Messari Mainnet Convos: Exploring Streamlined Token Ops with Bruno from Magna

Transcript

foreign thank you maybe we can start by uh we're talking about like the differences you know we were just talking about token 2039 like between massari mainnet and and 2049 what were some similarities differences what do you like with don't you like yeah it's it's you know it's interesting right because I think in Asia all these cities Singapore you know in countries Japan Hong Kong you know they're trying to compete through a track talent to grow the crypto ecosystems The Regulators are trying to give more clarity on what

people can build the governments are telling people you know come here incorporate here investors or clamoring to get into companies and so they're they're so growth focused and trying to really paint themselves as a part of the future of crypto and helping to grow the secret system in the US you know crypto still feels like The Underdogs the rebels were you know succeeding in spite of all the resistance from The Regulators from the government so you know it's kind of two different outlooks and when we you know we're out handled was in Asia and the panelists are talking about kind of crypto Outlook around the world there's always the same there was always you know very growth oriented forward-looking positive optimism in you know Singapore Japan

Hong Kong Iraq yeah everyone's talking about Mika the UK and then when they talk about the US it's like oh and all you know the US is in a holding pattern you know wait and see people are deciding if they want to stay in the era so it's an interesting contrast between kind of the US and the rest of the world in that regard yeah like I it's funny because like what what isn't isn't wrestlers who like free market with capitalism experiment innovate move fast break things like we want to be the best we want to like but like for some reason said we're holding back like why do you why do you think that is

yeah I mean I I think you know like anything else right Innovation and development and kind of follows the path of least resistance right and I think even at the event we were out this morning you know it was a Rooney full of compliance and risk people right and if you think about building in the U.S in crypto from day one you know you already need to start thinking about compliance costs right licensing costs legal costs uh you need to you know I talked to a lot of companies that from day one are thinking about okay they need a transaction monitoring kycaml and so I think if you go to another country where you don't have to worry about these things you know I could see the appeal

if you're a developer if you're a Founder if you're an entrepreneur and let's say you're not in the US let's say you are based in you know Vietnam I met some people from Ho Chi Minh you are based in Singapore you know why why would you sign up to go off to the US market if you have to deal with all this friction when all you want to do is just code focus on the products but also just try out Innovative things that the blockchain allows and so I think you are seeing that you know the US still has a big market in terms of capital Venture Capital institutional capital in terms of you know a lot of founder talent but the resistance and the friction to doing a lot of these Innovative things on the blockchain is just that much lower and so I think you are going to see more and

more products that the US customers Are Walled off from because people want to play around and see what takes off see what people like and take hold without you know there's no point in doing all these things sometimes before you even know if you have product Market fit so I think there's a sentiment of like hey why don't we figure out that product Market fit first and then you know follow through with all these compliance saying well as if and when we're ready for the US market and what was that into into magnet um you know what what the approach is that you guys took um we're looking at like a global market um why did you you know what approach did you choose and why did you choose that approach yeah I mean you know the

approach I was mentioning was like I think if you have a Founder that is starting in a foreign country yeah we're very different right I think we started in the U.S market with Connections in the US market and a lot of our customers have a US presence they have team members in the us or we have customers in the US so for us you know part of the reason we raised a lot of money was because we have to deal with you know the compliance we need those compliance tours uh we need to really think about building that up internally as well and so for us you know we have built our product in a way that is definitely geared toward customers that are sophisticated to do with the U.S presence that are you know the whole reason they're using magnets because

they're trying to really do things in a proper organized way so a lot of times the customers that we work with they have you know either a CFO or coo or perhaps ahead of HR and it's a lot of those back office teams that we're working with that really want to have you know very organized internal systems for in our case how they manage their investors how they manage their employees and how you know our main value proposition is you know getting tokens to your stakeholders on time precisely correctly and in a transparent way and so we're building tools for you know teams all around the world we we started in the US and so that's why you know we do transaction monitoring we you

