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Episode Description
In this episode of Diving Deep, Subscript's CEO, Sidharth, sits down with Amy Kalnoki, Co-Founder and COO of Bitwave. If you’re a finance leader evaluating digital assets (or just curious how they work), this episode is your cheat sheet.
Sidharth and Amy discuss:
- What CFOs should understand about digital assets
- The most common crypto use cases in the enterprise
- Why “wallet hygiene” is essential for finance teams
- Where traditional accounting software falls short for crypto
- And more!
Show Notes
Follow Sidharth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidharthkakkar/
Follow Amy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amykalnoki/
Follow Subscript: https://www.linkedin.com/company/subscript/
Follow Bitwave: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bitwaveplatform/
About Diving Deep with Subscript
Diving Deep with Subscript is a video series where we dive deep and explore SaaS metrics with leading investors, CEOs, and finance leaders.
Watch the entire series of Diving Deep with Subscript
Get caught up on the entire series right here: https://www.subscript.com/diving-deep
Episode Transcript
Sidharth Kakkar
Thanks so much for being here, Amy. I'm really excited to pick your brain a little bit about everything from founding companies, fundraising, finance, digital assets, the whole gamut. You're such an expert in so many of these things, so I'm really thankful for this conversation already.
Amy Kalnoki
I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Sidharth Kakkar
Awesome. If you're up for it, I can start digging into some of the topics that we have here. And start learning a little bit more about your experience, or from your experiences. So the first question I had was: You built and sold an enterprise SaaS company before, with Synata being acquired by Cisco. And now with Bitwave, you're tackling one of the more complex challenges in finance, digital asset accounting. It's completely uncharted territory. And I know Bitwave was bootstrapped for the first few years until the market itself was ready. I'm so curious to hear about that decision.
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah. It was interesting. We looked around at the time we started the company, which was 2018, and at that point there was already a lot of retail and individual interest in digital assets. And my co-founder and I felt really strongly that if there were individuals trading crypto and so passionate about digital assets that businesses would follow, there would need to be a whole industry of infrastructure to support them, and businesses go where consumers are. That's how they make money. And so we knew that it would be coming eventually, but since our market was always meant to be B2B, we were enterprise from day one. We knew we had to wait a little bit because in 2018, the number, just the TAM was not big enough, we felt, to justify the VC backing. Because when you take investment and outside capital, there is the expectation to grow and address what should be a fairly large TAM, total addressable market. And so we just didn't think that it was there yet, but we knew that it would be there in the future. We felt strongly, we had enough conviction that it would be there in the future.
And so we just ran a very lean startup model. Got an MVP out pretty quickly. Got our first initial customers by attending a conference and setting up a booth. We did that a couple times and had probably our first dozen or so customers within the first couple of months, and then just about spent the first three years, two and a half years, really just focused on product because what we do is very engineering intensive. There's a lot of intricacy to integrating with various different blockchains. The different blockchains vary a lot. And moving financial, auditable, high quality data between systems is actually pretty complex to make sure that it's reliable, always up to date.
And so there was a heavy engineering lift, but we had a handful of really great early customers that gave us a lot of really insightful information and we were able to just run it for several years and then, we looked around, like 2021 timeframe. At that point, the whole digital asset ecosystem had matured enough that people were starting businesses to service all the various different things that were going on in digital assets. Whether it was NFT trading, DeFi, staking, all of these things at that point existed. And startups and larger scale enterprises existed to support it. So we had a market to sell to.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's amazing. I find it extra remarkable that you had the sort of strength to go in with your conviction because you're taking the most precious thing you have, which is your time and, investing in this thing where the market signal was not quite there and you had conviction it would be there, but I'm sure lots of people told you, you like," What are you doing? This is not going to work." And it takes an incredible amount of, I don't know, guts, to stick with that type of thing. How did you manage the self-doubt around it? I assume you had some, or maybe you didn't?
Amy Kalnoki
Pat and I, my co-founder, we had really strong conviction that enterprises would touch digital assets. I actually learned about crypto and digital assets from him. He, even when we were doing our previous startup, Synata back, and we ran that from 2013 to 2016, and even way in 2013, he was talking about Bitcoin, talking about digital assets.
