The Problem

PlannerDAO is a crypto-native community. They receive funding through donations and sponsorships — and those payments are made in crypto. On top of that, most of their income is earned in crypto, which raises the ultimate question: how do they pay for day-to-day expenses in dollars?

Before coming to Multis, Steve had to convert the crypto to USD using his Coinbase personal account and send cash to the nonprofit's bank account. You might ask, "what's wrong with that setup?" Well, it's time-consuming and creates accounting and legal chaos. Steve said, "It is not a position I want to be in."

The Solution

Multis conversion to USD feature

With PlannerDAO being crypto-funded, they store a large part of their assets on a Gnosis Safe non-custodial wallet. Safety is key. Multis being built on top of Gnosis made the implementation of Multis that much easier for Steve. Just a couple of clicks before he could plug in and use his newly converted USD.

Steve said, "Getting the USD accounts was the game changer because we had a lot of money in crypto, typically USDC.  It's been very helpful to convert it all in one place and access USD in seconds."

Light-speed crypto banking onboarding

Opening a crypto bank account with Multis was much smoother and quicker than a traditional bank. Steve said, "opening the nonprofit account with Multis was much easier and smoother than opening a bank with my bank down the street."

Why easier? Multis onboarding is less than a day (vs. months at banks), the KYC form length is 10 minutes, and you have a Multis member with you at all steps. Everything is designed for the end-user and to make you forget the old banking processes.

Virtual web3 debit cards

Debit cards are the endpoint of Steve's needs. A simple and unique flow, from off-ramping to spending, is a game changer. By doing so, PlannerDAO can pay vendors and subscriptions in minutes after converting funds to USD.

Additionally, he mentioned that Multis virtual cards were the perfect answer to his issue of providing means of payments for his remote team. You can read about it in our last article here.

The all-in-one crypto/fiat solution

Before getting on board with Multis, Steve had his funds spread across a local bank account, multiple Gnosis Safe wallets, and a personal exchange account. That meant a cumbersome process with the potential for human error, time lost, and an accounting nightmare.

With Multis, Steve found a solution where all of his assets are in the same place. Track wallets, convert to USD, spend by debit card, and manage incoming/outgoing wires. Talk about streamlining financial management. ;)

We're happy to have Planner DAO at Multis. It means a lot for us to help DAOs organize their finances and focus on business. Let's build together the future of finance!

Feel like giving a try to our crypto bank accounts? You can open an account in less than ten minutes and join 200+ leading companies using our product!

Check our website blog if you’re interested!

Launch day on Product Hunt is truly a team effort, and can have a huge impact on your business and acquisition metrics. It's also a great opportunity to have the whole team unite over a single goal for a days time.

The web3 vertical on Product Hunt was only created in April of 2022, so products that used to be quasi-invisible are now being pushed forward.

What is Product Hunt and why should you launch?

Product Hunt is a huge community platform on which people give feedback on new products. It's often used for companies to showcase what they built and gather quality feedback from product aficionados in the tech space. These companies have one of two goals in mind: validate product value proposition or boost conversion metrics (eg: acquisition, traffic, sign-ups, etc).

However, a launch on the platform is beneficial on various other fronts. On top of the goals established for your Product Hunt launch, having a successful one can bring massive brand legitimacy, boost SEO and offer networking/partnership opportunities.

Over the past few years, the number of companies launching on Product Hunt has been growing exponentially, which has made them need to build an algorithm to guarantee ranking fairness. As on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok and other social platforms — users have been trying to decypher the way it works. Here's an interesting article from Patricia, cofounder @ Kairn.

Our experience: do’s and don’ts

This product launch was the culminating point of several months of building, so we wanted to showcase it while making it understandable for all.

We're first movers in the web3 treasury management industry, and released corporate cards and spending management tools for companies with crypto treasury — therefore bridging the gap between traditional finance and DeFi (Decentralized Finance).

Making DeFi accessible to all is the first challenge we're solving. Making masses understand it is another challenge we haven't entirely solved yet. And Product Hunt is a proxy to move in that direction.

In the midst of our product revamping and landing page redesign, we decided to launch Product Hunt as an initiative to boost acquisition, traffic and consolidate branding.

Here are some of the elements that made our launch successful:

• It's hard to appeal to a large panel of users in web3. People are unfamiliar with the jargon used, and it can easily seem foreign. Whenever possible, avoid the use of technical jargon — that will immensely help reach organic growth on your launch page (sometimes applicable to your product as well).

• Every bit of content, communication or tracking must be written/setup and taken care of before launch. Technical difficulties will take your attention away from the goal on D-day, and you don't want to be distracted.

• Team coordination — making it clear to the team that the launch is a key contribution to the growth of the product's user base, and essential to build brand identity. Therefore, in order to make the most out of it, the whole team should take time (in our case, half of the day) to generate traffic to the page.

We also made a couple mistakes (heads up for those of you planning to launch soon):

• Take a look at who is launching on the same week as you are. Ideally, avoid launching on the same day as the big fish (eg. Notion). In our case, we launched on a Wednesday, and were unfortunate that 4 other Products were able to gather 2K+ upvotes.

• The team at Multis is very connected. During the day, we were pushed by a web3 influencer on Twitter, which generated a ridiculous amount of affluence to our Product Hunt page, and a of newly created accounts upvoting and commenting on our launch: huge red flag for the Product Hunt algorithm (oops).

• Understand how to post a Product and the relationship between Hunters/Makers/Owners

Key takeaways

There are different aspects of your business that will make the impact of your Product Hunt launch more or less hard to measure.

For example, the impact can be drastically different depending on the nature of your business:

• For a B2C business, the impact of a successful launch can be very tangible, and often translates to direct conversion.

• On the other hand, B2B businesses have longer sales cycles with many points of contact within the organization, therefore making the conversion longer and often indirect.

The complexity of integration of a product/migration is also something to measure in that regards, and can make launch impact even more abstract.

And many more...

In our case, if we take the examples above, we offer a B2B product which is in essence a banking product — natively the most complex aspect of a business to migrate. So how did WE measure the impact of our launch?

Before launching, we had set a success metric that was based on the number of sign-ups and traffic on our website. Did we reach the goal we had set? Not exactly. But it wasn't the most valuable thing that we gathered from the launch.

In our eyes, the single thing that stood out from the launch was the amount of genuine curiosity from the Product Hunt community, and the praise from our current users. Throughout the day, we were able to gather quality feedback on the features Multis is developing, which helped us grasp a better sense of what the expectations were from our key audience.

For a company trying to drive sales and conversion on top of everything, our launch would have been somewhat deceiving. For companies like Multis that are working heads over heals on product development, there's nothing more valuable. So if that's your case, go for it too!

In a nutshell: if you nail (1) goal definition and tracking, (2) content & launch prep, (3) execution and network reach-out on d-day — there's absolutely no doubt your launch will succeed.

And of course, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions regarding launching on Product Hunt!

Check us out on our blog as well!

**Honorable mention: **Smoothie.so is an up and coming alternative for web3 products → keep an eye out for our launch there soon

6th of November 2022: It's been two months since we launched our web3 banking offer. We are onboarding dozens of crypto businesses. Another exciting day in the "multiverse." But as we know, we're never safe from a curveball. Binance announced that it would sell its entire position in FTT tokens — roughly 23 million FTT tokens worth about $529 million. Binance CEO "CZ” declared the decision is based on risk management following the collapse of the Terra (LUNA) crypto token earlier in 2022. Enough suspicion was raised in the crypto ecosystem to take a closer look at FTX.

A few days later, CoinDesk published a report highlighting potential leverage and solvency concerns involving trading firm Alameda Research.

In less than a week, FTX faced a liquidity crisis. They announced they were looking for bailout funds, received a non-binding offer from Binance, who refused to buy after taking a look at the company's finances.

11th of November 2022: FTX’s CEO known as "SBF" stepped down, and the company filed for bankruptcy. In the following hours, FTX experienced a possible hack. Hundreds of millions of tokens were stolen.

14th of December 2022: SBF arrested in The Bahamas. Police said he was arrested for "financial offenses" against laws in the US and The Bahamas.

The impact on our space

Navigating the new bear market

The FTX scandal had an immediate effect on all the crypto markets. The total market cap lost billions in a week. Early events in 2022 started the 2022 bear market. The FTX collapse made it worse. In many ways, FTX built a bank with the same inner flaws but no regulatory oversight. This obviously generated skepticism towards the industry and many media outlets even mentioned the end of crypto.

We believe this is noise, we've heard it before. It's cyclical. At Multis, we consider bear markets as a blessing for builders as it filters out bad actors. Take a look at this article from our CEO in 2019.

Towards a new challenge: recreating and promoting a trustworthy environment

Crypto has suffered from a bad reputation since day one. Some people call it a Ponzi scheme. The FTX collapse is a perfect argument for those detractors. It creates a massive distrust in the industry and distracts from the real interest being web3 and decentralized ownership. One proof of that is that Twitter talks have been all about the millions stolen by SBF recently, not about the incredible potential of a decentralized web.

