Greetings to all those, who are to explore the mysterious world of finances alongside SMPLR! Despite the market crisis, more and more Web3 and DeFi solutions enter the lives of off-chain start-ups and enterprises, thus making their contribution to the merging of traditional finances and crypto. Some of them are already using crypto for conducting payments and even more want to start, but the entry threshold could be rather high in terms of managing all the fiat and crypto transactions your company makes day by day. Here is when SMPLR stepped into the field after we received a strategic investment from SKL VC in November 2022. So today we are going to tell you the story of how the very idea of such a product emerged and evolved to a product soon ready to be presented as MVP.
The story of our founder: realizing the key problems
Our founder, Artem Kirillov, speaks on the history of SMPLR: “When I was working as COO in Guarda Wallet, I faced many obstacles when crypto and fiat met each other.
Firstly — crypto and fiat are used for the same purpose — to make payments, but require entirely different approaches and solutions to access, plan, execute and track payments.”
Another challenge for Artem was risk management: “There were around 40 people working in Guarda Wallet, and since cryptocurrencies are known for being trustless, I had to change all the private keys for test wallets, when those employees who had access to them left the company. Also, since most of the team members were remote, I could not hold large amounts of company funds in shared wallets, so I had to conduct all meaningful transactions by myself (including salaries, marketing expenses, and so on).
Besides, we had plenty of small volumes of crypto payments for giveaways, partner promotions, bounties, etc., It was not convenient to use the exchanges for these purposes since every transaction needs to be verified by 2FA, SMS, and e-mail messages, and takes lots of time. I had to do it manually using a b2c wallet and write down all the payments I have made in the text file, as there were no business solutions to track transactions automatically on the market back then.
I led the development of the product, with 20+ devs involved — and they needed real funds for dev and testing purposes in more than 50 supported chains. Furthermore, I received reports with thousands of transactions, which were impossible to deal with and understand: are these all legit transactions or improper use of funds took place, how much was spent on exchange commissions, gas, etc.?
Lastly, the difficulties were in the company’s structure, we had several legal entities in countries all over the world with plenty of payments in crypto and fiat — and collection and aggregation of payment data converted to a unified currency was a really hard task.”
Artem was about to do something about it.
Inventing the concept of SMPLR
As a product, SMPLR is to answer several key questions:
After Artem had communicated with 50+ founders and C-level employees in crypto companies to verify these problems, he met some interesting results:
So, this is how the concept of SMPLR was born. The original idea was to make a business wallet, where founders will be able to create the company’s “walled gardens” — secured space to delegate, decentralize and control payments without building complex smart contracts infrastructure. But as companies are already using payment stacks — Walletconnect, Metamask, or Gnosis and changing user behavior can be really challenging, we decided to focus on the unsolved problem of fiat and crypto payment stream consolidation. This is the first task SMPLR is to fulfill, but our plans are very far going: the team wants to integrate our own noncustodial wallet into the platform in the next 6 months to let customers benefit from easy employee onboarding, customized payment workflows, payment whitelists, etc. (thus let users who don’t need these features and keep the existing payment stack).
Right now, we are working on launching the first alpha version of our product. Some features that are already implemented: the opportunity to track accounts and transactions in 8 different chains (this list is constantly expanding, we have $XRP, $NEAR, and $TRX in the queue). Moreover, this version of SMPLR supports working with bank accounts: as for now, you can import your transactions via a .CSV file. Lastly, our alpha-version users can work with fiat virtual accounts (including cash and third-party payment systems).
What is to be added straight after the alpha launch: different categories of income and expenses to allow our users to get insights into spend, manage unified on-chain and off-chain contacts in one place with aggregated financial stats, basic reporting options, and the payment calendar to manage the time of releasing your funds.
Want to know more about SMPLR or have some questions regarding the project? Visit our website or contact our founder Artem Kirillov through Telegram or LinkedIn!
The story of our founder: realizing the key problems
Our founder, Artem Kirillov, speaks on the history of SMPLR: “When I was working as COO in Guarda Wallet, I faced many obstacles when crypto and fiat met each other.
Firstly — crypto and fiat are used for the same purpose — to make payments, but require entirely different approaches and solutions to access, plan, execute and track payments.”
Another challenge for Artem was risk management: “There were around 40 people working in Guarda Wallet, and since cryptocurrencies are known for being trustless, I had to change all the private keys for test wallets, when those employees who had access to them left the company. Also, since most of the team members were remote, I could not hold large amounts of company funds in shared wallets, so I had to conduct all meaningful transactions by myself (including salaries, marketing expenses, and so on).
Besides, we had plenty of small volumes of crypto payments for giveaways, partner promotions, bounties, etc., It was not convenient to use the exchanges for these purposes since every transaction needs to be verified by 2FA, SMS, and e-mail messages, and takes lots of time. I had to do it manually using a b2c wallet and write down all the payments I have made in the text file, as there were no business solutions to track transactions automatically on the market back then.
I led the development of the product, with 20+ devs involved — and they needed real funds for dev and testing purposes in more than 50 supported chains. Furthermore, I received reports with thousands of transactions, which were impossible to deal with and understand: are these all legit transactions or improper use of funds took place, how much was spent on exchange commissions, gas, etc.?
Lastly, the difficulties were in the company’s structure, we had several legal entities in countries all over the world with plenty of payments in crypto and fiat — and collection and aggregation of payment data converted to a unified currency was a really hard task.”
Artem was about to do something about it.
Inventing the concept of SMPLR
As a product, SMPLR is to answer several key questions:
- How to analyze your company’s crypto and fiat spending in one dashboard?
- How to go through the financial status of the company in a convenient way, where all spending and incomes are aggregated in one place?
- How to plan spending in crypto?
- How to unite all the cash flow (crypto and fiat together) in one place?
- How to delegate the payments without risks?
After Artem had communicated with 50+ founders and C-level employees in crypto companies to verify these problems, he met some interesting results:
- 50%+ of them confirmed the problems with delegating the payments, especially for marketing spending.
- But more than 80%+ answered that collecting and consolidating financial information is a much bigger issue.
So, this is how the concept of SMPLR was born. The original idea was to make a business wallet, where founders will be able to create the company’s “walled gardens” — secured space to delegate, decentralize and control payments without building complex smart contracts infrastructure. But as companies are already using payment stacks — Walletconnect, Metamask, or Gnosis and changing user behavior can be really challenging, we decided to focus on the unsolved problem of fiat and crypto payment stream consolidation. This is the first task SMPLR is to fulfill, but our plans are very far going: the team wants to integrate our own noncustodial wallet into the platform in the next 6 months to let customers benefit from easy employee onboarding, customized payment workflows, payment whitelists, etc. (thus let users who don’t need these features and keep the existing payment stack).
Right now, we are working on launching the first alpha version of our product. Some features that are already implemented: the opportunity to track accounts and transactions in 8 different chains (this list is constantly expanding, we have $XRP, $NEAR, and $TRX in the queue). Moreover, this version of SMPLR supports working with bank accounts: as for now, you can import your transactions via a .CSV file. Lastly, our alpha-version users can work with fiat virtual accounts (including cash and third-party payment systems).
What is to be added straight after the alpha launch: different categories of income and expenses to allow our users to get insights into spend, manage unified on-chain and off-chain contacts in one place with aggregated financial stats, basic reporting options, and the payment calendar to manage the time of releasing your funds.
Want to know more about SMPLR or have some questions regarding the project? Visit our website or contact our founder Artem Kirillov through Telegram or LinkedIn!