He was mining Bitcoin under our desk at the coworking space that we worked out of for Synata. And so I had already had a long time to build up my belief in digital assets and the future for the whole blockchain kind of ecosystem. And so I was very, I was all in on that, eventually, all enterprises would touch blockchain in some way. And we're seeing that now with the rise of stablecoins because stablecoins is just such a killer use case for enterprises to use digital assets for B2B settlements, for paying invoices. It's the whole new world of programmable money and enterprises are embracing it. And so we really are, just even every day, I see more and more of how enterprises and businesses are starting to embrace and use digital assets. So yeah, I felt it strongly then, I feel it strongly now.
Sidharth Kakkar
Wow, that's amazing. And so I guess a lot of that faith was and then is being rewarded. And in 2022 you raised a Series A, so the market sentiment, clearly had changed a bit around it. And Subscript raised, we raised our Series A last year. And it's so different from the first time I raised a Series A. So I'm curious what your experience has been like. For me, it was between 2015 and 2024, it was like a world apart. And I'm curious, what was that difference like for you?
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah, I mean it's different every time. And as a second-time founder, obviously, everything's a little bit easier because you have a network that you can rely on. We initially, though, called up all the same kind of investors that we had worked with and people we knew because our previous product was an enterprise software SaaS tool, as well. And so we initially reached out to enterprise investors and SaaS investors who really had not developed the same conviction, I will say, that Pat and I had around digital assets, and so ultimately we ended up raising from blockchain-focused VCs.
So it was a pretty different experience because we were being compared side-by-side with the token deals, with people who were going to be issuing their own coin, creating their own blockchain. And just the function of those raises are very different. So we're raising from blockchain investors, but we're not a token offering. We're a SaaS enterprise offering, so it was a very different. We're here with our SaaS metrics and then, initially some of the blockchain investors were like "What are the tokenomics?" And we're like, "We're actually not going to issue a token. We're going to just be a SaaS offer."
But we did find a great, just a fantastic group of investors who also saw the need for infrastructure. They were bought in on the whole concept of digital assets in the whole world that is being created by blockchain. And so, they were onboard with the need for infrastructure, and especially things that will serve businesses because they could see the need for what we did within their own portfolio companies who were starting to launch and have a lot of token-based transactions that they needed to account for, needed to keep track of, needed to calculate taxes. All of the above.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's cool. And I feel like that moment after you raise a Series A sized round, and then you have to figure out, okay, how do I use this to grow the business, is actually surprisingly hard.
Everyone's like congrats and you're like, "What do I do?" Or at least, I felt that the first time, a little bit, even the second time. And I'm curious, how's your approach to actually using the investment in the business to generate growth, generate success. What does that look like and how has it differed?
Amy Kalnoki
The moment right after you raise the series A is really, you can't do it yourself. You can't grow, you can't hit the metrics that you want to hear with just the smaller team that you had when you were bootstrapped or series seed. So it's really the time when you have the dry powder and the opportunity to build the team that you want to build and fill in the gaps.
Because earlier in your kind of startup journey, everyone is juggling so many things. Everyone at the company wears a lot of hats when you're a bootstrapped or a series seed company. But by the time you're Series A, you have the opportunity to invest in the team members that have those more specialized skills.
And so you can have someone just dedicated to just finance or just marketing. Whereas before, everybody's doing a little bit of everything. And I'm super proud of the team that we built here at Bitwave. This kind of point where we were from series A until now, we did the most growing as the team. And yeah, it's fantastic to see.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's really cool. I feel like CFOs have a bit of this paradox where they're naturally risk averse, but then they also need to enable the innovation that drives the business forward. And I feel like you kind of live at the intersection of those because digital assets, by definition, are the edge of the innovation.
And so I'm curious: What is the biggest misconception you hear from finance leaders about digital assets?
