Les Amis d’Ethereum France #12 avec Mazars — La Finance dans le Web3

Hello everyone, I'm Rémi Foult, treasurer at Ethereum France, and I'd like to thank Mazar for hosting us in their offices for this summer meet-up, "Friends of Summer Rome France." This is the twelfth edition, organized by the Ethereum France association. I'll give a quick overview of the organization and what we do. We're a non- profit association, so our goal is to educate and promote blockchain, and Ethereum in particular. As part of this, we carry out several activities, including organizing community events like this meet-up.

We've held about one meet-up per month, and you should also know that we're organizing a big conference in July in Paris about Ethereum Rome, called ETHCC. This conference used to attract 2,000 people, but we were a victim of our own success, so this year there are 4,000 places. If you haven't got one yet, don't despair, because there will be another badge sale on June 1st, and this time... The tarpaulins no longer speak in 30 seconds as they used to, but rather in two weeks, as was the case with the last match, so don't worry. And this year too, we'll be in two locations instead of one, so there will be many more cases.

Yes, there will also be an extra day, making it four days instead of three. Around that, there's also ETHCC Week, which lasts 10 days with lots of events. Around this event, we also produce technical publications. So, around Terrarium, we publish articles—well, we translate technical articles, like, for example, the Yellow Pepper Deshereum— and we also fund open- source or student initiatives related to terminology. So that's it for the association.

And so, I'll have the pleasure of moderating this roundtable discussion on finance in the third room. We were supposed to have three people, but one person had a happy event and couldn't join us. So, I asked the questions and I'll also answer them. As treasurer of Terrarium France, I want to bring a bit of an association perspective, so I'm going to ask our two participants, Umar and Léo, to introduce themselves, tell us a bit about their backgrounds and what they do today as CFOs. (If that's wrong, in a Web 3D company...)

So maybe, Umar, you can... can you hear me or not? Okay, great. So, indeed... Léo, I 'm the CFO of Comète.

My career didn't start in Web 3D at all. I 'm a trade native. My career started among those towers several years ago. I was at Deloitte, doing audits for several years for traditional businesses: CAC 40 companies, emerging SMEs, etc. And that was followed by an experience in fintech where I went from the 40th floor of the Majonga tower to Station F.

So I traded the suits for sneakers and spent two years with a fintech company that had the ambition, on the one hand, to automate accounting entries and, on the other hand, to take it... So, on the blockchain, there were three times as many emerging technologies at the time in this project. Ultimately, knowing that you're in accounting, automating accounting is already a big topic, so we put blockchain aside and focused on machine learning and OCR. This was followed a few months ago by a migration to Mercato, and I joined Comète as CFO to support its development. To understand what it is today, it's a group that's two years old, or rather, two entities with two activities.

Its native activity is gaming. Comète created the video game that was in the top 3 on Polygon, I think it was in 2021, with super active results in terms of mastering Xbox on the number of simultaneous users playing the same game on Polygon at the time. So we rode the NFT gaming hype of 2021 well, we did a great fundraising round, and this know-how... Of all the problems we encountered in putting a game on the blockchain, we realized that it could actually be useful for other projects, either pure Web 3 or a Web 2 project that wanted to experiment with Web 3. So, after having people constantly knocking on our door asking how we had scaled a game to Web 3, we finally released Lanchine.

And today, in our second venture, we're developing a product that will allow any Web 3 activity to interact with the blockchain. And above all, the big innovation—and this has been trendy for a few months now—is to create an abstraction account, especially for our Web 2 colleagues who would like to offer a waste-free experience, without wallets, without the complexity of metadata and all that, to fully benefit from the advantages of Web 3. So, I think my microphone is working because it works. Hello, okay, so hello everyone, my name is Oumar, and thank you for being here and thank you for inviting me. So, I'm working on my career, so, like the others, I have I was an accountant before, I worked for two companies.

I watched your videos for several years as an external consultant, and then two years ago I [Music] have always been interested in how technology, especially blockchain, impacts accounting, and so I decided to explore that by creating a podcast about accounting in Web 3 called Diakenton Quest. And little by little, it led me to Request Finance, basically a billing platform for Perreux, to manage its crypto expansions. So I'll explain a bit more about what that is later. Currently, Rick Ross Finance, we launched a community of CFOs on WebTV Cloud, and as the name suggests, it's a community of CFOs working on Web 3 where we share best practices, recommendations, and tools in Web 3 because it's not easy to manage a business in crypto. So that's what we do.

Today, the group has 420 members, and yeah, thank you. So, I'll also introduce myself. Beyond my role as treasurer of Thereum France, I have a background as a developer, initially in JavaSQL, and then I switched to crypto when, during a period between contracts, my boss asked me to do a report on blockchain. Then, in 2016, I fell into the trap and never left. Currently, I'm a blockchain leader at Groupe BPCE, a banking group (Banque Populaire Caisse d'Epargne).

I also work as a freelancer for a crypto hedge fund. So, let's move on to the first question, which is a tough one: what are the biggest problems, the biggest difficulties you encounter as a third-party developer? There are problems on all levels, and when you come from an ultra-mature market like fintech, which has been very well supported, and I was in the SAS world, everything is very streamlined and... I arrived in the world of Web 3 and I thought, well, this is going to be incredible because there are a lot of developers in Web 3 companies, a developer ratio that's even higher than in fintech companies generally, and I expected to be pretty well-equipped, at least in terms of the tech stack. But weeks and months have passed, and today, apart from an accounting ERP, I don't have much.

