J1 AG 04 Griffin Anderson Balanc3

I will go ahead and get started everybody for those who don't know me my name is Griffin Anderson I work at consensus and basically Drive a lot of our accounting initiatives at consensus how many people here have heard of the project balance let's just see a raise of hands okay cool cool how many people so we're one of the very oldest projects at consensus we actually presented at DEFCON one and have been around for the last couple years really building up our infrastructure and stack quietly kind of behind the scenes so how many people here own crypto currencies or tokens or some sort of digital asset let's just see a raise of hands okay most of the people in the audience here how many people here have lost crypto currencies or digital assets to fraud or know somebody else who has lost digital currencies to to fraud or some sort of scheme cool so today we're gonna be demonstrating the balanced bookkeeping software we're working with mostly I SEOs in the space if we're not working with you we'd love to talk to you but we're trying to make it really easy for you to operate your IC or token sale in digital assets in a compliant way so kind of what's the current ecosystem today today what we have is we have the SEC taking enforcement we have people starting to go to jail and there's a lot of scam and fraud going on in the industry as you all know as we work together what we're doing and what we are really concerned about is the direction we're headed together as an industry we don't want to end up like one of the original financial crises like the o8 housing financial crisis the dot-com bust etc we want to kind of avoid that and what we're working on and the balanced team is we're working on software that's designed to help prevent the next crisis we don't want to be part of the industry or part of all of you that causes the next financial crisis and that's one of the main reasons why I got into the space was to try to prevent and stop a lot of the legacy ways in which we did accounting and the way in which Wall Street used to work run an opera right so what is our solution to all this the first thing the way we really believe in is about accountability and transparency into these icos into these token sales into these protocols well you want to make it really easy for all of you as token holders be able to hold accountable these icos and the way we're kind of doing it is through our county and and bookkeeping software so here's the balance product this is the bookkeeping product for demoing today and what we do is we take all the information that you'll be using as a ICO so you tell us all the addresses and wallets you run and operate out of all the exchanges you operate up whether it's centralized in an exchange or on chain and we take all that information and we compile it up into what we are gonna show here's is the financial statement so we show both the the balance sheet the income statement we show a capital gains and loss these are all important for if you're trying to pay your sales tax on your ICO to one of the regulatory agencies if you want to look at your assets and your portfolio you're you're gonna probably need balance software to keep track of all that information and what's really cool is we're making this financial information if you volunteer as an ICO to make that information public and transparent so everybody else in the industry can hold you accountable and so we have more clarity and visibility into where you're spending that money just like public companies that have to report filings on Wall Street we're trying to do the same thing in the token and in the crypto space so here's some other screenshots of the balance software this is kind of our reports page we'll be coming out with additional types of reports but we've started out with the balance sheet income statement and capital gains and losses we also work with most of the large accounting firms and so this isn't just software we go ahead and designed on our own we work with them to figure out exactly what is on a jurisdictional basis what is for instance that capital gains and losses for each individual jurisdiction what are the best practices what's the best reporting standards and so forth we're kind of the domain experts I guess in the industry in regards to these accounting formats so looking at the software the way it kind of begins is you start by telling us the addresses and wallets you run and operate out of we go ahead and scrape the etherium protocol Bitcoin clients as well and what we do is when you submit your address in real time we pull in what the ether balance is and all the tokens and everything else at that specific address so we can tell you exactly what the balances are pretty close to real-time of whether it's Bitcoin either and we'll be adding additional protocols here pretty soon and then the next step is after you kind of enter in all that information we pull that into kind of our quote unquote kind of block Explorer but this looks like if you come from the accounting or financial space looks looks a little bit like bookkeeping software and what we do is we tell you okay what are all the transactions in and out of their specific addresses and wallets and what was the market price of those transactions so it doesn't matter if it's a ether or Bitcoin will tell you even what the price was of that specific token behind the scenes what we're doing is we're going in and scraping all the different protocols grabbing all the different transactions we have integrations with all the major exchanges so we're able to calculate what exactly what the market price was of that token at that given time of that specific transaction and we even have the ability to be able to go in and start tagging the addresses and so forth so we keep track of who you're actually doing the transactions with was it app Loney X account was it was it in over-the-counter trade in who was that individual you're doing that trade with and so forth and then what we have on the right-hand side it doesn't show it in this view but we have basically you can go in with a in accounting terminology a chart of accounts and tell us okay what was that expense or what was the reason you receive that crypto it gave that out so you can mark it as like a payroll expense if you're an ICO and you're