A great example of the distrust created for web3 companies is traditional banks' actions after the FTX collapse. Take a look for yourself. 👇

The FTX scandal has highlighted the improvements our industry needs. If we want billions of people to adopt web3, we must avoid events like this. And some suggestions appeared quickly. Many industry leaders offered solutions to counter potential new scandals. One of the most interesting is from Vitalik Buterin himself. He offered proof of solvency. You should check his excellent paper on it: Having a safe CEX.

The importance of decentralization — a crucial step for fund security

FTX was a centralized exchange. Multis' philosophy resonates more than ever: "not your keys, not your coins".

FTX collapse triggered a comeback on one of the biggest debate in crypto: centralization vs. decentralization. The following graph illustrates the overall trend of crypto holders moving their funds to decentralized wallets:

Also, daily visits on Ledger have tripled in the days following FTX’s debacle.

This is a huge signal. Decentralization is THE solution. Self-custodial wallets are gaining ground but there is still the same question: "How can crypto become mainstream with the complexity of key holding?". And that's exactly why we created Multis and why we are pioneering a new way to do banking.

The self-custodial conviction at Multis

Multis: the safety of Gnosis wallet with a user-friendly experience

From the very start, Thibaut and former CTO Theo made the decision to build on top of decentralized wallets. Why? We strongly believe that they're a cure to the problems the market is facing today.

The goal of blockchain technology is to give back control to end-users — and we've been building towards that since day one. Hence the fact that we decided to work with decentralized wallets, which pushes in that direction.

However, handling a non-custodial wallet can be a challenge for newcomers — we want to alleviate that pain. Access to fund security should be a given for everyone. As an answer, Multis is removing the native complexity of non-custodial wallets to bring them to new companies in the space.

Your crypto funds are in the safest place at Multis. We are built on top of Gnosis safe, the gold standard of self-custodial wallets. We do not hold your keys, and therefore neither your crypto. This also means we cannot undertake any actions on your funds (lending or trading for instance).

What about our web3 banking offer? When we decided to build a web3 banking offer, we knew that dealing with fiat would be challenging. We knew we needed the strongest infrastructure to reassure our users on their fund safety. Driven by the same conviction of fund safety, we chose FDIC-insured accounts. What is FDIC insurance? The FDIC protects the money-depositors funds in insured banks in the unlikely event of an insured-bank failure. Multis has your back. In crypto or fiat.

Let's BUIDL

The FTX scandal is currently shaking the ecosystem. And if you were still in doubt, the bear market is definitely here. Regulation will be tougher (for the better). Building back the trust will take time. Traditional media outlets will keep calling names, but we're in it for the long run, and for good reasons.

Crypto is here to stay, and this chain of events is tough but will benefit the space. We are even more bullish on our stance - Let’s BUIDL!

Check our website blog. if you’re interested!

Starting your web3 business creation marathon

We already spoke on this blog about the crypto pains when launching a web3 business. But it's always good to remember it:

• crypto funds are hard to keep track off

• payroll and simple payments are complex

• accounting is a nightmare

• unfriendly UX/UI is getting on founders nerves

Multis already offers a solution to these pains to help you get started. But we are now attacking a bigger problem.

Getting your crypto right is now easy with Multis, but there is still a slippery side: FIAT.

But why do web3 businesses need fiat? Unfortunately, everything can't be paid in Bitcoin, Ether, or Aave. Here's an interesting take from Coindesk if you're interested. Every web3 business must pay for IT or business lunch to run its operations. So diversifying your treasury with USD is necessary and inevitable.

But to access it, you have to get banked. And from there, it's a nightmare:

• Getting accepted by a bank is a marathon (more than 70% of our users need more than three months)

• Maintaining a solid and long-term relationship is a challenge.

You're banked. Great news! But how to convert your crypto income into USD for day-to-day operational expenses? Or convert your USD income to crypto for holding it? You need to access liquidity. Liquidity means exchanges. Getting approved and ready on Coinbase or Kraken can take months — same as a bank.

3 months later, your financial setup is done, and you can start focusing on your business. Let's build!

But it's not over completely: you will get smashed on conversion fees (1%). Moving your dollars to euros at the forex rate will kill you. Going from crypto to fiat will be a time-consuming process dealing with three tools simultaneously. Store your crypto on centralized exchanges is risky (especially nowadays). And we can go on for a long time...

The best of both crypto and fiat worlds

Multis's philosophy is "Not your keys, not your money."

That's why Multis has been a decentralized multi-signature wallet since day one. But designed for teams and designed for a fear-free experience. We know keeping private keys is a source of anxiety.

On top of that, we integrated a web3 USD account.

You can enjoy the serenity of holding your assets with your keys. And the possibility to cash out when needed to pay your operational expenses.

The best of both worlds.

Moreover, Multis is building it by pushing the best UX/UI ever created on fiat/crypto product bridges:

• Opening a web3 bank account takes less than a day.

• Crypto to fiat and fiat to crypto at 2 clicks away.

• The design interface allows storing your crypto in a decentralized way without anxiety.

• Web3 cards, fiat or crypto payments to pay anywhere, anytime with any currency.

I hope this article will convince you to give Multis a try. If not, I'm available for a call to show what we can do for you!

Feel like trying our web3 bank accounts out? You can open an account in less than ten minutes here and join 200+ leading companies using our product!

Standard DAO is a globally distributed collection of citizens, investors, and builders.

They help Investors, Creators, Communities, and Companies unlock value from Web3.

Standard DAO provides a full-service Web3 product ecosystem. It's powered by the Standard Protocol dApp, and a secure asset-backed treasury. It includes blockchain validation, stable yield generation, NFT utility products, and tools for building Web3-enabled Engaged Social Networks. It's focused on organizing niche communities around defined mandates with shared economic value.

Entering Multis

Martin (CFO) and Aaron (CEO) launched Standard DAO and raised funds only in crypto. They decided to store all their crypto in the safest wallet on the market: Gnosis Safe. Smart move!

The team started with Request Finance to process crypto payments. Request was perfect for performing payments and getting paid by their crypto vendors.

But non-crypto vendors needed initiation to get started on crypto. From time to time, Martin or Aaron guided them to create their crypto set-up. But not everybody wanted to go to crypto. For those personas, they used to run payments through their personal LLCs. They had to use an exchange combined with their LLCs bank accounts.

That's why getting a bank account for their organization became a priority. And they knew the pains of getting a US bank account as a web3 organization.

But they didn't know Multis yet. The Standard DAO team found about Multis online using simple keywords: crypto corporate wallet.

3 major features were solving their pains:

• Conversion to USD from a Gnosis Safe was a no-brainer. Standard DAO stores all of its treasury in a Safe. As said above, paying only in crypto today is not workable. Cash-out crypto to USD enables them to enter fiat payments in seconds.

• Debit cards and ACH/Wire. These two means of payment allow them to solve the pain of paying non-crypto vendors. Anywhere and anytime.

• Frictionless and light-speed onboarding. Nobody wants to wait 3 months to get a bank account. Business needs to keep rolling.

The 1-day KYC allows them to focus and their business and scale faster.

Living at Multis

Standard DAO was one of the first to onboard into the USD feature.

After 1 month, the organization already saw time and control benefits with:

• the all-in-one crypto/fiat accounting tool with automated tagging.

• a smooth and quick conversion to USD

• day-to-day expenses with reliable and viable virtual cards compared to their former corporate card provider.

We're happy to have Standard DAO at Multis. It means a lot for us to help DAOs organize and focus on their business. Let's build together the future of finance!

Feel like giving it a try to our Multis USD feature? You can open an account in less than ten minutes here and join 200+ leading companies using our product

At Multis, most of our web3 banking account users are international teams. We're happy to help shape this new era of organizations. And as always, we want web3 builders to focus on their business.

But a new organization form creates challenges. Multis being a web3 financial backbone, we focus on simplifying our users financial operations. And what's the first challenge? Providing means of payments, especially corporate cards, for their teams!

But how can we provide corporate cards to team members globally in a fast and scalable way?

There is not a lot of thinking to do here. The answer is easy and trivial: virtual cards.

Physical cards are the common solution. But outside the feeling of having a physical object in hand, there are no real benefits. Printing takes time, and delivery takes weeks. In the 21st century, sending cards by plane to the other side of the planet is not viable.

The virtual card is a trivial choice: usable in seconds, safe, and cheap. Everything a business is looking for.  Virtual cards were only a means of payment online. But that's revolute.

Our beloved smartphones were game changers. In seconds, you can pay for your business lunch in the US, and one of your employees can pay an IT expense in Europe. Web3 Multis corporate cards work with Apple Pay and Google Pay. And one major benefits our cards have: no foreign fees. Meaning you can purchase something in Australia with the card without extra fees.

