before it gets any better. Um, There's certainly, you know, every reason to believe that we're going to see a continued proliferation of new chains from rollups and new EVMs that are able to launch with basically no, technical effort because there's platforms that will let them, you know, just automatically launch and run those.

[00:06:19] Ben: To all kinds of new I guess, combinations of things like you mentioned with Fluent or there's a couple others. Movement Labs. It's got, a multi EVM chain that's coming. Supra is running a multi EVM chain, so I think we're gonna see a lot more sort of combinations like that. And, you know, we're, we're at a point now where the base pieces of tech are stabilized enough, the base teams have been building on these things long enough. There's a lot of like work for developers to go from and to kind of build on top of. And so now we're starting to see people figure out ways to combine those in new ways and in, new layers, and all that sort of thing.

[00:07:03] Ben: That's great for us figuring out ways to accomplish apps and capabilities that we want to have. And it's a little scary if you are on the backside of that, trying to deal with the aftermath of all of these things that people are doing. And it's kind of always been, I think, where accountants have gotten to sit.

[00:07:25] Ben: Which is you've got people out there experimenting with things, building new stuff as fast as they can build it. With very little thought given to what anybody is going to do about that after the fact. And, you know, in a world where we have, you know, really a hundred and some couple hundred chains and looking towards a future of thousands of chains all in new, and interesting combinations in ways it's it's definitely going to get a lot worse from here.

[00:07:56] Umar: So the listeners of this podcast, they're mostly accountants, CFOs, and I want them to understand how on chain data flows from the node operators and ultimately into the subledgers that they use and the different tax tracking tools. We'll touch on Noves shortly, but for anyone maybe looking to build a subledger or tax tracking tool, I want them to understand why is blockchain data not formatted for accounting and tax reporting use. So what should they know about using node operators or third party data providers? Required to enrich the blockchain data and then categorizing them based on their type and associated metadata.

[00:08:40] Ben: Yeah. So I think, you know, the key idea here is that a blockchain is a, a blockchain is an execution environment. It's a place where people can run code. You think a little bit of it a little bit like like an app store, right? It's it's a place where people can build and deploy apps that do anything that they can think of, and it has the extra complication that it is running across open source software, mostly most of these chains are that can be downloaded and run by anybody.

[00:09:19] Ben: And all of these nodes have to agree on what is happening in that execution, right? And so the optimization point for blockchains is how do we effectively execute what needs to be executed. How do we do that securely? And how do we do that in a way where all of these nodes that make up the network can stay in agreement about it?

[00:09:45] Ben: And in order to do that stuff at any kind of scale, there are a lot of trade offs that you have to make. And one of those tradeoffs is how the data is stored and how the data is transmitted and how the data is dealt with. And generally that's done in a way that is as compact as possible. And usually suitability for humans and compactness are not exactly on the same place, right?

[00:10:13] Ben: They're kind of like on different ends of the spectrum. And so besides the fact that the people who are building the chains are mostly concerned about handling the execution they're also trying to optimize for that thing. They're really not trying to optimize for like, how are you going to do something with this data after the fact?

[00:10:30] Ben: And so that's kind of how we, we land in the place that we're in. This varies a little bit by chain, but especially if you look at like the EVM, which makes up probably most of the chains that a lot of people are dealing with. There's no real concept of indexing inside those nodes. So if you know exactly the piece of data that you want, You can go get that piece of data, but if you don't know if you want to say, tell me all the transactions that this wallet was involved in, the node itself has zero capability to do that.

[00:11:02] Ben: There's no sort of like search functionality inside there. And so the typical flow is you have to index that data, which basically means you've got to walk through the data from the beginning of time, you've got to examine every single transaction that's ever happened, and you have to build a map of every transaction and every wallet and what their interactions were so that later when you want to get the data, you have a way to go search for that data. 

[00:11:35] Ben: And so. Typically, this is different. If you look at Solana has some more capabilities for like searching for transactions, still not complete. There's a lot of stuff there where, you know, if you want to know all the token accounts that are associated with an account to find somebody's balances historically.

[00:11:55] Ben: You can't do it because it only has like the current state of those things. It doesn't have like the historical state. Move chains like Aptos and Sui also have some ability to search for transactions as do some of the Cosmos ones. But in any case, I guess they're all limited in their ability to find that information.

[00:12:14] Ben: And so we need a layer that rides on top of that, that reads all of the data on the chain and creates indexes that make it easier for us to find the things that we want.

[00:12:24] Umar: In the intro I mentioned that on chain data is not standardized. All blockchains are not created equal. And you also alluded to that. Yeah, how far are we from a future where data from all these different blockchains can be standardized? Is that even possible?

