consola.finance Bringing Clarity to Crypto Accounting

Crypto is growing rapidly. But this means financial processes have become increasingly tedious as traditional systems scramble to keep up.

Regulatory agencies are ramping up efforts to simplify the connection between Web3 transactions and traditional finance and accounting practices. But the challenge is too great to rely on public institutions alone.

That’s where our latest investment, consola.finance comes in. The platform brings clarity and control to companies’ crypto finances. And based on the growth of crypto, they’ve come at the right time.

Crypto adoption is strongly growing for B2C & B2B

Crypto has been growing at an exponential pace following its introduction in the early stages of the past decade. Given a trading volume of $1.5 billion as well as an adoption rate of 14 percent in the US, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at large have truly reached mass market status.

When looking at the amount of Ethereum wallet addresses, they have been steadily growing since the first mainstream adoptions in 2015 and 2016, crossing 200 million in July. And based on Andreessen's most recent report, it’s expected to hit 1 billion users in the coming 10 years. Similarly, Blockchain.com wallets have gone from 42 million in September 2019 to 84 million in September 2022.

Crypto has experienced many ups and downs. But with every crypto downturn, a new plateau has been found. And with every iteration, the ecosystem is becoming stronger and more robust. When zooming out, the space is growing on many fronts.

DeFi users grew from 100,000 users in January 2020 to over 4.8 million in July 2022. In their June 2022 White Paper, the World Economic Forum reported that "According to the analytics service DeepDAO, in 2021 the total value of DAO treasuries surged fortyfold, from$400 million to $16 billion, and the number of DAO participants increased by 130 times from 13,000 to 1.6 million.

On top of that, the ecosystem is attracting more developers than ever before with top tier talent joining the ship with Ethereum drawing the biggest developer interest, almost experiencing exponential growth compared to other chains. But Web3 in itself is more than just Ethereum. It’s multichain with many other promising projects out there ranging from Solana to Polygon, Avalanche and Binance Chain.

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We see consumer adoption growing based on improving Web3 infrastructure as well as mass market ready use cases taking off ranging from lending to staking, to brands issuing NFTs, and play to earn crypto gaming.

Crypto is maturing and institutions are quickly catching up

Crypto use cases have increasingly extended beyond personal use cases and consumer plays, finding considerable traction within institutional settings. Whether it’s Coinbase’s partnership with BlackRock, (offering Aladdin customers access to crypto trading, custody and prime brokerage) or Luxury brands initiating Web3 / NFT projects (Gucci, Burberry, Balenciaga) or Fidelity (one of the largest financial players in the US to start offering Crypto to their clients), it’s become evident that crypto will be part of the long term strategy for many large companies. We’ve seen this already with Nike’s acquisition of RTKFT and the fact that Tesla and the Dallas Mavericks are accepting crypto as a payment method. 

Companies are increasingly identifying the large upside of crypto impacting their core business. However, engaging in novel tech and building crypto-based financial products poses new regulatory challenges and these companies are not exempted from this. With increasing regulatory pressure, finance and accounting departments face challenges they've never faced before, such as integrating crypto with traditional accounting and finance systems throughout the world.

B2B accounting, booking and reporting for crypto will be a massive space 

With the space increasingly maturing and reaching significant scale, the topic of finance and accounting in the context of Web3 will become increasingly relevant. The paradigm shift in the structure of these new financial products will create an accounting and reporting nightmare for CFOs. Hence, these companies will suddenly need to track the value of tens of tokens (assets) in order to properly monitor their finances and close their books. Ultimately, this strain will be especially felt in the context of bookkeeping, accounting and taxes, where finding and condensing information is of paramount importance.

This clear pain point will become increasingly material as crypto use increases, offering a clear growth opportunity for consola.finance. Because not only will crypto native businesses face regulatory demands, but so will any business that accepts crypto transactions. Given the exciting market dynamics and the direct need for this kind of solution in the market, we believe consola.finance can reach significant heights in its respective field.

consola.finance and their team

We first met consola.finance founder, Jacob Kobler, when he was still working at Bitpanda and building his idea for his business. We were immediately drawn by his enthusiasm, energy, and passion for building a world-class solution that will benefit countless Web3 companies.

consola.finance’s platform aims to simplify tedious financial processes for Web3 businesses. Their B2B finance and accounting SaaS solution serves as a single source of truth for blockchain data and offers block(chain) explorer with finance and accounting functionalities that companies need. Accounting departments gain transparency and insight, making prior manual processes redundant, reducing human errors, and improving decision making. They’ve already partnered up with several DAOs, DApps, NFT platforms, and centralized exchanges throughout Europe, USA, and Singapore and are further developing the product alongside them.

We are pleased to lead this round alongside the Blockchain Founders Fund and the founders of Bitpanda, to bring a holistic and new approach to Web3 accounting and finance.

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