But, at Multis, we noticed that paying with Apple Pay or Google Pay is not inherent to all customers.

That's why we want to share some small guides to help you be smart and fast in your financial operations:

• our guide to creating web3 Multis cards

• the Apple Pay guide to add your Multis card to it

• the Google Pay guide to add your Multis card to it

Feel like giving our web3 bank account a try? You can open an account in less than ten minutes here and join 200+ leading companies using our product!

This launch was a mix of exhilaration and massive challenges, so we wanted to share our approach and learnings to build a hybrid product at the crossroads of legacy banking infrastructure and Decentralized Finance.

Converting crypto-currencies to fiat currencies is a pain. It can take weeks, even months, to convert crypto to fiat. And that's when you're already approved by a bank or exchange.

Our team at Multis is lucky, we're USD-funded and have some fiat sitting on a bank account (which got frozen for no reason several times btw). However, the process is way more complicated for bootstrapped projects which generate revenue in crypto.

We’ve talked to many companies regarding the way in which they bridge their fiat and crypto funds, and some of them had very technical processes for crypto transactions, like writing custom API calls to (1) receive payments in crypto and (2) convert them. We love tech hacks, but when it comes to money we want it to be easy, straightforward and secure.

We wanted to share our approach to solve that problem:

1/ We built a business app with smart contract wallets

Why?

We chose to help users secure their assets with multi-signature wallets. Simply put, multi-signature wallets are smart contracts locking crypto assets on-chain. Only a predefined majority of “owners” need to approve a transaction before it gets sent. Spending limits and other restrictions can be encoded into the approval rules of the wallet as well.

Our top priority when building our application was security and convenience, and we believe multi-signature wallets offer the best compromise out there:

• They’re smart contract-based (this enables easy integration with Decentralized Finance)

• They’re software-based (you only need bandwidth and a laptop to use them)

• They can easily be embedded into a front-end

• Most importantly, they’re self-custodial, which means users can have full shared ownership and control over a company’s funds

How?

Workflows and jargon like key management or gas fees can be intimidating. We strived to offer a simple and reassuring UX by abstracting complex concepts as much as possible. People should not need to be acquainted with network/chain, transactions submission, nonce management, multisig smart-contract deployment, etc. to simply manage their assets. Some examples:

• In EVM based networks like Ethereum and Polygon, the gas fees are collected in its main currency – for example, Ethereum uses ETH. At Multis, we decided to handle network fees and enable users to pay in whatever cryptocurrency they’re transacting with

• We’re relaying transactions with Infura ITX to ensure they don’t get stuck in the mempool forever

• Getting data out of blockchains can be extremely painful and non-performant. We aggregate data across multiple networks in our databases to empower the discoverability of users’ funds

• We use the CREATE2 opcode (deterministic smart contract addresses) to:

  • Give access to wallets but only deploy them when first deposits are made. This streamlines onboarding without costing us gas fees

  • Give users the same wallet address across different networks

• We integrated multiple EVM networks in a single account. People don’t have to change their browser wallets (e.g. Metamask) settings to transact on these

We also strived to provide as much security as possible to our users with multi-signature wallets:

• Users are protected against internal risk — outgoing transactions must be approved by several signing users to be processed (e.g. 2 out of 3 signatures required) to prevent misuse of funds

• Users manage their private key to sign transactions and are protected against third-party risk. We can’t access their funds.

• This multi-signature wallet is effectively a Gnosis Safe multisignature wallet. It’s open source, thoroughly audited, and currently secures over $175bn across Ethereum and other EVM networks

We faced multiple challenges in doing so, in particular:

• There are no standards for signing methods in the web3 space. This means we have to support many different types of browser wallets to enable users to make or approve payments. Our integration with Wallet Connect only partly solved the issue.

• Smart contract wallets like Gnosis Safe are open-source. This means users can transact not only from their Multis account but also from any other platforms supporting these smart contract wallets. While fantastic for users (money portability FTW), it makes nonce management (clashing) very complex and buggy. We still have to come up with better solutions here.

2/ We aggregated on-chain and off-chain data

Why?

Our second main workstream was around data. We had to fuel data to our application from different sources, both on-chain (e.g. transactions status from multiple blockchain networks like Ethereum or Polygon) and off-chain (e.g. spot prices, metadata like labels or attachments added via our application). We wanted to ensure this data was easy to read and understood by crypto-fluent users and accountants alike. Most importantly, we wanted transactional data to be formatted and merged with USD transactions to offer a holistic experience.

How?

We built on 3 pillars:

1. We had to design a DB pattern that could handle many types of transactions from a debit card transaction to a complex DeFi transaction. Each atomic transaction has different information linked to it, including one or multiple incoming or outgoing transfers, different kinds of fees (to the blockchain network or to the providers, or us), different networks (blockchain or banking infrastructure for production/mainnet or sandbox/testnet), conversion price in USD and other information we want to store to offer as much transparency as we can

2. To do the above, we had to find the right partners that could allow us to aggregate the right level of information: For on-chain data - Infura to access nodes via RPC For on-chain information execution - Indexers such as Etherscan, TheGraph, Gnosis-Safe API and Covalent To obtain spot and historical prices, ethgas API’s and others - off-chain providers such as Coingecko

3. We dealt with wallet transaction rate limits - this was challenging because we retrieve a large amount of data from partners and third parties, which generally limit the number of requests to their APIs (e.g 5 calls/sec). We had to build a throttling mechanism to better manage the application’s throughput to downstream services and ensure we synchronize data in an efficient and resilient way.

3/ Bridging decentralized and traditional finances

Why?

Converting crypto-currencies into fiat is a hassle. The whole process can take up to a week:

• Get approved to open a business account on an exchange (up to 6 months)

• Send funds from company wallet to exchange wallet

• Convert crypto into USD

• Withdraw funds to an external bank account white-listed by the exchange compliance team (via ACH or wire transfers, usually takes 1-5 days to hit banking accounts)

• Spend with corporate cards, ACH/wire transfers

Because we internalized wallets and exchange features, we’re able to streamline this as follows:

• Get approved in less than 24h

• Convert crypto into USD (directly from the multi-signature wallet, proceeds are instantly available)

• Spend with corporate cards, ACH/wire transfers

How?

As an early-stage company, we needed help to build our banking infrastructure and get banking and money-service licenses. We had to outsource the bank stack to the right partner to allow us to focus on building the product.

• We help mainly crypto companies. Finding a partner with high-security standards to fill the banking and brokerage gaps we were lacking was crucial to avoid the complexity of integrating with two core services

• We use hexagonal architecture to build our service. Integrating a new data source to pull transactions to Multis was a no brainer. A new adapter and it was ready to roll.

• Speed is a key market advantage to getting users verified and converting USD into crypto. As soon as these operations start at Multis, we subscribe to state changes in the bank to immediately react and keep the process in motion until it ends

• Idempotence was taken to a higher level to avoid processing twice the same events. Without it, we could potentially have "double spending" issues, and we want those far away from our users' wallets

• We have a robust state consistency mechanism to ensure the bank and Multis have a similar view of the world. Advanced fault tolerance and resilience techniques are in place to ensure we always persist state in distributed systems

We'd love to hear your feedback on the way we went about building Multis. What would you have done differently?

I hope this post is helpful and can inspire other builders to experiment with these hybrid infrastructures.

An Employer Identification Number (EIN) is a Federal Tax Identification Number. An EIN permits the identification of a business entity. Every business needs an EIN in the US to operate. You'll need an EIN to open a business bank account with us 🤪

What EIN document do we accept at Multis?

To open a USD bank account at Multis, you'll need one of these three:

• CP 575 form

• 147c letter

• SS4 form if you operate only on US territory.

How to get an EIN?

Spoiler alert: the IRS is still in the non-digital era. They'll communicate by mail or fax. If you want to get the job done, we recommend Hellofax from YC.

For US-registered companies (with US-citizen founders)

• Find the Social Security Number (SSN) of the founders.

• Apply online here.

For US-registered companies (without US-citizens founders)

If none of the founders have an SSN, you'll need to follow the next steps:

• Complete an SS-4 form

• Call the IRS "Business Tax Help" number: +1 (800) 829 4933.

• They will ask a series of questions about your company.

• Fax the completed SS-4 form to +1 304 707 94 71 using Hellofax

For foreign entities

Foreign companies are eligible for EINs. If you're UK or France based, you can apply for an EIN to open a US bank account by following the next steps:

• Complete an SS-4 form

• Make sure that you are eligible to get the EIN. The business owner or a Third Party Designee has the right to request an EIN.

• Call the IRS at 267-941-1099 (not a toll-free number) from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. (Eastern Time) Monday through Friday. And press the appropriate number from the menu to receive a foreign EIN.