[00:12:41] Ben: Yes and no. I think that for sure the chains are never going to agree on how they do things because doing things in different ways incurs their own trade offs. I mean, that's, that's kind of part of the nature of things people are trying to optimize for certain scenarios, or they think about problems in certain ways.

[00:12:58] Ben: And so they build their systems, to kind of match up with those things. Having said that, I think that, you know, humans mostly deal with data in certain use cases, and they have like ideas about how that data works in those use cases. And so I think that generally we can map the underlying data and the way that the blockchains deal with them into a simpler way.

[00:13:30] Ben: Kind of like problem space of how we think about that data. I mean, accounting is a good example of that, right? Where regardless of the fact that everybody does their data in a different way and represents transactions and accounts differently, at the end of the day, there is some way to flatten everything into some sort of accounting entries that we can put in a ledger and work with.

[00:13:54] Ben: And, you know, , that mapping in between there is sort of like the difficulty and the challenge and you know, part of the problem that we've been working on all along is how do we create those mappings that sort of let us convert between the specific language of different blockchains and different sort of data domains or problem domains like accounting and tax or, you know, other situations as well.

[00:14:21] Umar: Like I speak with accountants, and sometimes they're looking for a subledger that maybe incorporates a specific blockchain. And sometimes that team will tell them, no, they don't. And it does take a bit of time sometimes to integrate like a new chain. In a future where, yeah, there's like a thousand chains, like you were referring to, what's the alternative for the tax accountant to quickly get access to the data?

[00:14:51] Ben: The way that I see this problem is right now, I think most of the subledgers are kind of tackling multiple layers of a problem because there was no alternative in order to build the accounting part of things or the subledger part of things they had to tackle the deeper problems, namely being fetching raw data and then trying to turn it into something that's more usable, I guess, and my take on that is that we don't need the subledgers to all be doing that because they're all doing the same thing.

[00:15:28] Ben: And it's not the kind of problem that I think, I mean, you can be better than other people at it, but only up to the point that you basically have the data right. Once the data is right, you can't actually make the data better than that. And so it's sort of just like table stakes. And right now I think the industry's not there yet, but at some point, that's going to be just a commodity service to say, well, look, I want this data in sort of like a ledger friendly format.

[00:15:58] Ben: And so to me, that's a problem that, that we've been tackling and that data providers need to tackle to sort of handle that that interpretation or that, that conversion from this like technical format into a more normal world format, and then from there, subledgers and auditors and tax people can kind of take it and do the layer of things that they do.

[00:16:22] Umar: Interesting. So I'll have two follow up questions. Accountants, sometimes they have the assumption that these subledger tools, they have it all figured and they can map all these popular protocols, smart contracts and just provide accurate, reconcilable data when you input a new wallet. So first for accounting firms.

[00:16:44] Umar: And I know I spoke with your co founder Christian, he told me that Noves is working with like different subledgers to provide data. I mean, you mentioned something interesting. So if subledgers are not meant to be working more on the data layer what do you think subledgers what's the role of the subledger then?

[00:17:06] Umar: Because we're always using like a traditional accounting software, like a Xero QuickBooks at the end to prepare financial statements. The role of the subledger is to fulfill what in this, chain of data. 

[00:17:21] Ben: So I would say that, so I'm going to caveat this by saying I'm not an accountant or work, work in the finance field at all right. But I think that there is the, the problem space of crypto accounting is, or, or crypto subledgers is like an extension of the existing problem space before crypto came along.

[00:17:49] Ben: So all of the problems involved in like valuing assets and like how you account for those things and how you choose to categorize those things and how you calculate cost basis and like all of those sorts of problems with their own unique sort of like crypto flavor. Like, okay, so you executed this complex DeFi transaction.

[00:18:13] Ben: There's two parts of that problem. The one part is retrieving the raw data about the DeFi transaction and then representing it in a way that a subledger can use. And then the second thing is, okay, now that I have that data, like, what in the world do I do with this? Like, what does this mean for my business or my customer?

[00:18:33] Ben: And so right now, subledgers are tackling both parts of those problems. And I think that the second part of that problem is, that is the business, right? It's like, how do we figure out how to use this data? Not so much like, how do we figure out that that was the data in the first place?

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[00:20:31] Umar: Now, in light of what we've just discussed on the explosion of different blockchains protocols, can you share how Noves has created this translation engine to be able to cope and convert on chain transactions into like something that accountants need and can be reported into their financials? 