know look at our clients very carefully um but there are you know some features we've had about building that are just very hard to build in the US without potentially exploding our you know legal costs and compliance costs and so it's something we do think about of you know where do we you know evolved in a product roadmap and how does that affect what types of customers we can work with um you know we are starting to expand we just hired a first person in Singapore trying to expand more into the Asian markets and understand their needs uh and so it's definitely an area where you know we're looking at where is that growth coming from where are those Innovations gonna you know grow and take root and make sure that we're not missing out on that just because we are

primarily in the U.S market epic congrats on the higher um and the expansion Wesley doing a great job shout out Wesley nice and and let's talk a little bit more about the roadmap like um you mentioned where you are in the hiring Road knocks starting to expand verbally uh beyond the US um so so drilling into some of the some of the product roadmatter um where where have you guys been where you are and then you know where where you you guys want to go yeah I mean a vision from day one was always pretty consistent right we think that you know tokens are the new form of ownership I have a new form of value transferable ownership it's how people participate in

the upside of a project right you could be an investor but also an employee that's contributing to the development it could be a Community member that's contributing to the ecosystem and so you know all platform is really two parts it's a system of record for that ownership and how do you trap who your stakeholders are how much they own and what are the terms around that ownership whether it's through a token Grant or a token investment instrument or something else and then how do you actually do the what we call the token operations to distribute those tokens so it could be an airdrop once a month that you're using magnet to track how much you need to send out to whom and even I'll watch chains sometimes we see projects somebody using multiple chains and then

a second part you know way that people use Magna is to do a full kind of on-chain distribution so they want to lock up the tokens in a smart contract Define in a smart contract you know what are the terms of that distribution exactly when do they unlock and then it automatically becomes available to the stakeholder claim when those unlock Milestones hit I think you know we started by first coming from the equity world where a lot of these things were done you know in spreadsheets and they have to be distributed manually by you know someone in the back Office Team and when you you know we came into crypto and we saw oh great we have now this program of a you know form of ownership programmable money and yeah teams were still using spreadsheets to track all

these things and still going in and manually sending tokens and so we're really trying to use like what crypto is natively good at right it's programmable money is transparent everyone can see the logic it's enforceable you can build in all these mechanisms like repurchase right um and really saying like how do we just do that from day one in a way that also makes these teams lives easier and so it's that's really our values it's it's transparency it's automation but it's also in a way increasing trust in the ecosystem because you're no longer depending on someone you know doing their job well you know exactly what's going to happen and could you can you describe or kind of unpack like one uh

example in practice um if you can name drop company that'd be awesome or like you know a partner of yours um and and kind of take us through the works of how they use Magna um yeah I mean you know we worked with a number of protocols uh in the past you know year and a half yeah since we launched uh one of them is you know access protocol which was actually a collaboration with the block and other uh media companies in the crypto space and research companies and you know usually when companies come to us it's right you know sometimes the day before the token launches they come to us and they say hey we have 20 employees we have a hundred investors uh they are

supposed to get their tokens every day starting tomorrow and we have no plan on how we're actually going to do that uh can you guys help us and we get them set up on the platform and then I say boom like everyone sees the number of tokens go up they can claim every day um and so really it's we've also had companies use us after they do a public sale and they kind of will say hey we actually have you know 3 000 people that are supposed to get their tokens starting tomorrow um and you know we help them do that in a gas efficient way and so that's kind of like the core value proposition is doing that distribution at scale like sending everyone to a portal when they can see exactly how much they're going to get but most of our companies today

actually come to us you know recently long before they launched our token where they say hey look you know what we just raced around we're starting to give out tokens for employees for investors we just want a place to put all that information because right now it's looking in a spreadsheet and we're worried about access we're worried about making accidental edits we just need a place to put it where we know it'll be safe but we know we can track updates to it and we can share with everyone exactly where they stand you know both now and also when we do our next round when we make our next fire and so giving that platform that everyone can be inside and see all of the information that they need to see that's what most companies are coming to us for today is