paying your employees if you go ahead and as revenue whatever the case is and there's a lot more additional functionality it's not showing the screenshot but we allow it to be completely modular so your bookkeeper your accountant can come in and they can use the software and kind of traditional accounting formats and so forth to basically classify their transactions they can all add multiple journal entries they can change any of the numbers that need to be changed it's all designed for bookkeepers accountants for your CFO for your internal team and then what we do is not as you saw before we we compile up the reports but we also give you a bunch of dashboards and things like that on the information so what is your portfolio holdings what's the breakdown of your assets by addresses and so forth and we're coming out with a lot more different kinds of dashboards soon to give you kind of a portfolio analysis of your holdings and so forth what's really cool is we just the big innovation is we just kind of go out and we grab all this information so we have special scrapers that go out and read the protocols it's all done in real time so you get a real-time view in perspective of this information okay so that's a little bit about balance software and we're trying to make the industry more transparent making sure that the ICS are more accountable and for your token holders to be able to hold you accountable with your actions away you guys are spending the money on etc a couple other things about balance software so the first use case we're showing today right now is the bookkeeping server but we're also working on other kinds of packages that sit on top of our data layer so individual tax reporting fund management we're also doing providence tracking but today we're just showing off the bookkeeping software and at the end of the day what we're trying to really do is make it as easy as possible for you as an IC or token sale to run your business in cryptocurrencies and digital assets so we have teams on the balance team that are exploring making a payroll compliance software so you can pay your employees in cryptocurrency in a compliant way internationally not just sending five ether to somebody but actually building out that software in from a compliance perspective in saying we're reengineering how invoicing works in a decentralized manner using block chains and protocols and so forth so if you're an IC or token sale hopefully we would love to talk to you to make your business run and operate smoother in a compliant way and we also kind of believe I guess in this idea that all assets are gonna be tokenized just like land and everything else we think we're gonna move into a future where all these as will essentially be digitized and we need to keep track of them no matter what type of entity you are just real quick you come talk to us if you're an ICU a crypto phone an individual I guess exchange a minor we would love to hear from you we're building software for your specific use case so you're probably gonna need us to help on the accounting report inside front of things some other things we do on the balanced team is we work with the big four accounting firms and actually five through ten all the legal firms that are operating kinda in the accounting side of things the regulatory bodies faz b IRS etc and what we're doing is we're looking at through the accounting blockchain coalition the industry we're behind us all the really weird issues that you probably are running into if you're kind of the chief operating officer of an IC o---- so what is the tax treatment of these digital currencies what do you do if you if it's a like-kind exchange what happens if it's an airdrop how do you tax it same on the accounting side what is the the journal entries how do you how do what is the accounting treatment of your IC o---- how does it work we're working with a lot of the ERP providers to re-engineer how there are systems work and so we have a bunch of these working groups with kind of the the best-in-class of all the big four partners and everybody else that works in this industry to solve and address these issues so we're kind of the domain experts there so some of the things to consider too if you're launching an IC o---- we do a lot of advisory work too so so here's some of the services that we kind of help with if you are doing a token launch but things like you're getting an evaluation of your intellectual property you're gonna have to have some IT audits you know we really help with our partners on the on the tax advisory front so if you're doing an IC o---- internationally you want to make sure that you're figuring out exactly what jurisdiction the IC o---- should be in to limit your tax obligation we help with entity structuring and everything else from bookkeeping bill pay everything else our partners that we work with help with all this kind of stuff and we can kind of help guide you through this process finally you can get a hold of me at Griffin Anderson at consensus net if you have any questions kind of accounting related happy to go ahead and answer them and another quick note we're hurrying up very very fast so if you know somebody who is a back-end engineer front-end and engineer full stack that might be interested in working on a FinTech product would love to meet them we have a lot of open positions that we're trying to fill right now cool I think we got a little time for a Q&A so we'll go ahead and happy I answer any questions about our software the bookkeeping software or our other solutions and then also any accounting or tax questions happy to try to answer those so what ERP systems are you guys looking at to integrate with so right now we do work with s IP and Oracle and they're their modules the software were designing right now is building an ERP system from the ground up specifically for cryptocurrencies and digital assets so the cool thing is our customers in this case is everybody who runs and operating cryptocurrencies and we're building it from scratch at the moment any other questions you got a couple of hands here we're 15 going to 25 here pretty soon at consensus we're actually a SAS base subscription model so what we if you are an IC or token sale and interested in buying our product it'll just be a monthly subscription fee Oh pricing wise we're still working it