Amy Kalnoki
Honestly, it's that digital assets are only used for crime. I'm shocked when I still hear that from people. And I'm going to repeat something I heard at the Crypto Banking Compliance conference I was at last year, and it's, "If you think digital assets are used for crime, let me tell you about this thing called cash." The scale of fraud that is committed using digital assets versus cash and traditional financial systems. It's just not even comparable. And when people group all digital assets and everybody in the industry together and don't see that there are a lot of very legitimate businesses and business reasons to use digital assets, I still find that surprising. And I do find that more with traditional finance folks sometimes that they're still scared, but I'm like, "Do you have a real opinion on what kind of database your bank uses?" This is a technology. Blockchain as a technology. I'm not sure why people have such a knee-jerk reaction. And especially around stablecoin, something that you just have to think of it as digital-enabled money, programmable money. It's the same as looking at a bank balance. There's a system behind that, a system of record, a ledger that is keeping track of all those transactions. And with blockchain, it's just a distributed ledger. It's a one that is, you know, blockchain-based versus a house database. It's why banks end up charging fees and act as the middleman is they have all this kind of old school infrastructure and software behind it. And if we can achieve those same goals by using blockchain or a newer technology, I'm not sure why it would be such a negative reaction, but I still do get a negative reaction sometimes, and I find that most surprising.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. That's so interesting. And so I guess, sometimes people have this knee-jerk reaction. What gets them to become more open-minded?
Amy Kalnoki
I think my favorite use case is actually something that we don't do at all, which is remittances across borders, kind of consumer, peer-to-peer payments.
I think it is crazy the amount that is taken out when people send money from the US to other parts of the world. It's up to 30, 35% sometimes. And you think these are people who are oftentimes like coming to the US and working and then helping support family members and friends back home and just to simply send money between people—so high fees. It's criminal. I do, I really think it's criminal that to send money to lots of places in Latin America and India can be 30% off the top of your own money to your own family members, to sometimes your own spouse—and, blockchain is the perfect use case for that.
You can put it in a stablecoin, so there's no fluctuation. Oftentimes, the on-ramp and off-ramp is a lot less than something like a Western Union or an international wire. And you can securely move money across borders. And it just, we're lucky in the US to have a very stable currency. People talk about inflation all the time here, but we have no idea what real inflation is in the US, where we have such a stable currency.
But other parts of the world, that's just not the case. And so having a financial tool that is divorced from governments and politics. I think that there is something good in that. I think that it is, it allows something like a stablecoin that is not tied to any individual government or even something like a Bitcoin or ETH that's pretty widely traded to be a good alternative for people who are not as lucky as we are here in the US.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's a great point. For CFOs, or if a CFO is hesitant about crypto or digital assets in relation to a business opportunity, something that will really move things forward for them or their business, what's the first step you would say they should take to become more informed?
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah, honestly is if you have a little extra money, like just get started with $20. Just understand what an exchange is, how custodial wallet is, what wallet addresses are. It's something that anyone can get into and it's something you can get into with very little money and just get a little bit of hands-on experience.
And I think that's really the best way. And then when you see that a stablecoin, like USDC that you get through Coinbase. It functions basically like a bank account. And you're not actually as a CFO, like taking stacks of cash and sending it off to someone. People still write a lot of checks, which I think is crazy.
But it's basically the same as moving money digitally as CFOs are already very used to doing. At Bitwave, we have an AR/AP payments management tool that brings all the same type of invoicing, invoice and vendor management and approval. Penny tests. All the same functionality controls that you would expect in a B2B software that you are used to in like a Bill.com or any other tool, where you're verifying vendors and collecting their addresses, that's available for digital assets, as well. You can have the same set of controls and policies around moving digital assets that you have around paying in fiat.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's cool. When it comes to digital assets, there's, because it's so new, there's a lot of variability. There are stablecoins that maybe were not so stable or things like that. I think a lot of the wariness seems to come from that. How do you suggest people approach that?
Amy Kalnoki
I think about it as risk. I think that you have to have a treasury plan and treasury policies and just think about it as risk, like that variability comes with potential upside. So if people are thinking about it as part of their entire risk profile, I think that is appropriate. Like maybe you're, you don't want any risk and your treasury team does not want to try to get any yield, that's totally fine. But maybe they do. And so it's just, it's a different tool in your tool chest.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yep. Makes total sense. So when, more traditional finance or companies that are not entirely digital asset oriented do things with digital assets, they can have quite a lot of operational challenges because they're not really set up for some of these things. What are some of the fundamental gaps you see that give rise to those challenges.
Amy Kalnoki
It's a concept here at Bitwave that we call "wallet hygiene." So, digital asset wallets at businesses tend to proliferate. They're very easy to set up. And if you think about the difficulty of setting up a business bank account, like a corporate bank account, often that's needs to be approved by your board. But it certainly is not something that anyone can just do. And so, if you are thinking about something like a custodial account or like a checking account or a business savings but it's one that anyone at your company could spin up.