• They will issue an EIN at the end of your call, which you can use immediately. Be sure to write the number down and keep it in a safe place. Your physical copy will come in the mail to your U.S. address a few weeks later. If you don’t have a U.S. address, ask the representative if they will mail the EIN or send it via email.

Did you lose your CP575?

When you first get an EIN Number, the IRS sends you an EIN Confirmation Letter (CP 575).

• If you got your EIN Number online, you can download the CP 575 online

• If you got your EIN Number by mail or fax, the IRS will mail you a CP 575 (it takes 4-6 weeks to arrive)

The IRS only issues the EIN Confirmation Letter (CP 575) once. You can’t get this letter again. But you can ask for an EIN Verification Letter (147C). Both documents have the same legal value.

How to get a 147C EIN Verification Letter from the IRS

• Call the IRS at 1-800-829-4933 (the “business and specialty tax line”).

• Press option 1 for English.

• Press option 1 for Employer Identification Numbers.

• Press option 3: "If you already have an EIN but can’t remember it, etc.”

• Tell the IRS agent you need an EIN Verification Letter (147C).

• The IRS agent will ask a few security questions to confirm you own your company.

• Tell the IRS agent whether you’d like to receive the 147C Letter by mail or fax.

  • by mail

    • 4-6 weeks to the mailing address they have on file.

  • by fax

    • Use Hellofax to simplify your life.

    • The IRS will fax you the 147C Letter while you’re on the phone. Tip: The IRS agent will ask, “Do you have a private and secure fax next to you?” If you are using a digital/online fax, say yes.

Cauris is a private credit fund that partners with financial technology companies worldwide. Cauris’ mission is to drive financial inclusion. They ease financing to Fintechs working with small and medium businesses and consumers. To this end, Cauris facilitate access to credit for 100 million people through the provision of DeFi-enabled financing to its fintech partners. Cauris believes this is key to empowering individuals and enabling economic growth in emerging markets. Cauris currently provides financing in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, India, and Mexico.

Let's showcase it with an example:

1. Cauris identifies great Fintechs in emerging markets who need capital to scale their operations (e.g., Asaak ) — if you're interested, click here.

2. They do due diligence on operations, performance, and loan portfolios. Then choose high-quality borrowers.

3. Next, Cauris uses pools where DeFi meets real world assets (e.g., Centrifuge, Goldfinch) to raise funds.

4. Cauris converts it to fiat (most fintechs they fund need USD) and lends it to the chosen companies.

5. Investors receive both a cash yield (generated by Cauris’s real-world lending) and a reward token (from the protocol)

That's the magic of Cauris. 🧙

The problem

Cauris' main problem is the lack of centralization of its crypto/fiat tools.

To better understand how complex it can become, let me quickly explain their setup:

1. For banking services, Cauris has accounts with multiple banks. Even though opening a bank account can take over three months — it has become a running joke at Cauris!

2. For crypto, Cauris handles multiple wallets — multi-signatures, hot and cold wallets. On many chains.

3. For liquidity providers, Cauris use several services — Decentralized exchanges (e.g., Uniswap) or centralized exchanges (Circle, Coinbase).

On top of that, Cauris runs multiple projects simultaneously. Meaning this already complex setup can go exponential.

Cauris started to get to a point where wallet management and bank management became an issue. Because they had to juggle between different accounts of different projects on multiple chains. Accounting became a nightmare:

• crypto transactions (transfers, swaps) are extracted on blockchain scanners like Etherscan.

• liquidity events (buy/sell crypto) are extracted for centralized exchange accounts.

• fiat transactions are extracted from bank statements.

All these extracts should be reconciled into one unique spreadsheet. You can imagine the time and the energy to do that. Alexander Raia (Alec) lost too much time and serenity on this cumbersome process. And that's why he started looking for tools and found out about Multis!

Entering Multis

Alec created an account on Multis more than a year ago when Multis was in beta. He decided to join us to solve his biggest pain: having a shared space for a crypto wallet to access and control all funds and facilitate his accounting.

With Multis, Alec and the Cauris team can save time and get clarity and control over their crypto payments. With Multis, they can:

• Safely store all his crypto treasury in a non-custodial multisignature wallet

• Monitor payments in real-time with email notifications and team spending analytics

• Enrich transactions with tags and pdf invoices. Or enjoy reporting analytics like spending breakdowns

• Download a Quickbooks-ready CSV to simplify their accounting every year.

And the most significant benefits he had at the time? Focus. His core business is to support his borrowers and find best-in-class credit protocols to raise money. Multis allows him to find time to focus on his business, and that's our ultimate goal. But our solution still lacked one big part to help him: the fiat part for reuniting all his operations.

The solution

When Multis launched the USD features (checking account & debit cards), Alec found Multis a potential ultimate solution. Moreover, he is always looking for a trustable banking partner. He knows how hard and painful it is to have a bank account for a web3 company. Multis is a crypto-native company, so he knew he could trust us.

As a result, Cauris's team can now visualize their assets off and on the chain for multiple entities in seconds. The biggest pain is washing away with Multis: accounting. Alec can save hours and save his mind by downloading a simple Quickbooks CSV ready for his accountant.

In bonus and a non-negligible one, Alec can move his financial operations to one place. It simplifies the heavy and expensive processes by cutting exchanges and bank accounts.

This full setup will save accounting and financial reporting hours. Especially with the power Multis gives to founders with automated categorization.

We like to think we're building a tool to help people who are building Open Finance, and Alec and his team are one of them! We're happy to help him get focused on his core business. 😀 Feel like giving it a try to our Multis USD feature? You can open an account in less than ten minutes here and join 200+ leading companies using our product!

Today, Multis is launching free corporate cards and checking accounts to help web3 businesses spend crypto treasury. Any US-registered business can now issue corporate cards for their team to allow them to convert and pay for things in USD with over 40 millions merchants worldwide, through our partnership with Mastercard.

It takes 10 minutes to apply, and less than 1 day to get approved. Multis also offers exchange and banking services with FDIC-insured accounts and ACH/wire transfers.

Teams can now run their entire web3 business on crypto with a single crypto-USD solution, from day 1. It is the first milestone towards our vision to build the financial backbone of the Web 3 economy — a vision shared by our lead investor Sequoia.

💥 Why Multis?

Crypto companies and DAOs are now forming an increasing share of our economy. As projects get off the ground and grow, web3 teams need crypto-native solutions to help them with basic financial operations such as storing crypto treasury, converting with USD or spending as a team. The current state of financial operations is appalling and puts them in a challenging and stressful position.

Most Web3 teams have a significant part of their assets in tokens but struggle to spend them on physical and digital goods and services. These still account for a very large part of their costs.

Opening up an account on a centralized exchange such as Coinbase, Kraken or FTX can take months. Most banks still don't work with web3 startups. This often leads to funding freezes or never-ending compliance checks. Many founders end up paying expenses or converting crypto from their own personal banking and exchange accounts. This is not compliant nor scalable and distracts us from real work — we've been there!

We're here to build a better Web, not to spend countless hours worrying that our finances will fall apart.

🙌 Enter Multis

Web3 teams should be able to access a secure and convenient finance solution designed for crypto and USD treasury holistically, from day 1.

We're natively web3. We won't flag your transactions or freeze your account if your business is running on crypto. We can approve any US-registered business in a day and provide them with full access to the benefits outlined below, from a single account:

🏁 Start with essential tools

• Open a Multis account with FDIC USD checking account & multi-signature crypto wallet

• Convert USD with USDC, ETH as well as 1'000+ cryptocurrencies (Ethereum & Polygon)

• Issue multiple corporate cards for employees and vendors

• Pay vendors and employees through ACH, wires and crypto transfers

📈 Scale with advanced tools

• Set custom limits and approval workflows for cards and crypto transfers

• Link external crypto wallets to track balances and transactions across multiple chains

• Control team spending with dashboards and transaction analytics

• Close your books faster with accounting data exports

🧑‍🏭 We're builders building for builders

We experienced first-hand the pains and distress created by scattered and ill-adapted crypto and banking solutions. We're fixing this.

We're providing teams with much more than just software: Multis is a cure. We're offloading teams from frustrations and anxiety. We're providing peace of mind so they can focus on building great things and do the best job of their lives.

Our round with Sequoia Capital provided us with the fuel we needed. Corporate cards and USD accounts are a first step towards a much bigger ambition. We are relentlessly building an all-in-one software layer designed to serve as the financial backbone for the growing wave of web3 companies and DAOs!

❤️ We've been working with the best

We're grateful to have earned the trust of many talented teams — all passionate about building a better Web. Over 100 companies like Audius, Sky Mavis (game studio behind Axie Infinity), Orange DAO or Connext have run their payroll and spent with vendors and contractors. With hundreds of monthly transactions and over $300M transacted, our partners have battle-tested our features and spent countless hours helping us shape this product.

We're now ready to say: "we're open for business"!