out right now at the moment it's it's it's gonna be around probably depending I don't want to misquote but it's around $1500 depending per month depending on the the ico and how complex your integration is these are for specifically icos and the bookkeeping software but what's really cool if you do run an IC o---- chances are you're working with a bookkeeper accounting firm and they're gonna be charging anywhere between fifty thousand dollars and a half million or million dollars a year and providing these services and what our software basically does is it removes all the time and reconciliation and everything else that they have to do to actually compile your financial statements and do your accounting so we save them a significant number of costs so depending if which which partner you work with on the bookkeeping accounting side you'll probably get a discount and ultimately hopefully you'll save everybody money in the space we got a couple up there so yeah great great I just wanted to ask as an individual if we want to check out the balance how can we do so right now if you want to check out the product mmm go ahead and send me an email right now we're testing like I said with I think 75 to 100 I cos at the moment so if you send me an email we can go ahead and send you the credentials we've been in beta for a long time but the bookkeeping software that you saw up there is moving over to production here any week yeah yeah absolutely so the software is customizable for the accountants so they can take the local rules and apply to the transactions and then it gets marked into the software and then rolled up to the financial statement so if they wanted to change the accounting treatment on a jurisdictional base it didn't show it in this slides there they have the capability to go in and customize all that one of the other very cool benefits we have though is that the truth is mostly the ICO token sales and cryptocurrencies isn't that complex internationally the rules are a little gray at the moment but it's not like this is a fortune 500 company that has Industry specific issues so the truth is a lot of the jurisdictional issues that traditional accounting software have to deal with is less of a problem for us right now just because it's not really complex accounting but the rules are great at the moment so that's that's the only issue yeah so all this software is exportable so if you want to take the data and throw it in another accounting system you can and then on the importing side some of the payroll products we're working on direct integrations with but if it's on chain if the transaction happened on chain we should be able to get that information or an exchange or whatever the cases we're working on a bunch of products so I know consensus as I like they're setting up a trading desk and so forth and asset management type software and that will eventually all be integrated into balance at some point and happy to talk more about the details offline we got a couple questions up there okay token Holdings often have governance implications for different different projects and obviously I mean it's moving into a traditional model where like you you count how many shareholders you have in those shareholders of certain rights if you're saying we give you're working on giving back control to token holders how do you feel something balance might also affect governance processes yeah so what we're doing is we're also adjusting our scrapers information it gives you more of a breakdown of what like the token holdings are specifically for that company we're also going to be adding more transparency into like if the funds are sitting in a multi sake who has to approve those transactions to release the funds we're going to add a lot more transparency into how the operations of that company work with their scrapers and so forth and and hopefully we'll we'll add more transparency into how the whole process works and from a funding perspective and from expensing and operations perspective hopefully I answered your question are you getting a pushback as well because I mean often when you have dot sales sort of a lot of correlative pounds are you seeing pushback from the industry yeah so um that's a great question so a lot of the I SEOs right now automatically opt in and are already showing Excel Doc's on-site or whatever publicly so that's really cool it's like there is a lot of momentum in the industry to be transparent to hold each other accountable what we're doing is we've seen some icos that do really want to be transparent at the reporting level you're gonna be able with our public transparency portal be able to kind of toggle that threshold of transparency whether you just want to show kind of quarterly monthly or annual report or if you really want to show the transactional level transparency some of the truth be told the ICO is that kind of pushback the token sales that kind of pushback in the industry it's kind of well-known that that they may be doing something shady so we find those that are doing things kind of the right way really trying to add value to the industry tend to want to be transparent and accountable and those that might be kind of doing some shady stuff tend to push back on the transparency side of things yeah quick question out your company is incorporated in the US or howhow is your set up your company set up yes so balance is a consensus spoke at the moment will probably spin out at some point so if you join the balance team you're joining consensus and the team is brought out globally so I'm based in New York but you know what if you're interested in joining the balance team we we really don't care where you're based thanks a couple more questions up here so we I can share what we've shared publicly so far so we did release our alpha with gnosis Aragon and didge X and those financial statements pretty soon here we're gonna make another public announcement with the you know they're not all I cos want to be transparent so you can use our software without being transparent and just use it for your internal bookkeeping but those that do want to be transparent we're about to make a public announcement probably at the end of March here with all those names of companies and icos that are using our software cool any last-minute questions good thank you very much everybody