And so we have, we call it "wallet hygiene." You should have good processes in place and maintaining access control and knowing the current balances. We've had customers who have found, like years later, digital asset wallets that an employee had made, done some transactions, and then ended up having a significant amount of money in them, and they just forgot about it and then found it once they went through the whole process of really onboarding and doing a control check around where these wallets are, because any developer, really anyone at your company, could spin up a wallet. There's not that same level of initial control.
And so having a good process in place on just maintaining and checking and controlling and tracking your various different wallets is really important because once you get used to using digital assets, it's actually very easy and your team will love it.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. Ah, that's so interesting. And I guess I would've assumed that for any wallet created you'd have track of the cashflow from the thing you are tracking to the thing you're not tracking. Where does that get lost?
Amy Kalnoki
Oh, I think it's often, I don't want to point to developers, but oftentimes, people will spin up a wallet for testing. It starts as like a petty cash wallet, but then they're buying and trading and selling, money's moving in and out. Then maybe that person leaves the company or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. Something that Bitwave really solves is you end up having a lot of oftentimes one-sided transactions. Like you're not sure what these wallets are that you are moving because it's just a list of addresses unless you're keeping track of it. Unless you've have a schema internally to say, okay, this wallet is developer A and this wallet is developer B, and you've labeled those clearly, and you have marked like this is only for development purposes. Oftentimes, people will end up, they'll start with one omnibus wallet and they'll realize that keeping track of all these different transactions is too difficult. So then they'll make 10 different wallets. But if you're not really careful about tracking them, they are actually easy to get lost. Because, I keep saying, it is like a bank account or something like that, but there's not remittance advice, unless you use a software like Bitwave, like there's not a lot of information that you're getting on who owns this wallet unless you are making a conscious effort to document it.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. It's interesting because the thing that really stands out for me is that at its core, digital assets are a technology and it's very much a kind of a raw technology. It's not meant to be everything that a bank account is right out of the box.
And you need a core part of that infrastructure, like Bitwave, to make it work, like have the technology work in the way that you need it to work for actual useful cases.
Amy Kalnoki
And integrate with your existing software. I think, something we felt strongly at Bitwave is digital assets are not going to replace everything.
Like businesses are not going to be a hundred percent on digital assets. They're always going to have fiat and for businesses to actually be using digital assets, they need to have it tied into their existing systems, to their ERPs . To where they're doing their fiat accounting. And so, really, that integration point is actually super, super important.
Sidharth Kakkar
And where do those other softwares that are part of the finance tech stack fall short in terms of being able to support digital assets?
Amy Kalnoki
Often, it is the number of decimal places. If you think about traditional finance softwares, most go down to two or four decimal points. But digital assets, you need 16, 32. And so, the UIs will just literally break. For things like Bitcoin that fluctuate in value, the accounting treatments can be quite complex and not the same as a fiat currency because in traditional accounting, you have Forex or you have an inventory item, and crypto combines the concepts of both of those.
It's like an inventory item that you have to track but that is fluctuating in value. And so, it's just, it is a bit of its own thing. It doesn't function like either inventory items or Forex in your traditional fiat ERP solutions. And so that's why Bitwave exists as a subledger. The best way to do a kind of digital asset accounting is to keep it separate from your fiat accounting and track it in a subledger because it just, it kind of functions differently than Forex currency or than inventory lots.
Sidharth Kakkar
Oh, so interesting. So before companies adopt Bitwave, or if they don't adopt Bitwave, what do they do?
Amy Kalnoki
Spreadsheets. Massive spreadsheets that are manually updated. Yeah. And like a very manual process.
In fact, early days when we went, initially went to go out and raise, people would ask, "Who is your competition?" And I'm like, "Hiring five people to keep a beast of a spreadsheet accurate and up to date." And a spreadsheet that is being manually updated is not very auditable. It's not the best way to run a high-functioning finance org. I love spreadsheets. Who doesn't love spreadsheets? They serve their purpose. But to really be an accounting system of record, it's not ideal.
Sidharth Kakkar
We're in the same world as you. Everyone uses spreadsheets to manage everything about their financial revenue operations and billing their customers and doing revenue recognition and the complex formulas—and try implementing a locking mechanism for the month of March in a spreadsheet , but leave April able to be changed—and it's like, good luck. So yeah, I'm very familiar with that. As a spreadsheet person myself: Love spreadsheets for modeling, really bad for store of data.