[00:20:51] Ben: Yeah so, there's two things. I mean, one of the things we found when we started working with data is that you, you already said the same thing, which is nobody ever had all the things that we wanted. We would kind of, we'd figure something out and we'd find a partner and we'd start working with their data.

[00:21:06] Ben: And then we'd say, cool. And also this chain. And they'd say, yeah, we don't, we don't have the chain. We're not going to do that chain. And so then we were kind of back to square one. And Ultimately, the answer was there is nobody that has all of it. And so we're going to be forced to use multiple people, but we didn't want to build our software with like a bunch of different kind of like scattered things.

[00:21:28] Ben: And so we essentially built like a data aggregator that progressively standardized data as it moved up our stack, so the pieces that are very close to the chain, we have lots of different implementations that work with this provider and this provider in this format and that format and brings it into kind of like a somewhat standardized version and then the layers that are built on top of that standardized further.

[00:21:55] Ben: So, by the time the data gets to the very top, we have a very nice and consistent set of data, regardless of where that data is coming from. And the other thing that we did as we're building stuff is we we knew that we were going to have this problem where there was always going to be new stuff and it was going to be constantly changing.

[00:22:13] Ben: And so we designed from the very beginning for rapid assimilation of new things. So like, if there's like a new DeFi protocol, a lot of times we would hear from a subledger or someone that they might have like a two to four week lead time on getting that integrated or, or maybe, maybe longer. And so the way we built our systems, we can, you know, we can assimilate 200 new contracts that we've never seen in a day.

[00:22:43] Ben: And just rapidly on board stuff really quickly. Because we knew that that was kind of like the world that we were headed into. And so we designed our system around that specifically.

[00:22:54] Umar: And who are the customers of Noves today and by that, I just want the listener to better understand the difference between a subledger. Noves is not a subledger. You're working with subledgers to provide them with the DeFi data.

[00:23:11] Ben: Yeah. So we actually have a really broad set of, of use cases, but in this sort of realm specifically. So we would consider, you know, subledgers or other crypto tax accounting software as an ideal customer for us. We're probably the only data provider that runs reconcilers on our data streams.

[00:23:35] Ben: Like we'll pull wallets and actually reconcile the balances ourselves to make sure that everything ties out exactly because if they don't, then what are we even doing? But we also work directly with accountants and tax professionals with auditors, basically anybody that needs, you know, clean, accurate and complete data to plug into their application or into their workflows.

[00:24:01] Ben: We're, we're happy to do that. And we've always had a pretty big focus on the reporting side because like I mentioned, we started with the intention of doing a fund. So it's been a big focus area for us. And I think we have a pretty good understanding of how people on the financial side of the world think about their data and how they want that data to look.

[00:24:19] Ben: And so we've spent a lot of time and energy to produce data that looks and works the way that the financial world wants it to.

[00:24:27] Umar: All right. So I have a follow up question. In the case of these accounting firms and auditors that you mentioned, you said you helped them plug the data into the applications and workflows. What does applications and workflows mean here? And what's like the technical knowledge they would require before implementing Noves? In what format will you be providing the data? And then what happens after you provide them the data? Like perhaps they would have to run cost basis calculation or how would it actually work?

[00:24:56] Ben: Great question. So the answer is it depends. We have, you know, on the very simple end, we have a tool that will produce like a CSV export of data. And that comes in a format that is the way that an accountant or a tax person would typically want to see the data. It's not very blockchainy at all. It kind of, you know, fits into the, it's the sort of thing you could import directly into you know, existing software and we've certainly had people who have used our services. They pull that into a spreadsheet that some existing process they have that they were maybe filling manually before from some other worse process. And so this just lets them skip a lot of that. We do some nice stuff with our data.

[00:25:43] Ben: Like for, for most transactions, we produce like an English sentence that just tells you what it was. Like you deposited, you know, USDC into this liquidity pool or something, which when you're working with data makes it much easier to kind of like work quickly through things. I know we've worked with some people that use other subledgers that don't have chains that they wanted.

[00:26:05] Ben: And so they would use us to grab data from those chains and then just pull that straight into the subledger. And then we have had a couple other places that have actually had engineering teams and they can, you know, tie directly into our APIs to pull that data straight into their software. Kind of the gamut, depending on where people are at technically, what, you know, how they would choose to do that.

[00:26:27] Umar: Speaking about APIs, could you provide us, like, with a walkthrough of how a new client would have to onboard or implement these different APIs that you have, the different products that you also have? And yeah, the time it requires for them, the technical knowledge that they would need.