I do a lot of things in-house, so it's an ecosystem that's quite poor in terms of advanced tools. As a result, solutions are emerging, like Ricofinance, which is kind of like the Spender of Web 3. So we have these players arriving, but the first observation is that in terms of tools, we're basically back to spreadsheets, back to Google Sheets quite naturally, because we don't really have any other choices. So that's on the tooling side. And I don't know, even for payroll, for example, if you have employees tomorrow, there are a lot of them.

who come knocking on your door saying, "Well, actually, I'd like 20% of my salary to go into USDC or crypto." You look at it and say, "Well, actually, in Palife there's no Ether or Bitcoin button, it doesn't exist." So, you're always forced to hack traditional tools a bit and bend them a little to be able to do what you want. That's the first observation. Another observation was in the relationships with banks.

I think that if there are external consultants or even auditors among you, a company rarely has just one bank; it's always multi-banked. And there are some... there are some Practis-like decreases as we develop in the territory, as we diversify our activities, etc., we're encouraged to use several banks. When you're in Web 3.

0, you generally manage to get your first bank because, in fact, they don't really know what you do, so they'll accept you. They'll... in case it becomes necessary, you'll be able to go to Société Générale or any other bank. Where, and then, in fact, when you have one call, then two, then three calls, and then one day you do a small fundraising round with a Business Angel, you tell your bank that part of the money will be going into wallets. They start to get a little worried, but what did we agree to?

And as time goes on, they stop responding, and they make life a bit difficult for you. Every three months, they ask you to justify all significant transactions, and let me tell you, the threshold for what constitutes "significant" isn't very high in these cases, and you have to justify a lot of things. And in this case, that's also a pitfall: getting into banking and being able to use several banks for support, either in operational procedures, because neobanks are great because they're linked to payroll audits and to your Expansool account to pay suppliers automatically. So we also come back to the problem of equipment and touring, and then another problem is... When you're raising funds, if you mention that part of the financing is in USDC, it can really be a sticking point for the bank.

They might say, "Well, actually, go see the notaries and handle that with them because we don't want to take any risks." So, being in Web 3 can also create friction at that level. Another point of friction, since we're talking about fundraising and other issues, is that when you're in mature markets, you're very good at understanding and working. For example, I was in the software publishing world, and there are 21,000 accounting firms, so many employees. If we charge users, well, that's the market size, and they understand that immediately; there's no problem.

But when you're in Web 3 and you're building a solution for Web 3, in the first pitch decks, people were saying, "We're capturing the entire value of the web." 2 and we say it's going to go to Web 3, we'll go right away, there were a lot of zeros, there were those who strongly believed in it, they raised huge sums, they were the first, all the better, today people understand that not everyone from Web 2 will go to Web 3, and so we have to rationalize and give a coherent market size by saying, well, we're building a tool that can bring any F2 solution to interact with the blockchain, and finally, what is your market? It's the GDP of all the developed countries, well, there you go, it's complicated to justify, and that's a real problem, it's about giving orders of magnitude and promising things and followers because even with growth, you can say we're going to put all the resources into our goto market, that's what our business model is going to be, that's what it's going to be, finally, there are on the part where we start to have comparables, we start to be able to identify when you're on a company like Comète that builds a product to bring The real economy on the blockchain, not the defight, it just circulates tokens in a closed ecosystem. Well, in fact, we'll have to be convincing and demonstrate web maturity in our business plans and budgets, and that's quite a complicated story to sell. We're getting there, but I think we're among the first, and it's difficult to have comparables and sell a market pie and growth potential.

Another issue is compliance and regulation. When I was in the fintech world, we were filing complaints with the regulator because SP2 only allowed 90 days for full bank account recovery, which was already huge. When we get to Web 3, we understand that the problems are much more significant because someone like the AMF, which defends the interests of individuals and small investors, has a right that surpasses the jurisdiction of the commercial court. They can intervene and shut down the business, and these are real risks that need to be assessed, especially if there are auditors involved. Among them, as you know, the regulatory risk is very high, and so that's also one of the points of friction when Web 3 is assessing the regulatory risk.

For the MF (French Financial Markets Authority), when you're at Deloitte, it's just the prospectuses that are validated for CAC 40 companies; it's a formality. When you arrive in Web 3, the formalities are much more burdensome, with a real sword of Damocles hanging over your head. And then there's a second player who comes into play, launching its public consultation, which is the CPR (French Prudential Control and Resolution Authority). The CPR is even riskier than the MF because it does n't defend small investors; it defends large investors, which are among those towers that are the banks. And they have interests that will defend every single one of them, and some adopt and try stablecoins, others are rather aggressive.

And once again, we'll have to listen, see what's happening, and prepare for it. And what we also need to see is that regulation is sometimes also... Well, it's not all bad. Those of us in the gaming industry received the good news of the Yellow Project, which will provide a bit of breathing room amidst all the new regulations. Yellow, for companies that deal in collectibles and NFC trading within a game's ecosystem, will allow for regulatory flexibility.

It's true that sometimes regulatory clarity can be a positive thing. We often see regulations as something negative, but we also appreciate clarity and a framework, and the assurance that our business can thrive in the years to come. So, if it's done well, with consultation and dialogue, it can be positive. There are also some issues. I also wanted to talk about the differences between the Web 2.

0 and Web 3.0 CFOs. I 'll generalize a bit, but the Web 2.0 CFO is mainly concerned with costs, the budget, revenue streams, and the list of debtors, whereas the Web 3.0 CFO...