Amy Kalnoki
Right. Yes, agreed.
Sidharth Kakkar
Very cool. How does a multi-ledger environment —as well as the combination of fiat and digital assets— how does that live alongside a traditional ERP in a business? Can you paint a picture for that?
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah. Usually people are doing rolled up journal entry reports to reflect their digital asset holdings in whatever currency they're denominated, so US dollars. And so, that's why keeping an accurate subledger and just doing all your crypto accounting and transaction monitoring, and even tax calculations, in a system that is built for digital assets, and then you can just push the dollar equivalent and keep your main financial statements all still dollar-denominated.
Sidharth Kakkar
Got it. Okay, that makes sense. That's cool. And what is usually that first use case that might cause someone to go from a pure fiat world into a fiat plus digital asset world?
Amy Kalnoki
Honestly, it's varied through the time we've been at Bitwave. During the summer of DeFi, it was everybody getting into DeFi and realizing the yields and opportunities there. That's very complex accounting. When NFTs were a big thing, it was brands wanting to engage with their customers through an NFT. But of course, you mint, create buy, sell NFTs with digital assets.
So, suddenly you had these large corporations who had issued NFTs and had Ethereum-denominated revenue that they needed to account for. And then now, like I mentioned before, I actually think stablecoin payments is an excellent use case for enterprises to get into digital assets. You think about all that can be done with smart contracts and the more programmable invoices.
Imagine a supply chain where you would be able to program in and release a stablecoin payment, when your shipment is actually received at a warehouse or sent from a warehouse and kind of pre-programming things in that can be executed via smart contract and paid out in stablecoins. I think that there's a lot of exciting opportunities for businesses to do that.
But even if you just are paying, like I said vendors abroad or contractors overseas, you could use stablecoins for quick, easy, fast remittances.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's really cool. And so do you see like particular types of organizations or particular industries doing this a little bit more often than others? Or is it more across the board?
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah, there's really a bit of a network as soon as someone wants to pay you in stablecoins, whatever kind of vendor, like we've seen traditional enterprises. We've seen more crypto native. We've seen smaller startups. Really, it's pretty universal, like saving money, time on payments is a pretty universal appeal.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. Okay. So like a whole diversity of use cases and a whole diversity of organizations that's sprouting up a little bit everywhere. That's cool. What's the biggest financial blind spot for companies engaging with digital assets today?
Amy Kalnoki
Oh gosh. Not spending time in process, and I think the biggest blind spot is not exactly having a good control process in place and really understanding some of the more downstream things. Like it is going to cause an accounting, not issue, but an accounting challenge that needs to be addressed.
But not that that's bad. It could cause tax, depending on what kind of digital assets and how you're holding your wallets. Having a good strategy of like people and process and tools in place and doing that early rather than later. Sometimes, we'll see folks engage in digital assets and get pretty far down the road before they realize that they don't have any of those people, process, tools in place. And then the cleanup can be harder than if you just had things set up from day one.
Sidharth Kakkar
Interesting. And I guess, what are the consequences of being late on some of this stuff? Or not necessarily, you know, keeping track of it from an early stage.
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah, cleaning up one of those messy spreadsheets. And that's not a fun project for anyone. I think you're just missing the opportunity for innovation, for streamlining things, for keeping, headcount low. If you are hiring people to help manage things more manually, that's not maybe the best use of resource.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah, totally. You had talked about how Bitwave is, less of a, token issuer type of business with that type of metrics, but more B2B SaaS business, right? And so you are focused on B2B SaaS types of metrics, and you have a pretty metrics-driven approach. And full disclosure, you're a Subscript customer, so I'd love to hear more of your perspective on this: What are the SaaS metrics you focus on? And I would also love to hear how that's evolved from your past company.
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah. At Bitwave, we've always been built for enterprises from day one. But like I said, there weren't a ton of enterprises in the space when we got started.
And so we really did work with SMBs, mid-market, crypto native, non-crypto native, a whole kind of broad set of users. And so having a tool that can really look at revenue by customer type was super, super important for us, so we knew where to focus, when to focus more on the needs of our enterprise clients.
Everything's always been built from day one to be like enterprise grade from a security and compliance perspective, but there are certain features that enterprises tend to deem more than some of our more mid-market companies. And so really looking at things like ARR, but then going one step deeper and looking at things like ARR by customer type.