Apply in 10 minutes and get approved in a day to try the best banking experience in the web3 industry!

Thibaut and team, Multis.

‍

On top of that, most goods & services are not payable in crypto or ACH payments.

Which brings us to the punchline: **Multis Corporate Cards are now live! **💥

Your crypto treasury at the tip of your fingers

Multis has become the one stop shop to convert and spend — no need to exchange your crypto anymore! Here are some extra perks:

• Spend locally and abroad at no extra fees

• Available and ready to use for all of your team members

• A remedy to your reconciliation hassles - all team members can benefit from a card connected to per department

Multis Corporate Cards: why they're so important

Following our USD account creation and off-ramp releases, we wanted to double down on fiat by offering corporate debit cards.

More than simply an additional feature, our users found it essential for our product to be a full financial stack for web3 companies.

• Safety guarantee with Gnosis Safe

• Access to banking services for crypto companies

• Registration for US-based businesses within a day

• Make spending crypto treasuries easy

Additional feature: Multi-cards

We wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so here's an additional feature!

You will also have the ability for users to create multiple cards per account and per user, and assign each one to a team member.

How will that work on your dashboard?

Admins will have a consolidated view of all cards in the company, while team members will only be able to view their own card. On top of that, you will have a view of the amount spent per month on each card.

Keep an eye out on what's to come, things are heating up at Multis ;)

‍

Next, we will be covering:

- DAO Bookkeeping - Hiring in DAOs - Team Structure in DAOs - KPIs for DAOs

What is Treasury Management and Why Is It Important for any company?

Treasury management refers to planning, organizing, and controlling the holding, funds, and working capital of your entity.

Treasury management gives founders more visibility over their assets which allows them to make better decisions in terms of spending management and investments, especially in a volatile market,

Steps You Can Take to Make The Most Out of Your Funds

Step 1: Use a Multisig

In web3, the first step towards effectively managing your funds is making sure they are stored safely and practicing control in a decentralized environment.

Multi signatures emerged to help teams manage funds collaboratively:

• They’re self-custodial — you don’t rely on a third party to store funds

• They’re secure against social risk - no one person can flush out your company’s funds

• They’re secure against technical risk - you need several private keys which makes them difficult to compromise

• They’re software-based — you can transact anywhere, any time from your browser

• They’re smart-contract based - you can interact with other smart contracts to leverage DeFi access and innovative services

**Step 2: **Maintain a clean wallet hygiene to keep control of funds and investments

Implementing a process to keep track of your funds, can help founders mitigate a lot of risks related to transacting with cryptocurrencies. Here's what you can do:

• Educate your team members and prevent them from opening wallets on-the-go

• Divide wallets by use case (eg: tech, treasury, etc) and label them

• Keep a directory of wallets with names, addresses, and use cases clearly identified

• Separate personal and professional wallets

• Note every transaction data instantly. Don't forget to categorize it and add an explanatory note

These basic steps will help your operations manager and eventually, your accountant get a better grasp of what a purchae was made for and will give you oversight over your spending.

Step 3:  Level Up With Tools Such as Multis for Convenient Approval Workflows and Accountability

We are designing our accounts to have technically sophisticated features (like tracking all company wallets, making labels) as well as to include behavioral nudges that encourage good "wallet hygiene" or best practices for dealing with your company's crypto. 

By saving a wallet address as a contact with a name, it means that the outgoing transaction will be more legible. You can also filter the transactions by wallet address, asset and amount. Not only that, you can add an attachment, write a note ( and use emojis 😉 ), and label the transactions. This makes tracking and understanding the multiple transactions to keep your crypto business running easy. In addition, you can benefit from valuable insights about your cashflows, your expenses and the profitability of your portfolio.

Step 4: Save Your Treasury From Shrinking Through Diversification

It's simple: if you are only holding your native token in your portfolio, and for some reason (management, marketing, competition, a bear market), its value goes down by 30%, then the value of your whole treasury will shrink by 30%.

The most impactful DAOs in the space have their treasury diversified. For example, BitDAO keeps 18% of its treasury in USDT and 17.4% in USDC. Decentraland has 38.6% in USDT.

✅ Diversify your treasury into stablecoins to reduce volatility. Here's how:

• OTC sales

• Conditional order strategies

• Financial Derivatives

• Use Diversification Tools

• Swap crypto-to-crypto on Multis to rebalance your portfolio 😉

👉 To get a deeper understanding of how these mechanisms work, check out our DAO treasury management guide.

Treasury management is about security and discipline. It is important to buckle up with the right tool stack and the right mindset. You can leverage Multis to automate your crypto finops and reduce the risk of human error: save time and manage your finances collaboratively.

‍

Crypto payroll: huge benefits but often manual set-ups

The benefits of getting a paycheck (or part of a paycheck) in crypto are many: funds hit your account instantaneously, payments aren't mediated by banks, and exposure to digital assets can be an interesting investment opportunity. Paying salaries in crypto is of course perfect for companies with distributed, international teams.

The only problem? Paying salaries in crypto can be time-consuming and anxiety-producing. Very often, founders have to make individual payments to team members from their own wallets in a process that can take hours. As a team grows and interest in getting paid (or partly paid) in crypto increases, a manual setup can't be scaled. One founder we spoke with talked about the struggle he faced, as a growing number of his employees wanted to be paid in USDC: "I do everything on my personal wallet which is massively unscalable, error-prone, makes me the bottleneck in payroll processing, and doesn't integrate with our accounting in any way."

The advantages of Mass Pay on Multis

Making batched payments from your Multis account is easy- you can save money and time easily when making payments

• Built-in accounting features

• Gas fees are payable in whatever currency you are transacting in

How to Make Mass payments on Multis

Now paying multiple people on Multis is easy!

From the dashboard simply click on "Pay" in the  left-handed bar. From there, you'll be walked through a 4-step process where you'll be asked to:

• Choose your currency (and remember, on Multis you can pay gas fees in whatever currency you're transacting in)

• Label your transaction - making bookkeeping even easier

• Add any notes or attachments for your own record keeping

• Either manually enter in contacts from your company address book or upload a CSV with up to 65 ETH wallet addresses

With Multis, founders don't have to "do it alone". Our integration with Gnosis Safe means that you can invite your team to Multis and delegate tasks like payments to operations professionals. What's more, labeling of payments before they are made means that the accounting is taken care of and can be easily exported as a CSV.

Are crypto tax audits common?

Most crypto investors who report their crypto-taxes in good faith will probably never have a crypto-tax audit. However, if you are part of a web3 organization or a DAO and your revenues come from cryptocurrencies, you may be subject to a potential tax audit- especially as the IRS has been paying more attention to crypto of late. This is one of the reasons why keeping all the information on your different transactions, tax payments and crypto management is highly important. Moreover, tax and regulatory agencies all around the world are focusing more and more on cryptocurrencies due to its rise in popularity among corporates.

If you receive a request for inspection, don't worry. While the checklist can contain many questions and requests for transaction histories, you probably have all the necessary information available for your crypto-tax accounts. With IRS audits that can span six years back, this is all the more reason that businesses need to be meticulous keeping records of past crypto transactions. If you do find your business getting audited by the IRS here are the most common requests.

The most common IRS requests

Although audit requirements may vary in content, there are a few common introductory questions the IRS will ask you about your cryptocurrency taxes. When responding to the IRS, it is a best practice to respond clearly and in an organized manner to each request.

Common requests from the IRS :

• Wallet ID and blockchain address owned or controlled by taxpayers.

• Any digital currency exchanges with email address, user IDs, account numbers related to those platforms and IP addresses.

Here is all the different information that the IRS requires concerning your transactions :

• The date each unit has been sold, exchanged or disposed of.

• The basis and FMV of each unit at the moment of acquisition.

• The date and time each cryptocurrency has been acquired.

• FMV per unit at the time of sale, exchange or liquidation and monetary value received by FMV ownership for each unit.

Recently, we have seen more and more audit letters coming from the IRS asking  specific questions that are much more complex to answer than previous standard ones. This has included requesting correspondence with different counter parties on all crypto transactions (tweets, emails, messages…) for example. You should also be aware that the IRS may ask you for some additional information depending on your initial responses.

How to get through a crypto audit?

The most useful elements to have on hand to survive a crypto tax audit are thorough records of your financial transactions. As we know, crypto transactions can be notoriously difficult to account for and funds are often stored on a variety of wallets across multiple chains.

For more complex audit questions, you'll have to demonstrate that your tax calculation follows all of the cost basis for your audit trail. Having a CPA on hand can help you answer the details of loans and margin activities.

Multis: Gathering the information necessary for a crypto audit

Multis accounts provide users with a single source of truth to track all of your organization's crypto and can be used in the event of an IRS audit.  Accounts are equipped with:

• The ability to track and account for wallets across Ethereum, Bitcoin, BNB, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism blockchains

• The ability to add category labels and annotate transactions for better clarity on flow of funds

• Multicurrency support- Multis is integrated with Coingecko and the Multis payment wallet can support ERC20 tokens and stablecoins

• The ability to export all transaction data as a CSV document that is compatible with Quickbooks and other accounting software.