3. He's concerned, as Leo mentioned, about the new regulations and the impact they'll have on their business, since if their portfolio is in cryptocurrency, they also need to know how to manage their cash flow. That's a big difference that the CFO of a Web 2 company doesn't have. [Music] And how to manage private keys and their modes here. So that's something you need to learn when you come to work for a Web 3 company.

I want to clarify if I mention any English words, please excuse me. For example, if [Music] I've lost my train of thought, but the other problem with Web 3 for the new Web 2 CFO is that you also have to recognize that it's a paradigm shift. With the South, you're told that you don't have it in Web 2. So I think everyone knows the phrase: if your keys aren't your crypto, then [Music] these are new things that The new CFO of Web 3 has to deal with, and there are a lot of other issues. I can mention, for example, accounting in the blockchain is expanding.

I was going to say in English, so we're not hiding space, but accounting in, if you use Life US Cap, it's done, and so you have a reconciliation to do between what's cash on the blockchain, on your block explorers, and on your financial accounts. If I give you an example on Cosmos, you have your staking, so when you know, staking reboards are continuously being accumulated, and you can see them, but you can't go back to them because, no, sorry, you can't go see them, so you can't recognize them until you can claim them. So that's a difference that the blockchain has, cash P6, which we traditionally don't have. There are a lot of other issues, for example, standards. You don't have a standard for crypto.

So today, crypto is recognized in accounting as an intangible asset, so you don't have a standard for crypto. You have a lot of Things after crypto, as an accountant, like crypto valuation, for example, it's not the same as, how you say, stops, because the market never operates 24 hours a day. So, to value your crypto in your financial statements, what price do you use? You need to have, how to say, consistency in the price you use, for example, each month or annually. So these are problems because, well, Mazar, otherwise the auditor will come and ask you why you're not consistent on the price you're going to use for your cryptocurrencies.

So there are many things like that that the new CFO of Web 3, I think, has to deal with. Thank you. And so, I have Ethereum France. So the main problem we had was that we had a traditional accountant at the time, and so when we sent him the export at the end of the year of the 53 crypto stocks, well, he was a bit unhappy and didn't explain a bit. What is it, ultimately, for him if you didn't have much sense of it, and so it wasn't handled very well?

So it's true that we switched to an accountant specializing in crypto, so he knows the subject well and is familiar with crypto accounting standards, or at least tries to work within the existing rules to include crypto in taxes, in annual accounts, etc. So that's a paintball we were able to do, that's the idea. And otherwise, the other problems, well, as you said, it's the banks, so I 'm well-placed, I work in a bank. So, the banks don't necessarily want to, it's that they don't know about it, and they're subject to numerous regulations. If they're not compliant, they lose their banking license, and that's it— business is over.

This has a very high regulatory cost for the bank, for the branch. So, it's a bit of a lottery. Depending on how well your branch knows about crypto, or if it's something they haven't touched, they'll treat you accordingly. It really is a lottery. You can be with any bank; it really depends on your branch and your advisor.

For example, we were initially with a large French bank that deals with agriculture, and at first, we could open association accounts without any problem. But when they saw Kraken transactions coming in, they thought, "Well, that's what you're doing." So, we switched to an online bank that starts with a Q, a well- known bank specializing in... The companies, and we told them we were a company, and therefore a corporation, an association, and that we organized conferences around blockchain, which is true, and they said OK. And the same day, when they saw Kraken's trading flows, they asked, "What is that?"

Well, we explained it to them. Actually, it's simple: we have sponsors for THC, half of it is in crypto, so we pay our taxes, we have employees in France, we pay social security contributions, we have invoices, everything is clean. But it takes a little time, and it's true that when you look at online banks, they deal with, etc., cryptocurrency, it falls into prohibited categories, like prostitution, necromancy, casino games, and cannabis. So, a little advice: if you create a company, don't lie in your corporate purpose.

Let's be happy, they'll hide it for the moment. If you want to have a bank, you have to avoid mentioning the terms crypto. Unfortunately, crypto, blockchain, Web 3, NFT, even worse, mining, i-seeo, so that's a bit... It's a bit sad, but things are changing a little because there's a more accepted framework today that wasn't there yesterday. And the major banks are starting to consider integrating cryptocurrencies with trusted third parties.

So, there you have it. And that's it for the difficult points. So, accounting, indeed, and the banking aspect in France, at least— I don't really know about abroad. And so, I'm going to ask the next question: how do you use cryptocurrencies and Web 3.0 in your daily work as CFOs?

Do you accept crypto payments? Do you use Latify for certain operations? Do you use, in our way, a platform—we're software for crypto invoicing for Pérol and for managing experts, so Chinese Request, for example—we pay our staff, our contractors, the Chinese suppliers, cryptocurrencies, or through other means. And just to explain a little, what is Request, to understand the difference in Web 2.0?

So, when you pay someone, you get an invoice, and in short, everything I mean, it's quite easy to make a payment, so it's pretty straightforward, but documenting that transaction is a bit more complicated. It's more complicated if you do it on a Web 2.0 tool. Why? Because later you have to reconcile that transaction with an invoice, for example, a PDF, which then reconciles it with the payment.

So it takes a bit of time, and we accountants spend a lot of time reconciling transactions. Well, with Quest, the difference is that when you email an invoice and when you get paid, the response is automatic. So the accountant doesn't have to worry about it; they can just verify if the transaction was paid or not. That saves time for accountants. And [Music] Here's the part I wanted to mention because for payments on the blockchain, or rather on Web 2.