kind of very proactively saying you know we want to get everything you know in order so that when we come to that token launch you know we don't need to scramble we actually know that everything is already in place and we can just should go and then once the token lawn chilies you know that it's going to get to the right people so a lot of like proactive you know kind of stakeholder management is how do we work with companies these days if they think they might and we're back get chilled out um that that makes a lot of sense like building a more mature token distribution process Beyond spreadsheets yeah um I mean personally like you saw me

lose my hand earlier at this broad trailer we do everything on chain yeah um when we are I Take payroll right like that's that's a great example we build a transaction in a gnosis multi-sig add a bunch of uh like transactions into a batch and then and then send that batch out to you know our seven people on our team um that requires us to manually input each transaction that's click you know through buttons to add it to a batch and then have to have to send out that transaction if we had 300 people on our team or 3 000 people on our team readings like a ton tons of clicks tons of buttons to

push and you always have that that risk of someone uh fat fingering I'll bet and then and putting in you know an extra zero on on a paycheck or you know uh a transaction that that you send out to one of your employees and with companies with massive imbalance sheets massive payrolls they can't afford to take that risk um and and we're kind of seeing like the two different approaches the run that is almost like you can almost like look at it from the US lens it's a little bit more like buy the book If you will and a little bit less on chain natively

um a separate set of use cases and like business practices for the companies that are using those uh those more mature types of systems um and then for token distributions like that's an entirely different Road air drops um I'm curious in general like whoever really like drill down approach uh to a value proposition um so maybe we can talk a little bit about the roadmap is where you're going like um rare the product expansion wise and and um you mentioned there's a couple of features that like you can't really do in the US but like

um maybe you can allude to those or in a perfect road if the regulation does get there like what what is like your vision what would you rev to do with Magna um in an ideal world yeah yeah I think where our roadmap goes goes in you know a few different directions if you look at the stake rivers that we serve right I think you know compared to maybe other companies in the space like we very much like to work out what are the problems that we can solve for those stakeholders to make their lives even easier the more that our product grows and the more that they use our product and so breaking down those stakeholders I'll bring you know those stakeholders I think one is kind of the protocol teams themselves right so those back office teams there's administrative teams the

the people we got together this morning it's Finance it's operations it's HR how can we make their lives easier and so that's one part of our roadmap where we are building uh you know Integrations with payroll software Integrations with HR management Integrations with eor for companies that I've overseas employees how can we bridge the gap between what's happening on chain and what's happening in the real world right so things like tax withholding tax payments um you know reporting accounting a lot of what we're doing now this quarter is building tools that it just said that intersection to make sure that you know those payments are doing through magma have the right withholdings and then I'll report it to the right authorities

the other stakeholder that we're really trying to build a lot of facility for is the recipient right that employee that investor that advisor how do we give them more utility out of their tokens so the ability you know in terms of governance features staking making that easier uh just being able to do more things to the Token you know swapping off ramping um those are all things that we want to build into the product so that when you get that token you know if you're not a crypto native person you're like what do I do with this right okay this is great but I wanna you know I want to participate I want to vote I want to sell I want to say you shouldn't have to go figure it out on your own because you know a lot of these you know not even

retail holder sometimes even investors if they're not really web3 native they don't knock at necessarily know they need to you know withdraw their metamask and then log into the snapshot so trying to make those workflows more seamless to that person that's getting tokens and then I think you know the third is solving more problems for the protocol and so right now you know we help them distribute their own projects tokens um how can we make other workflows easier you know we're looking at there was a treasury management that we see a lot of companies come to us with and you know we sit in a place where we work with a lot of these protocols you know really early on when you know they still have a lot of questions about how to structure the token compensation you