If you use Multis to track all of your organization's crypto, you can have key information necessary to provide in the event of a tax audit at your fingertips.

Multis: Can you tell us what's new in 2022 when it comes to reporting your crypto to the IRS?

Shehan Chandrasekara: There are some minor changes since last year:  The IRS has clarified the crypto tax question on the front of the 1040-form. Mainly, if you are only holding crypto,  you don't have to check yes for that question. Other than that, things remain the same — you have to pay capital gain taxes on crypto and NFTs.

To learn more about filling out the 1040 form, see this guide on how to answer the crypto tax question.

Multis: If your company gets audited, what should they expect?

SC: First of all, don't panic when you hear "audit". What the IRS does is that they send you a notice of "Correspondence Audit". The document often indicates that the taxpayer has underreported expenses or the IRS is requesting to see proof of requested expenses. These audits are quite common and are part of the tax paying process.

However,  there is another type of audit where you have to go to the IRS and talk to an agent and then they will be digging into your bank accounts. Those audits are for very complicated cases and only occur if you fail to pay millions in tax money.

Multis: Some companies prefer to make payments in stablecoins. What are the implications of paying your employees in stablecoins from both employer and employee perspectives?

SC: The employee side is very easy, if I receive  100 USDC for my paycheck, that's a taxable event. From the employer's side, that 100 USDC is subject to self-employment tax. You might also have to do federal and state tax withholding depending on where your business is registered. Pretty much you can treat the 100 USDC as if it was in USD. It is subject to the W2 reporting or you follow the independent contractor rules.

You can find more information on declaring income from stablecoins here.

Multis: A lot of Multis users are in fact DAOs. As these organizations go mainstream, how should they approach taxation?

SC: There is no correct answer because every DAO is set up in a different way and a DAO can be a lot of things. Some DAOs look like partnerships for tax purposes, some look like C Corporations and some are just hobbies- essentially a group of people doing something together. In that case the DAO can be more or less a non-profit.

If your DAO is set up as a Wyoming LLC and if you have partners it will most likely be taxed as a partnership unless the DAO elects to be taxed as a C corporation.

***You can find more information on how DAOs are taxed in ***this article by Cointelegraph.

Multis: What about the contributors? If you are a DAO contributor and you receive governance tokens, is this a taxable event? Do they need to be reported to the IRS?

SC: In this case, you are offering your services to the DAO and receiving something in return. It is considered wage income. Wage income is a taxable event at the time you receive it.

Multis: What would the taxes look like when we talk about NFT creators? If say, you are minting and selling them for income.

SC: If you are minting and selling NFTs, that means you are running an NFT business. In other words, you have to pay income taxes whenever you sell them and receive the token you're selling them for. Another taxable event for you is when you receive royalties. This means that you can deduct business-related expenses: home office expenses, subscriptions, and utilities. You'll pay tax on the net income of your NFT sales.

According to the IRS, any advertisement that helps spread the word about your business is an advertising expense and can tax deductible for small businesses. You could argue that giveaways are advertising expenses. However, you can't report 1,000,000,000 in advertising expenses and only make 100,000. The IRS will raise a red flag and ask you questions.

***For more information on paying taxes on NFTs- as a creator or an investor- check out Taxbit's guide. You can also see some of the top ******NFT tax pitfalls to avoid ***in this Forbes guide written by Shehan.

Multis:  NFTs are largely used as airdrops and incentives which makes us wonder, is it true that gifting crypto is tax-free when it's less than $15K?

SC: The 15,000 dollar threshold is important to know. If you give somebody below that amount, you don't have to do anything or report anything to the IRS. If you give more than 15,000 dollars, neither party has to pay taxes however you would have to fill form 709 with the IRS stating that you gifted this specific asset at this specific value.

Multis: Speaking of gifts, are donations to blockchain-based charities taxable in the same way that they are when given to charities in fiat?

SC: It is a tax write-off only if it is a U.S charity, meaning that it is a US 501(c)(3) organization. If the charity is based outside the US and isn't registered as a non-profit, you don't get a tax deduction.

For a listing of non-profits accepting crypto donations, you can consult the GivingBlock's directory.

Multis: Moving on to some best practices, what's the data you need to keep in mind if you want to track your crypto taxes manually?

SC: For tracking manually you would need to know the date of the transaction, (purchase and sales), the price of the token or NFT purchased, the capital gain, transaction fees, and exchange fees and you have to use the right method for accounting (FIFO or LIFO).

However, this is a very long process and it shouldn't be done manually.

You can learn more about how Multis can allow users to track their assets across multiple chains and centralize this information here.

Multis: What qualities should crypto businesses look for in their CPA?

SC: First of all, you need to find a qualified person — a CPA, or an enrolled agent. If that person has crypto, that's a really good sign because they are involved in the space and know how to deal with these ambiguous regulations. Second, you should ask them questions: like "how many crypto clients do you have", or "can you give me a quick overview on how crypto works." and try to engage in the conversation.

Check out this thread from Shehan on what to look for in a crypto fluent CPA.

Multis: If you haven't filed taxes on your crypto and it's been a few years. What can you do to fix it?

SC: You have to go back and amend your returns but you need to see an accountant because there are some situations where you don't need to amend and if you do, you would be raising a red flag.‍

For a deep dive into crypto taxes check out Laura Shin's interview with Shehan on taxes on the Unchained Podcast.

With DAOs growing and revolutionizing corporate governance, Stripe enabling web3 crypto businesses on their platform,  and all the experiments taking place on the Metaverse, crypto is being mainstreamed. More and more businesses are putting their treasury in crypto and a growing cohort of web3 businesses are being created. This is exciting for us at Multis because we believe that decentralization through web3 and crypto currencies can unleash a wave of global entrepreneurship. We're also aware that web3 businesses and organizations have particular needs when it comes to managing their crypto.  Multisignature wallets are the gold standard for safe and innovative storage - especially for businesses or teams. If we were to recommend a multisig, it would be a Gnosis Safe.

Gnosis - What is it?

Gnosis Safe is part of the Gnosis ecosystem.  Gnosis builds new market mechanisms for decentralized finance. Their three interoperable brands allow you to securely create, trade, and hold digital assets on the Ethereum blockchain.

Gnosis Safe - the successor of Gnosis Multisig

The Gnosis Safe Multisig is a multisignature wallet that is the official successor of Gnosis Multisig. This upgrade comes with various security and user experience improvements. As the name implies, a multisignature requires a minimum number of people to approve a transaction before it can occur.

Most people with crypto use a single key wallet, be it a hardware or a software wallet.

While these wallets can be useful for someone holding crypto for personal use, they're less than ideal for a business or an organization. A wallet with only a seed phrase to access it makes it extremely possible for an employee to go rogue and siphon funds. This happens more often than you may think. Not just that, even if your business is made up of one person, it is still not the wisest way to secure your digital assets (we think a Shared Custody Multisig is a good way to go).

With a multisig, a company with 5 managers can set up their wallet to require approval for all 5 of the managers or 3 of the 5 managers for major transactions. This ensures that no funds are misused by a person.

In addition, Gnosis Safe Multisig gives users full custody over their funds, meaning users are in control 100% of the time and have access to funds 24/7.

As of February, 2022, there are over 1.7M Ether and more than $90B equivalent in digital assets secured by Gnosis. The smart contracts of Gnosis Safe are not just audited, but formally verified, and the company runs a bounty program where researchers can earn up to $100,000 for every bug they report.

Some features of Gnosis Multisig Safe include:

1. Multi Signature - Fully customize how you manage your organization's crypto assets, with the option to require a predefined number of signatures to confirm transactions. Require multiple team members to confirm every transaction in order to execute it, which helps prevent unauthorized access to company crypto.

2. Assets- Gnosis Safe Multisig supports ETH, ERC20 (Tokens) and ERC721 (Collectibles). You can also see the fiat values of your assets.

3. Use any wallet - Use any wallet to sign transactions. No matter if it’s a mobile wallet, browser extension, or hardware wallet

4. Safe Apps- Bringing multisig security to DeFi, you can now put your funds to work directly from the Gnosis Safe Multisig interface. Use digital assets to invest, earn, borrow, invoice, do payroll and more.

We also like that Gnosis Safe does not try to be more than what its name says. You won’t find banking features or 3rd party integrations here, minimizing the surface of an attack. If you are looking for a place for your treasury, look no further than Gnosis.

You can find a full overview and comparison of Gnosis Multisig Safe here:

As proof of confidence in the Gnosis Safe, Gnosis has moved an additional 10,000 ETH to the Gnosis Safe contracts and will move an additional 10,000 ETH every month until all of their company’s crypto funds are stored there.