0, when reconciling a payment with, for example, your bank statement, I can see exactly what the transaction is, but on the blockchain... It's a bit more complicated because you only have a zero X and you don't have any data on this transaction. So, one of the best practices to recommend to new Web 3 CFOs is to track all their transactions on the blockchain because otherwise you won't understand anything. At the beginning, you can do it with a spread cheat if you don't have a lot of transactions, but as you develop your skills, that's where I recommend using tools like accounting software. There are plenty of them now, like Cripso Crypto Worldwaves.

These are accounting software programs made for crypto. I think you're a bit more... maybe we'll talk about tools for crypto. Yeah, so today I was wondering how we use crypto. So, for example, to pay salaries, to make payments, yeah, to make payments, for example, when I come to...

if I go to ETH CC in a few months in Paris and I have to claim my expenses, if I do it in crypto, I can also... This is done through RequestInance, so as they said, it's kind of the latest development in crypto. It's a new feature, essentially the same features you have in Web 2.0, but we've introduced them for crypto. So, invoicing means having documentation for each payment because, behind the scenes [Music], you have to be audited.

So, you can be audited in the same way you were audited before, where you had to provide documents for each payment. It's the same as the documentation for the chili peppers you used in crypto. We're adapting this aspect, like scheduling for crypto, to facilitate auditing and simplify everything related to tax finding and accounting. Crypto is something intrinsic to our business model. Why am I mentioning this?

It's important because earlier I looked at the number of Web 3.0 projects in France, and in fact, when you look at some surveys, there are approximately 10,000 crypto projects in France. I'd bet my life on it. Cut, which doesn't have 10,000 companies that own and interact with crypto in France, so maybe there are consultants, maybe there are freelancers, I don't know what that encompasses, but anyway, this figure is taken with a grain of salt. Earlier, I also mentioned Comet's activity in the B2B and gaming sectors, and it has a common denominator: what we'll call the abstraction account.

That is to say, we're looking to encourage the arrival of Web 2.0 type players or Web 2.0 type clients on the solutions that Comet supports. In fact, we need to abstract the blockchain, and it's true that I could have talked about this earlier in the first question. One of the big hurdles for a CFO entering Web 3.

0 is understanding Web 3.0. If you don't understand how a blockchain works in a very basic way, with a system of waste, you've already lost out for what follows, because typically at Comet, why... We need gas, or rather, why do we need crypto? It's because we're reducing gas, meaning we're going to pay the gas bill instead of the customer so they don't have to bear the cost.

The idea is—I don't know if there are any players here tonight, or maybe people who have explored this—but basically, on Sera, it's all about credit cards, credit cards, credit cards. At no point do you get hit by a Metabas saying, "Go ahead, give me 3 cents to validate your NFC transaction." So, in fact, we need this crypto stock to pay and relay your transactions. So you enjoy the game, you have fun. For example, in the game, for the gaming aspect, it's a space game with spaceships.

You also have cards so these ships can share resources and fight each other. And these cards, these ships, are NFCs. Every time you're given a card, we're going to... well, we're actually doing an operation we'll call a mining operation. NFT means that we'll assign you to NFC, and that's a cost for us that's completely transparent to you, and we support it with crypto.

So, the primary use of crypto, whether in gaming or the B2B sector, is to relay waste, to support waste, and it's also to run all our contracts because, in fact, we also operate on a 100% EVM ecosystem, so today Polygon, particularly for video games. What happens is that when a contract interacts with the blockchain, the trade-off for reliably and intangibly recording the data is that it's a cost. And once again, we're in line with the philosophy of waste, and we want to abstract it for the end user. So, we're going to support waste again. For example, when you win a game on Comet Battle, you're rewarded, you're recommended this reward—it's an interaction.

There are several underlying contracts that interact with each interaction. It's all about the money, and it's important to keep that in mind because when you anticipate 10,000 players for a Ledger Live event, and your game is the first one focused on girls, you have to expect 10,000 players to arrive, claiming a set of 44 coins that are quarantined. Each CNFT mine is worth 6 cents on Polygon, so you have to anticipate all of that, you have to see it coming, you have to fund it if you're using safes, etc. You have to fund those contracts accordingly. So that's the ABCs of crypto needs.

That's it. Then the second news item is fundraising. The "bourrun" is actually the five years preceding it, from 2017 until now. There are a lot of people who have become wealthy through crypto, sometimes through luck, sometimes through conviction, and there are people who have finally... Some people have left a circuit, they've lost their private key, and yes, that's their Globaldi phase site.

Then there are people who have all this money and they're thinking, "Well, what do I do with it?" Well, actually, I'm promoting an ecosystem that has enriched me, and so they have very strong convictions and a leverage effect of 6000x. They'll say, "Well, it's €1000 that I put in in 2017, I don't know how much today, I'm going to invest it in companies in the real economy in the form of crypto." So I'm going to invest crypto in companies. And typically, Comètes' fundraising rounds were done in a hybrid way and largely in crypto, and it's a good thing.

Accepting crypto fundraising is strategic for a Web 3.0 company, and it's even essential because you'll have people who arrived very early in the field and who have very strong convictions who want to take this ecosystem somewhere and who will support you. And who will support you financially, but also in terms of networking, etc. So that's the second key to crypto at Gomez: fundraising. After other ventures, which are a bit more anecdotal but which we still leverage, this client-supplier relationship remains extremely anecdotal on the B2B side.

We receive almost no crypto payments since we often support large groups that want to migrate to Web 2.0, either fully committed or in an exploratory way. So for these people, you need a bank transfer. And the players who pay you in crypto for services are often pure players, but generally they've raised funds, they have fiat currency, and they pay you. On the supplier side, for everything related to marketing events, there are many companies in the ecosystem that accept crypto payments.