It's a metric that I really focus on and keep track of because I think it helps make data-informed decisions on where you spend engineering time.
Sidharth Kakkar
That makes so much sense, being able to segment by those cohorts. I'm also curious, how do you manage that from a product direction perspective?
The different types of customers, because I imagine they're pulling you in different directions
Amy Kalnoki
At times, but sometimes, the needs of more mid-market companies really do align with enterprises. And so, yeah, just try to follow the revenue. And so, you know, as a business, you have to be growing. And so figuring out where you think the biggest opportunity for growth is and focusing on that segment.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. That makes sense.
Amy Kalnoki
And our last company, we only had one ICP, one, kind of, customer type. So this was something that, at first, having—we think of Bitwave as a platform, really. So we've always thought of it as a platform with a lot of different modules, different upsell opportunities, different things. So, it is a bit of a choose your own adventure when you implement Bitwave because the platform, at this point, has been around for six plus going on seven years. So really, it can do a lot.
You can do a lot in Bitwave. And so thinking of it as a modularized platform helps us build a package and implement Bitwave that's exactly right for each of our different kind of customers, whether it's a crypto exchange versus a more traditional enterprise who's just using it for payments.
Like you can handle all of everything you need to do in Bitwave, but those are two different, kind of, user types even though, maybe they're both large enterprises, the way they use Bitwave could be different. And that platform approach was something different for us this time with Bitwave versus our last product.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's really cool. And it's interesting because products like that are so powerful, but they take time to build. But if you know what the customers want, it's worth it to take that time and build the right thing that'll just work for them.
Amy Kalnoki
Exactly.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's cool. Before using Subscript, what were your sort of challenges around billing and revenue and metrics?
Amy Kalnoki
It was just really, it was keeping QuickBooks and HubSpot aligned. And then we have our commission software, too. And so it was a lot of different systems, how people were paying us.
I think we're pretty unique in that we accept customer payments in crypto and digital assets. Like I said, now that's exploding. But we have been doing that from day one. You could always pay us in digital assets. And some of our, actually, earliest customers are the large blockchain foundations that everyone knows because they had very complex accounting needs and they wanted—of course, they're a foundation issuing a token—they wanted to pay in their digital assets. So, a huge chunk of our customers pay in their own native tokens. And keeping our multiple systems up to date and what we're pulling out of Bitwave it's a challenge.
It's a challenge that our own customers have and that we solve for them. So just really having a good system that is meant for SaaS billing that is flexible enough to be able to build things out. We have some usage-based costs. That was a big struggle before using Subscript usage-based billing.
I think all the typical challenges of multiple systems, multiple different, like I mentioned, we have multiple different customer types, different modules. Everyone has a custom implementation, and so it's just, it was a lot to try to do without a tool like Subscript.
Sidharth Kakkar
In what ways does Subscript help you operate more effectively then?
Amy Kalnoki
We were sending invoices out from multiple places, and so having just a centralized place to both send invoices out, but then also to do SaaS metric reporting and better SaaS accounting. Because we are great at digital asset accounting, but you know, Bitwave does not do any sort of fiat accounting.
And so having a tool that was really designed for subscription revenue has been great.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's very cool. I'd love to, before we end, poke a little bit into how you think about the future of digital assets. Bitwave is at the forefront, a lot of, I mean really anything related to enterprise crypto accounting and you partnered with AngelList recently to bring digital asset management solutions to fund managers, highlighting especially how venture capital is shifting. So, I'd love to pick your brain on what do you see in the future? One question, like as VCs and enterprises, they continue to embrace digital assets, what do you think is next?
Amy Kalnoki
Yes. Certainly at the moment, VCs, investors—there's a lot of excitement and commitment to digital assets as— blockchain is, I think it's a great technology. It is a technology. Like people think of it as this kind of abstract thing, but at the end of the day, blockchain is a technology. It's a technology tool. Cryptocurrency and digital assets, and currency in general, and transfer of value is a great use case for blockchain technology, but that's not the only use case.
Now those two things are very conflated, but blockchain as the underlying technology, and then digital assets as the use case of them, I don't think is going away, especially because of AI and digital assets. I think the whole next wave that we're going to see is agents using digital assets and stablecoins.