Multis- Building on Gnosis Safe

We chose to build our app on the Gnosis Safe smart contracts because we believe it's the gold standard in multisignature wallets: It is open source and it supports DeFi integration through leveraging a whole ecosystem of Gnosis Apps. It is a solid offering and meets all the levels of security we expect from a well built product.

We've been building with Gnosis since 2019. Even though it's excellent for storage, the interface is very techy and can be intimidating for newbies. That's why, we extended Gnosis Safe's features to build a user-centered interface that extracts transaction data from your Gnosis Safe and aggregates it cross chain to allow financial professionals to have one single source of truth throughout our insights dashboards and transaction categorization features.

We see Gnosis Safe as a key treasury solution to a larger problem of getting clarity and control over crypto finances.  At Multis, we've added other features like the ability to link wallets crosschain, get valuable insights on flow of funds, have a shared contact book, pay up to 65 different addresses in a single transaction and soon, USD exchange accounts. Multis is non-custodial, we do not have access to your funds.

Linking a Gnosis Safe on Multis

We make it easy for our users to link an existing Gnosis Safe to their Multis account. Here's what you need to do:

Step 1 - Connect the MetaMask that's associated with your Gnosis Safe(s).

If your Gnosis Safe keys are stored on Ledger or Trezor, you can import your keys to MetaMask and use your existing Gnosis Safe(s) to create a wallet on Multis. Here's a tutorial on importing your Trezor and Ledger keys.

Step 2 - Multis will automatically detect your Gnosis Safe through MetaMask. Select the address of the safe you want to link from the drop-down menu.

Step 3 - Once your wallet is linked, you can click on "Launch Multis" to go to the dashboard.

Step 4- If there are owners associated with your Multis account they need to be invited to Multis. You can do this in "Settings" under "Team."

Step 5 - Once team members are invited by email they need to login and connect the MetaMasks associated with the Safe to Multis.

Step 6 - Your account is now activated.

Don't have a Gnosis Safe? You can click on "Create a New Wallet" and Multis will automatically create one for you!

Step 1 - If you don't have a Gnosis Safe, Multis can create one for you. Click on "Create".

Step 2 - You can choose to use MetaMask to sign your transactions. However, this step is not mandatory. Learn more about key mangement on Multis.

Step 3 - Hit " Continue".

Step 4 - Once your MetaMask is connected, your main payment wallet will be created and you can hit "Enter my account".

You already created a new wallet on Multis but you want to switch to an existing Gnosis Safe?

If you already set-up a Multis account but would prefer to use an existing Gnosis Safe as the main payment wallet, then write to us at support@multis.co and we'd be happy to help you change your setup.

When we started building the best all-in-one app for web3 organizations, we knew how important it was for users to have a single source of truth for their company's crypto. This is why tracking multiple wallets was part of our product from day one. Knowing that web3 is greater than simply Ethereum and Bitcoin, we expanded chains to include BNB, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Of course, the world of web3 changes at breakneck speed. In the past 12 months NFTs grew in both cultural and commercial relevance: NFT based startups are on the rise, and even big legacy brands are getting in on the action. With predictions of the market reaching more than $80 billion by 2025, NFTs have gone from a novelty to a legitimate asset class.

NFT Trackers: a growing need for Multis users... and businesses

Many of our users have been asking us for support in tracking their NFTs, an increasingly important part of their crypto portfolio. At the moment, there exists a growing roster of NFT trackers adapted for various use cases and chains. However, most of today's NFT trackers are built for individuals, and not for companies. This can be problematic when an organization is handling their assets as a team and where full clarity over digital assets is needed. We knew that users were toggling between their Multis accounts and external NFT trackers, as our goal is to provide a holistic overview of all digital assets, we knew we could level up and extend the product to NFTs.

Integrating with OpenSea for NFT Tracking

We decided to introduce NFT tracking thanks to an integration with OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. After speaking with our users, we knew that the most important parts of tracking NFTs came down to total valuation of NFTs across collections, foor prices, and of course, the images of the NFTs themselves.

We built this first iteration to track NFTs on Ethereum mainnet, but we plan on integrating other blockchains in the future. Right now, users can link the wallet(s) where they are storing their NFTs and visualize NFT collections including:

• NFTs in collection

• Floor prices and valuations

• Total valuation of all NFT collections

Users can click through to an individual collection and visualize:

• Valuation of the collection

• Purchase price of NFT and date purchased

Tracking NFTs in Multis: Getting a holistic overview in a few clicks

If you want to track your NFTs from your Multis account, it's easy. On the Dashboard click on "Portfolio." In the Portfolio section, click on "NFTs" on the upper bar.

Next, click on "Track New Wallet" and either link your MetaMask or enter in the 0x address of the wallet containing your NFTs. Your NFT page will load and and you'll be able to visualize all ETH based NFTs on your wallet.

Interested in managing your NFTs as part of a digital portfolio with your team? Create a Multis account for free and give it a try!

In 2021, everyone bought their first NFT.

In 2022, everyone will join their first DAO.

— Coopahtroopa.eth 🔥,🔥 (@Cooopahtroopa) November 26, 2021

According to the experts, we’re right now in the year of the DAO (or Decentralized Autonomous Organization). As of February 2022, there are at least 188 DAOs controlling over $12 billion in assets. These organizations have huge potential: they’re digitally native, transparent by design and their community-led ethos means they can often scale faster than traditional top-down organizations. However, a major block in running a DAO is a lack of tooling that can allow for efficient treasury management, payouts, reimbursement, and smooth governance. Traditional businesses have a wide range of Saas products, and business apps to support their operations, in addition to corps of lawyers and accountants specializing in startups and small businesses. This is not yet the case in the web3 world. Below you’ll find some solutions that we’ve seen our users implement and in order to improve upon tools and to create solutions whole cloth.

DAO Treasury Management: Emerging Tooling to cover the basics and to diversify

Nearly all DAOs store their treasury on multisignature wallets, which are built for teams. Although there are a wide array of multisignature wallets, Gnosis Safe is the de-facto multisignature wallet for DAOs. Most DAOs lock up their assets on multiple multisignature wallets and disburse treasury to individual wallets for coindrops or allocating grant funding. We spoke to a member of a grants committee at a major DAO and he summed it up saying “My biggest issue is that most DAO contributors have no understanding of treasury management at all. Lots of funds sit idle because the most important thing with treasury is knowing how to use it.”

Multis: DAO Tooling for Treasury & Cashflow Monitoring

Snapshot metrics give DAOs financial KPIs

One of the reasons we built Multis was to give DAOs and web3 organizations clarity and control over their crypto treasury. We’ve built our app on Gnosis Safe because not only do we think it’s the gold standard for Multisig wallets but also because DAOs can simply connect their existing safes and access the app. No need to transfer funds to a new wallet.

Monitoring Finances and Getting Company Metrics

You can Track wallets across multiple chains

Multis allows teams to track financial activity of wallets across ETH, BNB, Polygon, and BTC. DAOs can link as many wallets as they are using for a holistic overview of their funds. This can be a crucial way for DAOs to make complex financial information easier to read and to understand. Visualizing company treasury over time and by category can help teams make better decisions about cashflow and budgeting and is a crucial step towards getting a handle on your DAO’s treasury.

Community access

Access Control allows sharing with a bigger group than safe owners

Unlike a Gnosis Safe, where only “owners” can access funds on the wallet, Multis accounts include a teammate-level access. Meaning that non-owners can still see activity on the wallet, label transactions, and export financial data.

Easy Reporting

Multis accounts make reporting on finances easy. The “transactions” tab is a single source of truth where users can categorize their transactions across all wallets, add notes and attachments for added clarity, and export data as an accountant friendly CSV report.

Insights that are easy to share

The “Insights” tab on Multis was designed to give users a snap shot understanding of basic KPIs: inflows and outflows over time, and a breakdown of expenses by categories. Unlike minute accounting data, these charts are made to give non-experts a view of funds for better transparency and easy decision making. We’ve already been told that some of our DAO users are taking screenshots of company Insights and sharing them with their community on Discord. We hope to make this feature more sharable in the future and better integrate DAO communities.

Payroll

Multis is designed to make DAO payments as easy as possible. That’s why accounts are equipped with payroll functions allowing to pay up to 65 addresses in a single transaction. Thanks to a built-in company address book- contacts are stored in a single place. Because our accounts are built on Gnosis Safe, users can put in place a payment approval policy, ensuring that outgoing payments are validated by multiple admins to ensure maximum transparency.