Typically, we participate in being here, well, in crypto, we participate in NFC Lisbon. By the way, we'll have the opportunity to meet you there again. We pay in crypto, so... Events in the crypto and Web 3.0 sectors are primarily crypto-related.

In Barcelona, ​​I pay very few crypto suppliers, so, quite simply, I have my PR account called Penny Lane, and I have maybe ten or twenty crypto transactions at most per quarter. I simply add a comment with the ATX value used to pay that invoice, which reconciles my transactions with the latest crypto Huskase transaction. This is important to discuss because it's asset management, and this is a problem I had when I was a front-office manager in fintech. You've just completed a funding round, received a lot of money, and you don't know what to do with it. You have millions in an account, and you've decided that with this money, you'll have a burnout period and burn it through slowly and carefully, or wildly, depending on your ambitions.

You'll start with a big team-building event... Abroad, and then you come back and take stock. In World 3, the advantage is that you don't have that colleague at your bank saying, "Well, I have 5 million, what do I do?" Oh, well, if you want, we have accounts that have been sitting idle for six months, earning much less than inflation, but still earning. Okay, thanks.

If you're in World 3, that same amount, if you're lucky enough to have people like Rémi in your ecosystem who raise awareness about this kind of subject, well, you'll explore on Av, you'll explore on Coeur, you'll explore a whole bunch of failure protocols, and you 'll play with Lady Faille and you 'll make that money grow, money that's otherwise useless, sitting in an account for two years until you burn through it all, considering the next funding round. So that's the latest new skate from Comète, it's Sept Management. It makes an excellent transition for you. Indeed, can I ask you the same question? It's been a long time since France started investing in crypto, so our principle is to try and stimulate the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem as much as possible.

Therefore, we try to accept crypto payments by default, to offer crypto payments, but we also accept fiat payments and pay in fiat because the majority of people prefer to receive a bank transfer rather than ether or USDC in their wallet. So that's the payment side of things. We've seen that we 're in a crypto ecosystem with good crypto projects that have raised funds and have crypto treasury. In fact, once you have crypto and you have convictions, it's actually simple to use, and you don't need to call a bank to get accepted, etc. So, about half of ETHCC's sponsors pay in crypto, and among them, 15% pay in dollar stablecoins, so all in USDC, and sometimes there are some who pay in...

We accept Ethereum in France because we like land. We sold some land to two other people in 2015 and kept it, so we're happy. We also made a big purchase just before the land price went up by more than 20%, which made us happy. [Music] So what I mean is, yeah, we try as much as possible to accept and pay in crypto, and sometimes there are scams, but I have my government token, I have a lot of it and nothing else. Can I pay with that?

Well, there you go, we can start discussing it, but maybe it won't be the market rate, especially if it's a small token, etc. But still, we'll do our best to accept and find common ground. That's for the payment and invoicing part. So we use Request, sometimes we have a small traditional Web 2.0 invoice with the vouchers in mind, the intra-community VAT number, etc.

Sometimes it's a no- sponsor invoice, it's a DAO without The address is without any extras, and then to put it in the invoicing tool it doesn't fit, but it does fit in the request. You can put parcel minus 13.23 on power plants in location, no problem, it's a free field. And the last part, indeed, so in fact, when I've been the field treasurer for France since the 2021 fiscal year, and when I arrived, we had a Kraken account, and so basically, the majority of our activity is to collect, well, for the treasurer it's to collect sponsorships six months before the THC until the SCO last month, and spend everything during the THC, and then start all over again the following year. So there's a transition period, however, during which there's quite a bit of money in crypto and the bank account, and where we get diluted by inflation.

And it's true that I very quickly became passionate about yield farming and decentralized finance, and so when I arrived I asked the office if we could close with the treasury, so things It's always something that happens, it can be scary, especially given the events of March 11th and March 13th, so the SDC deck, the hack of the hour with the contagion in Engueil, etc. But nevertheless, we do yell farming, good old-fashioned paper, things that are normally very salty, we take breaks, not so much on the markets, not so much on the pre-borrowing markets, which remain risky protocols, and we still manage to break out in a cold sweat when there are Steven Coin spikes and things like that, but by being reactive, it generally works out, it's always been done, in fact, it was really smooth sailing until last March, and last March there were events, and so, well, they were well managed, there were no losses, but indeed it puts a damper on things for several people, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are, today there are big returns in design and by taking a lot of precautions and being a specialist in this By following the ecosystem closely, there are ways to do some really cool things and thus increase profits and offer better THC in the following years. So, that's it for [Music] use. There will be a Q&A session at the end if you have any questions about it. And you see, an interesting point you mentioned is the failure, which you experienced a bit negatively.

One disadvantage of the failure is that we can be very reactive because we control these cryptocurrencies and it's an ecosystem in which we can be active and... Maybe you see, you took it very badly, but we, at Comète, were very happy because we had a debt in USDC that we had used as collateral to borrow from SDC Survivors, and naturally, when the SDC loses 20% of its value, the debt actually costs 20% less to repay. So it was a good thing for us, especially since you can be very reactive with your cash flow. Typically, it also offers this kind of advantage: if I had taken my euros, given them to a bank, and told them, "Well, here's an internal account working at 3% in a context of 6% inflation," well, if there was any market event, would I have been able to recover my millions in three seconds in my internal account? But being reactive, I'm not so sure.