I don't think an AI is going to go to an ATM and take a stack of cash out and go pay for something. I think that AI agents will be interacting with digital assets because it is programmable money. They'll need to in interact with programmable money. And right now, digital assets is the best. Like a blockchain-based cryptocurrency is the best for a programmable asset. So, I think it's only going to grow.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's very cool.
Amy Kalnoki
All the future—I think we'll see a lot of really cool things. People will continue to innovate and continue to find new use cases for things.
Sidharth Kakkar
You mentioned that over time, the use cases that are trending have differed. What do you see trending now and/or which use cases are really gaining traction for traditional organizations embracing digital assets and where do you think that may shift over the next year or a few years?
Amy Kalnoki
I think it's payments. I think payments, from the beginning, have been the best use case. It was even mentioned in Satoshi's whitepaper as like a peer-to-peer kind of payment option. And so, the value transfer is just the best use case for digital assets. It's the longest lasting. I think, the widespread use of stablecoins. So the rise of stablecoins, which have been around for a while. Like everyone's talking about stablecoins as if they're a brand new thing. Stablecoins have been around for a while, but they're really just at this point, I think everyone understands how they're different than something like Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of the meme coins that sprout up. So, I think the widespread understanding that this is just this is pegged to the dollar, what it is, how it functions. I think that's why stablecoins are having their moment. And I think that that's the biggest use case, but it's always been the use case.
Sidharth Kakkar
Yeah. And as we think about more and more digital money and the intersection with AI agents , what are the traits or attitudes that will separate finance leaders who do really well with that type of change and embracing the possibilities?
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah, I think it's that keeping the change in mind, so embracing that things do evolve in the digital asset space, oftentimes very quickly. And if you're the kind of person who, maybe a bit of whiplash between different things is maybe not your favorite thing, I would say go in heads up knowing that things in the digital asset space do evolve at a very rapid pace, but that's one of the things I like about it. I think that that's what keeps Bitwave and the product that we're building exciting. I like that every month it feels like there's a new chain or a new product or a new use case. It's exciting.
Obviously, it's a management challenge to keep a really solid backlog and keep a good roadmap in mind and not get pulled in a bunch of different directions. But I actually find that really interesting and exciting. And part of why I do love working in this industry is people are so creative. There's always something new. I find it really exciting.
Sidharth Kakkar
That's really cool. I think we've covered almost everything. I'm curious if you have anything to add as far as closing on either the present or the future of digital assets and enterprises embracing them.
Amy Kalnoki
Yeah, I think, anything can really be tokenized on chain.
Like you can have RWAs—real world assets. People talk about that a lot. I think that's a really exciting thing. If you have assets or something that you want to tokenize, like businesses can do that. That used to be pretty near impossible. Easy, quick cross-border payments—that used to be a lot of friction. Mailing checks. All that can go away if you start using stablecoins and you can still bring all the same controls and process that you have in place around ensuring good financial practices within your organization. You can keep those same processes and controls even when you move into digital assets.
At this point, the digital asset accounting industry, like the CPAs and firms and outsourced bookkeepers who, you know, might be helping you with your fiat accounting. Now, there's a whole ecosystem, a world of experts and folks who you can engage with if maybe you don't have the capacity in-house to keep track of everything.
And then again, investing in something like Bitwave to have a good system and a process and controls in place, and keeping track of things up to industry best practices from day one will save you a lot of cleanup work on the back end. And then, yeah, just get started. It's not scary. It's not hard.
Just play around with a few things with a couple dollars. I think, if you are worried about it, that you shouldn't be. I think you'll see, once you actually dive in, that anyone who does any sort of complex, fiat finance-related function, I'm sure you have the skillset and are the type of person that could thrive in digital assets.
There's really no difference. There are challenges, don't get me wrong. There are quirks. There are things you need to learn, but you're probably doing as equally as challenging things, and as nuanced, and as specific to your finance function, right now. And then, the last thing I'd like to say is you are not late to the party.
If you're getting into digital assets now, it is still very early in the whole evolution of this and this technology, and so don't feel like you are behind the times. You are right on time, if you start today.
Sidharth Kakkar
Very cool. Those are some great messages. I think the final wrap-up here seems to be: Don't do things in spreadsheets that you're not meant to do. And I think with that, we can close out. Thank you so much for doing this interview with us.
Amy Kalnoki
Of course. Thank you. It was fun.