Hedgey: Optimizing DAO Treasury

The Hedgey Dashboard

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Most DAO’s have over 95% of their treasury locked up in their native tokens. This is a huge risk: unless your token moons, a treasury made up of a volatile asset is highly risky- in a worst case scenario the DAO might end up selling it’s native token during a bear market. A best practice from traditional finance is of course to diversify their treasury with lower risk assets. Stablecoins are a perfect example of such an asset, however, selling native currency on a DEX can cause real price impacts. Hedgey is a permissionless protocol designed for DAOs to generate yield and diversify their treasuries without having to do spot sales on the open market. Hedgey lets users create t ime-locked OTC offers as transferable NFTS or generate upfront yield by writing covered calls with native treasury tokens directly from their app. This is a powerful tool that DAOs can use to protect their treasury long term and insulate it from fluctuations that come with a Bear market.

DAO Legal Tooling

Right now, most DAOs exist in a legal grey area- somewhere between a co-op and a small business. As DAOs continue to amass impressive treasuries and grow in number — it’s becoming an imperative to protect stakeholders from legal liability and to have an appropriate structure for looming taxation. The state of Wyoming is a pioneer in this area — allowing DAOs to set up as LLCs, the Marshall Islands has been following suit in this area as well.

KaliDAO - Launching a DAO with legal benefits

KaliDAO is one of the most interesting projects we’ve seen for DAOs wishing to launch with a legal status. Spun off from the team at LexDAO, a group of legal engineers, KaliDAO allows DAO members to connect their wallet directly to their platform and to establish key preliminaries like voting structure and legal status, end-to-end tokenization, voting support, and LLC formation and drafting agreement software. At the moment, there are 4 types of agreements available Wyoming DAO LLC, Delaware DAO LLC, Unincorporated Non-Profit Association, and Investment Club. This is an amazing all-in-one way to protect a nascent DAO from day 1.

LexDAO - for a community of legal engineers

LexDAO does not offer legal advice. It’s a space for “legal engineering professionals” who are building blockchain projects that can be used in lieu of basic legal fees. They’ve also come up with a way to provide an arbitration service that renders a decision through a multi-sig committee of LexDAO legal engineers. Their blog provides interesting opinions on web3 legal disputes as well as explanations of legal implications of protocols. We should also mention that their directory of key contributors is a roster of many lawyers specializing in web3- for those looking for legal counsel on their DAO this could be a good jumping off point.

Antifirm - Web3 specialized Lawyers who get DAOs

Antifirm is the web3 arm of the law firm Campbell Teague. Unlike KaliDAO and LexDAO which do not provide legal advice, Antifirm provides counsel on everything from DAO structure, to NFT sales, to General Counsel.

DAO Governance Tooling

Image Courtesy ofNichanan Kesonpat

A key feature of DAOs is transparency in how decisions are made and funds allocated. Members often earn voting privileges through contributions to the DAO. Unlike typical corporations DAO stakeholders are empowered to submit proposals from all areas of the DAO: from grants, to engineering, to marketing, to events. The result of voting in DAOs means on-chain action.

On-Chain Governance Voting Tooling

Historically, On-Chain voting tools were used to enable DAO governance and decision making. Tools that allow for this include Tally, Sybil (developed by Uniswap) Boardroom, and Compound Governor. However, due to volatile gas fees on Ethereum Mainne t it’s become increasingly common for DAOs to look for other tools for voting that will save them on gas fees.

Offchain/Signal Voting Tools

Oftentimes, DAOs will use offchain social networks like Discord and Telegram for simple polling as these tools are often integral to the DAOs community. Snapshot also offers off-chain and gasless voting systems that can be adapted to different systems (quadratic voting, approval voting, etc).

DAO Tooling Starts with a Mindset

As Vitalik Buterin stated “You can’t just have a DAO to be a DAO. You need a DAO to do something.” The most vibrant DAOs are building exchanges, turning legal services into code, making web3 easier to use, and funding culturally significant digital art.

However, as a company we recommend that from the outset nascent DAOs take what they’re doing seriously. This starts with selecting the right tools to accomplish treasury management, assure legal status, and make governance easy to enact. In order for a DAO to do great things, tools need to be part of the conversation early on. In many ways, we’re talking mindset, and an openness to a certain degree of centralization (especially when it comes to tracking assets in your portfolio). Any DAO should try to put in place tools and ways of working to ensure the future success and prosperity of the organization.

Did we leave out any tools? Let us know support@multis.co.

Making room for more crypto dreamers

Multis’ greatest asset is the team of professionals (or “crypto dreamers” as we like to call them) we’ve assembled. In 2021, we grew from a team of 4 to a team of 10. In 2022 we’ll be using the capital from the raise to recruit 15 more full time crypto dreamers across business, product, and engineering in Europe and the US. Growing our team will be instrumental for us as we meet market demand.

Speaking of demand, we see no signs of it slowing down. Within 2 weeks of taking our accounts out of beta we tripled our users and grew AUM exponentially. While we know that web3 is the future of entrepreneurship, we strive to earn trust in a trustless world, growing our team to ensure not only an excellent product but also white-glove service. 2022 is set to be an exciting year in web3 and one of great growth at Multis.

These are early days but I can tell you that working with Sequoia, and in particular Stephanie Zhan, has been invaluable for me as a leader. Our team is already feeling the effects of their expert guidance that has helped legendary companies like Stripe and our peers at FTX and Filecoin become leaders in their fields.

Of course, we could not have got where we are today without support from our users, our partners and our investors. Most of all, it’s thanks to the Multeam and their dedication, vision and amazing work that we got to where we are today. If you’d like to on this Zeppelin (inside joke, we’ll explain later) job openings are here. WAGMI ;-)

— Thibaut

Building Trust: a Core tenet of Multis

At Multis we often say that we “earn trust in a trustless world”. In other words, we are aware that we’re building the financial groundwork for hundreds of DAOs and startups who struggle managing their crypto. For us, this means that we want our accounts to be as safe as possible (which is why we build with Gnosis Safe), and we want them to be as easy to use as possible (hence hiring top shelf designers and recruiting across product).

Fluid and easy payments are at the heart of this equation. We know this because when we spoke to hundreds of founders and CFOs at DAOs and DeFi startups they often spoke about how difficult making payments were, especially when it came to paying gas fees.

Making gas fees as seamless as possible

A key learning from our initial product was that no matter how nice our interface was, paying gas from an external signing wallet added an extra step and could slow down business operations. This was amplified when users would have to purchase ETH to pay for gas- this added more time to an already time consuming process. There was an added burden for users when their transaction is stuck in mempool.

Although we do plan on integrating layer 2 solutions and other chains, we knew that we wanted fees on ETH mainnet to be easier to pay and we wanted to eliminate the added step of having to make sure there was enough ETH in your payment wallet before making a payment- so we knew that a relayer that would allow users to pay network fees in whatever native token they were paying in was the best option.

Integrating Infura ITX: a key partner for an easier payment experience

There are a few major relayers, and we decided to integrate Infura ITX. We did this because the documentation was extremely clear and it was easy to integrate- especially because it’s compatible with the well-known ethers.js library which we use in our stack. On a bigger level, I like that they are actively working in favor of improving the developer experience to bring more people to the Ethereum space.

I’m aware that some people might argue that improving the devxp with a centralized service might be a problem (Moxie, for instance) and go against the web3 decentralization ethos. But in the end, it’s a matter of balance, a network needs to attract developers with good and accessible tools while keeping enough decentralization to be secure. My team appreciates how open the Infura team is to hearing our feedback and constantly improving their product. You can check them out yourselves, at Infura.io/product.

Diving into our technical set-up

A user making a payment on Multis will select the currency they want to pay in (this is dependent on the ETH based tokens currently in their wallet). Network fees will be settled in the chosen currency. The technical process is a bit more complex/

Every time a user wants to perform a transaction from their Multis account (built on Gnosis-Safe) we follow these steps:

1. We build up the Gnosis-Safe transaction which represents a tuple {to, value, data} (simplified) associated with some refund parameters

2. We collect enough signatures from each owner depending on the approval policy

3. We use Infura ITX to relay the transaction via their RPC API and guarantee us the transaction will be mined under 6 blocks (1min30) when using the parameter schedule=fast. The validity of the transaction is guaranteed by the signatures collected from each party (admins on the multisig). Neither Multis, nor Infura, can manipulate the transaction to steal funds, it would result in a failed transaction. Technically, Multis via Infura ITX pays the gas fees in ETH. But the Gnosis-Safe has a refund mechanism that allows us to get reimbursed by the multisig smart-contract in the token of our user’s choice. No ETH is required anymore. Pay the gas in the token of your choice.

Looking forward: Technical integrations with Infura

In the future, as Multis extends its coverage to more networks, especially sidechains and Layer2 solutions such as Polygon, Arbitrum, or Optimism (and more), we would love to be able to use the same method with ITX to relay transactions on behalf of the users and continue offering eth-less transactions on those networks. We know that building trust through fluidity- whether it’s fiat that’s as liquid as crypto or making network fees as easy ass possible — is a major part of our engineering and product strategy. Our Infura ITX integration is an important step in making good on our vision.

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