So, a little aside on the subject: there were indeed gains made. I work in crypto, and indeed, when there are decks of Steibble Cogne that are, well, extremely large like that, it's It's a great opportunity, it's just that it fell on a weekend when there was a rugby match and I didn't sleep and everything, so it wasn't, it wasn't, it was clearly not nice. After that, yes, it was a huge opportunity on many levels and there are some who took full advantage of it, and that's it. But the negative aspect is that, all the same, there are some companies who managed the thing badly, so they sold their coin table with a 10% discount. So that's sad for them, and it's quite a blow to everyone involved in this wonderful discipline that has seen island farming.

It's definitely put a lot of people off, not me personally, but let's just say there were some close calls. It's all good now, the situation was very favorable, but anyway, let's move on to the next topic: do you have any best practices in your SIFO work that you would recommend? Do you have any tools? There's the superb Request tool, if you have a great invoicing, payment, and payroll tool that I also use privately, but do you have any others that you would recommend? Do you have any best practices that come to mind?

If there are people who want to get into crypto and web financial management, Web 3.0, then in terms of best practices, I would say identify all outgoing and incoming flows, wallet addresses, because if you forget a few addresses, your cash flow won't be correct. In terms of tools, there are plenty, but what I would recommend to a new CFO in Web 3 is, so I would recommend, if you're doing crypto, as I'm telling you, and of course we recommend doing crypto, as I'm telling you, well, use, there are plenty, Ledger, Ledoy (French), or a Match here as a safe, so if I look, I don't know how to say it in French [Music] in your wallet, so you're doing crypto, as I'm telling you, and then the second part, you're going to make payments, so of course I recommended Requestinance, so to document all these payments and take care of the part, can't WC target, so that's the second part of the supply chain, the third part is how to export, now everything is a transaction from the blockchain to your accounting software, and today everything is accounting software, such as, I don't know what the most used accounting software is in France, but for example, QuickBooks, SAP, Oracle, Netflix, you ca n't [Music] it's not made for crypto, so you first need to convert all your crypto, I don't know by For example, if it's in euros, first, before exporting them to your accounting software, and today there are many new accounting software options, your crypto, which is one of the biggest, you have Bitwife, your crypto works, you have 13 finance, you have many, and they are all a little different in their Husky, perhaps some accommodate certain blockchain blocks, for example, Crypto works with many, but also, for example, with Cardano, and you have other solutions in contact that don't have enough blockchain, so it depends on you. And just to explain a little why you need to use these, they are crypto for accounting because you can't export these transactions directly from the block explorer to, for example, 0, so you go through the solution, for example, Crypto, so Cryptus allows you to export, categorize your transactions and document them before having them in a traditional ERP, so in terms of tools, this is what I would recommend to a new CFO, so a little on the Supply Chain, creditor-debtor, so request to take care of your chili peppers and then Listen, there are plenty of them, and ultimately, your traditional accounting software that allows you to prepare your financial statements for later audits and to make thank you [Music] for example, instead of going on Ethereum and wasting a lot of money, you can go on Polygon and do it at a lower cost, and we go on a V, we go on Curve, we get lost, we look at what's happening in the Explorer block, we try to understand, we can also use a YouTube channel called Finematics which is great, explains things very well, and we can start with very basic topics and then we can get lost in L2 and relup topics, and that, for me, is the first thing to do, what is about understanding what's happening, and once you've gone through those steps, in my opinion, the subject becomes more complex because doing NTX, well, once we've done networking, the Custody problem, we're aware that the Strawberry sites, there's a stake involved, etc., and potentially the company has internal multicycle processes, meaning several people sign the same document.

Once you have that, it's quite practical. Ultimately, instead of having BNP Paribas's Z-Apette and going to see three people in the office to validate a € 10,000 transfer, well, in fact, three of you sign on a secure platform to validate ATX. [Music] And I told him, "Explain to me everything that happened on the Comet Wallet," and we explored it together. And actually, if you want to do the task in a very purist way, there's a technological solution called an indexer. An indexer is a technological component that allows you to listen to the blockchain because developers are poets, and the blockchain disappears while listening to the blockchain.

So you have this tool, which is in a more perfect world, to help you. If that's wrong, that This will be after the Comet series. In the meantime, I'm using in-house tools, like APIs and stuff like that. So, basically, we simply rewrote history. He scraped everything that happened on Ethereum, everything that happened on Polygon, and everything that happened on Optimizum.

Because, of course, you know Jérôme, he couldn't help himself; he had to go play around everywhere. We looked at everything that happened and created an in-house database of methods. Because, in fact, you have interactions on the blockchain, on the VM ecosystem, on Polygon, Ethereum, and you have a method that's recorded in the transaction methods. So you know what happened, and these methods are referenced. You go to a public directory of the Earths, which says, "Well, here are the existing methods: this is a swap, this is liquidity premiering, this is a withdrawal from the companies."

So, all of that... If it exists, you can retrieve this information and create a database, saying, "Well, there you go, I've already interacted with all these methods." Second, you archive all the contracts you interact with in a spreadsheet. You say, "There you go, you've scraped the entire blockchain." You remove all duplicates from the contract list, and then we'll look at who you interacted with.

You'll query again using APIs or tools that exist (I don't have the name, it was done on their end). You'll find out who these interlocutors are, and there are two possibilities: either they are well- known platforms you interacted with, or they are simply assets held by people, and you don't know who they are, or organizations are like geese. So if they are geese, it's up to you to find out who these geese belong to: which organization, which individual, which business? And once you've created this database of third parties and methods, you create your rules and you'll say, "Well..." When you have a particular method that interacts with a particular contract, it's essentially about depositing cash on a platform.