[00:26:44] Ben: Yeah. So a lot of it depends on who the customer is and what they're, you know, kind of what their existing team product and workflow is like. So on the easy end, like I said, if it's a if they're going to use like an, like an export. There's literally a UI, you log in the account, you put in the address that you want to get the export for, you click the button, we'll go gather all the data, and when it's done, you just download the file and drag it into your, you know, into your software or upload it into your spreadsheet or whatever.

[00:27:13] Ben: There's no. No integration and nothing to it. As far as like the APIs and stuff like that goes our stuff is pretty simple. We're not we're not really focused on people building very technical solutions. And so our APIs are pretty streamlined. To the specific use cases. I mean, I'll give you an example. 

[00:27:34] Ben: For reasons I guess maybe it's because originally Etherscan built the first API for this stuff. And so when they set it up, if you want to get a list of all the transactions for a wallet, you can go get the list of ones they sent. You can go get their token transfers. You can go get their internals. You can get the NFTs.

[00:27:54] Ben: And then you have these lists. They're slightly different. They're not all the same. You've got to merge them together. You've got to de dupe them. Like there's this whole process, right? So we have an end point that just says, give me all the transactions for this wallet. And you get one single list with every transaction that is in any way related to that wallet.

[00:28:14] Ben: And they all look the same and it's just one list and you're done. And so it's intended around the workflow, how people actually want to use it. Instead of being designed around, this is the data we have and how the data looks. Which is how most data companies, you have data companies, which are very technical, and then you have like finance people over here that just want data.

[00:28:35] Ben: And we sort of tried to come from that perspective instead of coming from the, well, this is what we've got angle. And so in general, the lift on our API is, is pretty simple compared to other people. Having said that, there's still some layers depending on where you are, like Solana is more complicated because you got to get all the token accounts and staking is separate and there's some stuff there that's a little bit inherent in the ecosystem and we simplify it as best we can, but there's still some hoops.

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[00:30:45] Umar: All right. I also want to touch on your positioning today against other data providers. So on The Accountant Quits, we actually have a tools page and Noves is listed there under the data category, but there's also some other companies like Octav, Datai network, not sure how to pronounce it. They just rebranded Cielo, TRES, Debank. So for the listeners to understand are you competing with those firms? Or are you competing with like third party node providers like the Infura, Alchemy? And how does Noves differentiate from all these different players?

[00:31:22] Ben: Well, so the answer is complicated cause each of them is a little bit different. Right. And we, we know a lot of those guys. The easy one is like Alchemy and Infura and those types of things are very low level. That's like, just give me the absolute raw data. I mean, Alchemy has APIs that, you know, are higher, a higher level than that.

[00:31:39] Ben: But they're also very focused on the technical side of things, not so much on the financial side. Some of the other ones you listed like Octav and those guys are more focused on the financial side. We, we are sort of competitive with them, but we're also not exactly competitive them. A lot of those guys we've talked about working together on some different data things.

[00:32:03] Ben: We have a lot more broad coverage than most other financial data providers. We also have a lot of automated systems for dealing with new stuff compared to like Octav, they have a system for letting users give them feedback about what different transactions are that they then use to try to like map things.

[00:32:25] Ben: They also provide a lot more higher level capabilities than we do. So they have a system for you know, collecting your data and sort of having it all together and being able to mark it up and things like that. And we don't do any of that stuff. We're just purely a data play. 

[00:32:40] Ben: And where we're actually heading looking forward is to be more formally a data aggregator kind of like the same concept as like you have for you have with 1inch or Odos or someone for swaps or like Jumper for bridging.

[00:32:56] Ben: Where you just go there, you say, look, this is what I'm trying to do. And then they say, well, here are all your options of how you can get those things. And you can kind of have that experience in one place. We're doing that for data access, where we're going to bring everybody else's data in all the different data providers and data sources.

[00:33:13] Ben: And provide a way to get access to all of them because we want what we always have wanted is the experience of one place for all the data. And it's just it's a difficult thing for anyone data provider to do. And so we want to be able to to kind of bridge that gap by making that possible by unifying everybody else's data.

[00:33:35] Ben: So in that way, I think we view everybody in the data space more or less as a potential partner for us.

[00:33:41] Umar: Yeah. Okay. That's a new product. I never heard of before. So data aggregator are like just like 1inch, but for data. Super interesting. Okay. Now there's a topic I also wanted to go through. So I would be remiss if I didn't touch on AI agents because it's kind of impossible to read a prediction for 2025 without encountering the word AI agents and how they're becoming increasingly sophisticated. In the context of this topic today, on managing the explosion of blockchains and protocols, how do you foresee AI agents to be used in the data collection and reconciliation process? And yeah, how do you foresee this impacting the workload of the crypto accountant?