know who should they use the lawyer as an accountant who should you know they're launching with token okay with all hey magnets you know a good Market maker you know do you know any one of the exchangers so even for us throughout you know we think about how do we help these protocols even outside of the product right it's making these introductions I think we want to build up a directory of people that we trust that can make their lives easier so they don't have to figure that all out on their own and then figure out okay now what parts of this can we you know built into the product so that they don't even have to go outside of the platform to answer some of those questions so there's some stuff in there that you know we're still early in figuring out but I'd say you know our mission is

really to make the lives of protocols easier so that they don't have to worry about how you know to run the protocol how to scare it from a back office perspective they should be worried about how to scale their products right not the operations that's where we want to you know be able to improve and have an impact on because we're the next big Market hits you know you're gonna definitely have a shortage of crypto native back office Specialists right crypto native operations Finance HR do we want to make it so that those people that are going to be coming into the ecosystem um Anew right from Lab two that they don't have to figure this all out on their own from scratch they don't have

to reinfect the wheel yeah I I I see the vision like uh as recall it Forward into like new Cycles um I I saw Roger lushner's uh panel yesterday about real world assets how there's an adoption code from the most boring uh to the least boring and I think there's there's a close parallel to complexity when we talk about Brewing this um and maybe tokenizing cash is very very easy um but look at Circle and very like centralized uh company that that has HR they have operations

they have all these systems um once we start getting into uh equities real estate commodities there's multiple other industries that are coming into this into this web 3 where this tokenized rib and they're gonna have to figure it out um they're not gonna be natives um they're going to have to uh figure out how to operate in this space and that's where Magna fits in um you guys can solve operations as crypto and d52 uh build into the traditional herd um it sounds like magnesota Bridge back out you know that's the goal right because I

think it's only going to get more complex to run a crypto company over time I think you know if you look at a couple of years ago it was more challenging but you know you were also maybe not working in as many countries we're not working on as many chains and now people are dealing with multi-change I'll just cross chain you know military jurisdiction payroll employees all around the world um you know the Technologies are ever changing all the infrastructure is ever changing and there's only ever going to be more options as well around you know what tools you use for all these back office tools and I think we have a lot of ideas about how to simplify some of those things for teams but you know yeah part of the the challenge is how do you

keep up with the times and you want to be able to be a trusted partner for people that can you know always make sure that we are at that Cutting Edge and then making sure that we're exposing our customers to those you know New pieces of functionality that are coming out awesome play play more.com uh I appreciate you taking the time uh check out Magna on Twitter where they have this up on Twitter we're tied by the handles um and and check out this conversions right like between on chain and off chain uh between decentralized corporate structures like Dao's and centralized corporate structures like LLCs with HR and operations departments um Magnus had to bridge that Gap and and uh really accelerate the adoption into the mainstream so

um thank you so much for coming on right thank you closing thoughts anything yeah I mean I think you said it best right like I think we work with companies uh the fur Spectrum you know we work with some companies that are completely decentralized and you know we give them the options of what how they configure the vesting how they can configure the smart contracts so you know we work with some companies that you know they want the trustless aspect of crypto they want to see their stake laborers want to see you know on the one extreme the tokens are completely locked up no one can take them back no one can change them you know they're going to a wallet there's nothing to stop that from happening you don't have to trust the administrators On The Other Extreme you don't see companies that in the US entity U.S

employees they have contractual agreements you know the value of the flexibility of being able to if someone loses access to their wallet oh I now want to invest these tokens to a new wallet right if an employee gets terminated okay we need to stop that vesting and so they want that repurchase option they want the ability to change the recipient because for them they care about the blockchain rails for the transparency and the convenience and they don't necessarily need the trustlessness because of the nature of the relationship that they have storyboard is always going to be you know if you're fully decentralized we have tourists for you if you're for at least you know centralized then you know you just want to use Magno to just manage your obligations and track all those details we have something for you

as well and more and more we're seeing a mix of those worlds and obviously appealing to both you have solutions for any Hybrid models in the middle as well exactly awesome but building trust uh and uh helping these uh projects cross the chasm whichever direction they're running very very clear to see thanks for coming on oh thank you