From an accounting perspective, we'll look at what exists in traditional accounting and ask ourselves: what happens in the traditional world when I take cash, deposit it, and can withdraw it at any time—something very liquid, not an asset tied up for 20 years? Well, you take the framework of fixed-term accounts and account 508 (for those who will be discussing it), and you simply create your own engine, feeding it as you go, so you don't have to process 12,000 transactions at closing time. So, for me, the first thing is that good practices don't mean they're easy; they mean they're good. It's about exploring, cutting your teeth, and then being rigorous over time, saying, "Okay, I'll do every quarter, I'll sit down, I'll look at what happened, and..." As for appropriating something, for me, there's nothing worse than being dependent on a software publisher, and there are many things that are very complex.

We were talking about bank reconciliation, we were talking about many ultra-complex subjects. We 're very happy that there's software that does it today. For blockchain, I couldn't see myself spending a fortune on a subject where, in fact, it's there, it's public, anyone can take it, you just need to have the right practices to retrieve it in three clicks and work that took us a month of exploration and understanding. If we run it again for Q1 2023, it's something that will take a few days at most. So for me, the right practice is, personally, to get lost, to test, to discover, and then to have a fairly regular follow-up and really want to get to the heart of things to fully understand what's happening.

So, this interests me because, for me, until now, the perfect tool didn't exist. The sense is that we have a tool for invoicing, a tool for tagging transactions, and I still use EtherScan and banks to check what I've done. So, indeed, not procrastinating is a very good thing that I should apply more because it's true that sometimes we can do an Endify operation that also goes on Coswap, so we sign a transaction, nothing happens, but 5000 later there's the German 7 that arrives and we go directly to the stablecoin on Kraken. So, to find the 1, the 1, etc., and to know what it was, it's better to do it right away.

And so, well, those are the main practices. What I do is I use several tools, and we also have an accountant who takes care of the accounting. But if you have a tool that makes things easy at Comed, then I'd really appreciate a little demo if I can save a few days of work. That tool is Google Sheets. It's nothing more complicated, it's just a lot of work understanding what happened, and ultimately it went from a blockchain format to an accounting format, and that's it, quite simply.

It's good to know. So, without further ado, let's go back to the Web 2.0 world. We've already talked a little about relationships with banks, and so the question is: what are your relationships with the banking world? And with banks, yeah, we know that sometimes there can be friction, we've already talked about that a little, so we can come back to it.

I ca n't talk about it since I'm in France, but I can say that for any CFO, it will depend, of course, on your crypto cash reserves. If you have crypto cash reserves, the difficulties mainly arise when making an offering, a ping. So, for example, I was also talking about the CFO of Gelato in the last case. They raised their funds in crypto, so they mainly have TH and USDC. So tomorrow, if they make a million-dollar offering, they're going to have questions from the bank.

And it's not going to be super simple, so the difficulty, of course, is whether you have cash reserves in fiat and crypto and you manage your cash flow. As for making large fiat transfers, you won't have a lot of questions from the bank. I think [Music] the question, the problem, is more about that. And also, in terms of general best practices, it's also about advising CFOs to have several banks as backups. We saw what happened in the United States with SVB, so I think everyone understands now that when you're working with crypto, having a backup plan with several banks [Music] is important.

So, is it problematic or not that the bank ultimately asks questions to find out the origin of your funds? Because we could say, well, if you've raised funds, you have documents that justify it to your bank, and yeah, that's true, but sometimes when you have to make some rather urgent transfers, if you have to justify the origin of the funds every time... So, the funds are a bit more complicated. So yeah, to get back to the main point of our relationship with the banks, as I was saying earlier, our landing was a stroke of luck. We arrived with a new video game code; there was no blockchain, no crypto.

We went to see... at the time, I wasn't there yet, but Jérôme went to the nearest BNP. So, the first mistake, if there are people who are going to... well, things not to do is open an account at a branch when you're a company. You absolutely must prioritize the business center.

That's the first thing. I don't understand why banks accept business account openings at branches when two years later you get a call saying they can't manage your fundraising, they ca n't manage your €40,000 transfer abroad. Because, in fact, it's still a branch, and if you were at the business center, that's already the first downside. Okay, that's good. He said earlier that crypto and blockchain weren't mentioned in the company's purpose, and especially to avoid agencies because they'll then, when they actually understand what your daily business is like, they'll inevitably create divisions and chaos.

And it's especially concerning anti-money laundering and counter- terrorism laws. In fact, very specifically, I have to justify all my incoming funds with invoices. That is to say, I have two auditors: the auditor and the bank. The bank asks me for the same work as the auditor, except they have a very low threshold, so they'll ask me for all my sales invoices. And that's not very pleasant because they can't provide the services you're paying for, and on top of that, they ask you a lot of questions.

It takes up a lot of your energy. So you say, "I'll go to our bank," and then you knock on the doors of other banks. They say, "Oh yes, welcome! Fill out the questionnaire and everything," and so on. I think that, well, I have a pretty strong conviction about this, but I'm not certain.

I think there are people blacklisted in the banking world because even today, when I want to look at online banks, neobanks, or banks that aren't necessarily in France, I get past the first step of "I'm a company that does business, here's my website URL," etc. However, when I get to the point where I have to provide the company's legal representative with their documents, and I'm at that stage, it's always a roadblock, and I get laughed at by all the banks. So, there you have it. I have a pretty strong conviction about this, but I'm not entirely certain. So, the best practice is to have several banks very early on, business centers, and then if you have very specific needs, for example, in our B2B business, we bill the IT infrastructure on a recurring basis, and in fact, that's recurring revenue.