[00:34:31] Ben: So this is kind of an interesting thing. I mean, we get asked all the time if we use AI for doing our mapping work and stuff like that. And the truth is we've had a trained model for our mapping work for probably a year. That's very good. By any kind of standard, like 93, 92, 93 percent accurate.

[00:34:53] Ben: The problem is if you tell an accountant that you were going to give them 93 percent accurate data they're not generally very excited about that idea, right? And so the trick, the trick with this whole thing with AI is that I don't think that we're going to see AI doing the actual data processing work in that sense, because it's not really what they're designed for, or at least not the current models are generally not set up for that kind of thing.

[00:35:23] Ben: What I think you're going to see is you're going to see agents increasingly equipped to work with the data tooling that's out there. We're doing some work. We're prototyping right now with, this project called FXN, which is about like agent to agent services. It's kind of like he told me I was talking with the founder. He said it was the Fiverr of agents or something like that, right? Where agents are able to find other agents that can do what they want to do. And so we're building an agent that can help other agents get data out of our pipelines that they need. So in that case, it's the sort of workflow that the agents are collaborating on versus like processing the data itself.

[00:36:07] Ben: And that way we can ensure that we're delivering accurate and correct data while still allowing the AIs to kind of like do the heavy lifting of connecting it from place to place. And I think that that's sort of the way that we're headed is how do we build. Our tools to be easier to use for agents, easier to work with for agents.

[00:36:30] Ben: I assume in the, the accountant, if I weren't building this and I were building something on the accounting or tax side, I would certainly be building agents that took a lot of the drudgery out of the, you know, going through the data and tagging the data and all kinds of stuff like that, which seems like that's probably a problem that will largely be solved this year.

[00:36:52] Umar: Are there projects building this right now? Or yeah, are there other interesting AI projects that an accountant, a CFO should be paying attention to?

[00:37:06] Ben: I'm not an expert on that part of it. I know I've seen a couple, it's a little hard, right? Because AI is the the buzzword that you slap on anything to try to get interest or you rebranded into to try to, you know, get a bigger raise or whatever. So it's, you really have to dig in a little to see where there is real work going on and where it's just buzz, but there's certainly enough things progressing in other areas that we do.

[00:37:32] Ben: I mean, we use AI and all of our coding stuff, of course. And the quality of that tells me that a lot of the more bookkeeping level work that is in those tools is, is going to be eliminated pretty soon I would think.

[00:37:46] Umar: Yeah, I agree. Ben, we are, yeah, we're coming close to the end of the episode. The topic for today was on managing data in a multi blockchain world, that was the title of the episode. 

[00:38:02] Umar: As closing thoughts, has there been anything that we didn't touch on that maybe you'd like to share with the listeners, or if there's, there's, an important milestone for Noves coming up that you'd like to share?

[00:38:13] Ben: Yeah, we've kind of talked about it a bit and we, and we've touched on it, but I think that the big piece is that we're, we're very focused on trying to bridge the gap between what it is that people want data for. What it is that people are trying to do with the data and the details of how that's implemented at the blockchain.

[00:38:33] Ben: And it's been largely ignored and we're kind of building that bridge. You asked about it earlier. How to handle all of these chains and all of the new things that are happening and what we're trying to do is build a standard where when you have a new chain, all you have to do is build a couple of connectors into the data system and then all of the rest of the conversions to financial data or to, you know, block explorer data or to wherever else is already handled by infrastructure that's been built once. So there's just that kind of that last mile, I guess, that you have to build on a per chain basis.

[00:39:16] Ben: And then the rest of it just sort of flows through on standards and that's what we're working on.

[00:39:20] Umar: All right, Ben. So thanks a lot for coming today. Just while preparing this episode was there's not a lot of resources today for accountants, CFOs to understand like on chain data. So yeah, I learned a lot just by preparing this episode. And if people want to reach out to you or get in touch with Noves, what's the best way to do so?

[00:39:42] Ben: Certainly can find me or find us on Twitter. I'm Noves Ben. You can find our website is noves.fi. If people want to email me, that's fine. I'm ben@noves.fi and happy to see how we can be useful.

[00:39:57] Umar: Perfect. There's a last question that I like asking to the guests just before they leave. It's like a tradition on this podcast. Do you have a favorite quote or a maxim that you live by?

[00:40:08] Ben: You know, for the last couple of years I've really been resonating with the phrase that things are always working out for me.

[00:40:15] Umar: That's a good one. Yeah it's the it's a perfect way, to end this episode. Ben, thanks a lot for your time again and we'll keep in touch.

[00:40:28] Ben: All right. Thank you.

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