Every month, we'll charge a client, and what happens is that in the world, in the Fintech, you have tools that do this very well, like Goet Hardless for example, which I used to use in the past and which is really good for this. When you go to Go Hardless and it's already too late, they'll tell you the same thing. When you fill in the different fields, everything goes well until the point of the agent, and then they say it's not possible, they don't want you. And that's what Rémi was saying earlier: they don't want to lose their license, so they don't accept just anyone. So the situation as it is today is that it's very difficult to get into banking when you're a Web 3.

0 firm. The downside practice is to do it very early, and then once they've finalized the deal and have you in the pipeline, it's complicated to get out. They subtly try to push you out by blocking your fundraising operations, saying they don't want to transfer funds abroad, etc., etc. And that's when...

Cryptocurrencies become a relay because you end up raising funds in crypto, you end up paying your international suppliers in crypto. There are alternatives that exist, but they're a bit more exotic. For example, there's Monerium, which is based in Iceland and is a bank with a stablecoin in euros, which, according to the handicap page, is 107% collateralized. You can explore this kind of thing. We're asking ourselves questions without much conviction; it's not yet decided if we'll go for it, but in any case, it's a topic we're considering today since the bank that's been supporting us so far wo n't support our next round of financing.

We're wondering how we'll receive the funds, certainly fiat and in a hybrid way, from the next round of financing. So, thank you. So, I only have experience in the non-profit sector, but I've also worked in banks for 15 years, and I think that once you understand that banks are just afraid of getting fined and they just need supporting documentation, things go much more smoothly. Once you've passed that stage... Regarding onboarding, as an association, we're asked for the first Kraken transaction.

That's what happens, but once we've explained everything clearly—and I think the key is that our bank understands what we do and that we're not financing terrorism, selling drugs, or contributing to climate change—once they understand that and we've explained it well, like, "We have invoices, we provide this type of service, etc."—the first time there's a bit of friction, maybe a little more the second time, and then, in my personal experience, I haven't had too many problems with subsequent transactions. Then there are transfers. It turns out there are quite a few banks where you can attach invoices to all the transfers you receive, so the bank doesn't even need to ask me anymore, which is convenient. I got access for my accountant, so everyone's happy.

I don't procrastinate; I put the invoices directly onto the transfers. I do n't wait for the bank. They came and blocked my thing to ask me, and then things went much better. After that, there's the loneboarding stage, so yeah, let's be happy, they'll hide it, but it does n't always work. PS: Because sometimes you have to be upfront about what you're doing, and it's the law, you know.

There are solutions in France, for example. There's Banque de l'UBAC, which specializes in countries under the sway of the 'barbecue' and recently in cryptocurrencies. It's a bank that might not be suitable for very small businesses, but we know there's a bank that does it, one that even advertises in France. Then there are other banks abroad that offer banking services, even for exchanges, for those who mine. There are banks specializing in cryptocurrencies, not like Boursorama or H5, as you're used to, but there's a backup.

And generally, as I said at the beginning, I'll say it again: it's important that your bank advisor, before opening an account, gets in touch with someone and tells them, "Okay, there will be crypto in my income, I'll have cash flow, etc., but I'm not doing anything illegal." I develop video games, I organize events and conferences, I do meetups, so I know it's good that he understands your business well, and once all that is explained and understood, if you're on the same wavelength as someone who's even slightly open-minded, it usually works for me. And then, if you have problems with your bank not accepting your fundraising, etc., call me Leo.

I know people I've trained in banking (which is prohibited in the BPCE Group) who know the procedure for opening accounts, the best practices, and what can and can't be done. Perhaps this is also something to add. We were talking about regulations much earlier, and to link regulations and banking, a change in mindset is needed. Banks today are still very closed, but with the adoption of Mika and the San status planned by the AMF, it's something that serves the acceptance of the ecosystem by the movement, because today... It's very, very difficult to get.

For me, typically, right now I'm going through the San registration process to file with the AMF (French Financial Markets Authority). It's very difficult. Those who were able to do it at the very beginning were those who had the right feeling, because at the time, I don't know, to the point of saying it was easy, but in any case, it was more accessible. Today it's a bit more streamlined, but in any case, when someone arrives with a PSA (Simplified Partnership Agreement) at a bank, the discussions change. So, there are also benefits of regulation, but it's also the idea of ​​saying, "You are outside the standard format," and getting back into your own way.

If I had to summarize my job with an image, it's been about fitting square pegs in round holes since I was a comet, and really, typically, getting into sound regulations. Then, well, I know it will ease the burden on my banker because he'll know I have internal processes. It's not just about saying, "I have my name on the AMF list." That's for those who... who might be among us tonight, there are still cybersecurity issues, there are still issues of the right person at the helm of the company, there are more background checks and, well, there are a whole bunch of things to fill out, I can be precise, but the idea is that if you demonstrate that she is a good person in the right places and that you are there to do things, well, I don't remember the exact terms, but intelligently, there's no reason why you shouldn't have your room, but it's just a whole bunch of formalities to fill out, boxes to tick, and it will depend a bit on the shoulders of your banker, and yeah, well, so that's a good transition to the regulatory aspect, so we've already talked about the human aspect, how do you approach the regulatory aspects and risks, business continuity, especially with regard to French and European food, which is coming, and Mika, which will arrive in 2025, only if you are a PSN for Mika, one more year for you So, to get it compliant, if you want to save some time, it's actually good to have it before Mika's release.

So, I love that for now we're following Mika's progress, but it's difficult at the moment to project into this project and therefore know exactly how it will go, the impact it will have on the business. [Music] So thank you all for coming to Smith Up, and there's a little cocktail reception right after, so thank you all. [Applause] [Music]