Automated Token Operations with Liquifi and Integral
SuperRare’s operational efficiencies were enabled through the combination of Liquifi’s automated distributions and Integral’s real-time onchain reporting.
TL;DR
Liquifi and Integral transformed SuperRare's manual 2.5-hour token distribution process into automated 40-second flows, significantly reducing time and errors.
Liquifi ensured accurate, scheduled token distributions with robust approval features, while Integral provided real-time on-chain transaction reporting and simplified financial management.
The combined solutions gave SuperRare's finance team full control, visibility, and security over their transactions, enabling better decision-making and freeing up time for strategic initiatives.
SuperRare needed a solution to streamline all aspects of token distributions and lockups.
In 2022—after launching their governance token ($RARE) and forming the SuperRare DAO—the SuperRare team began planning to bring their accounting in-house.
That meant standing up financial infrastructure, managing traditional and crypto accounting, and preparing for the final round of token distributions after a 1-year lockup period.
Back then, Sushen Talwar (now Head of Finance at Zora) had joined SuperRare to manage this entire process, and he immediately began looking for solutions that solve X challenges:
SuperRare paid its service providers and vendors in crypto, but it needed a system to handle token distributions or ensure each cliff distribution was accurate for each wallet.
SuperRare relied on a complex set of Excel spreadsheets to track the business's activity, which was hard to maintain and prone to error.
SuperRare needed a way to automatically distribute $RARE to its stakeholders after the lock-up period ended, so stakeholders received tokens similar to an airdrop.
SuperRare needed a tool with an approval account to maintain visibility, security, and internal controls.
SuperRare spent many painful hours manually interpreting and categorizing on-chain transactions with no consolidated real-time view of treasury or account balances.
Before Liquifi, Sushen explained, “we’d manually send tokens from Gemini or Copper to ~literally~ every person in our cap table. That process took hours and came with few internal controls.”
He went on: “That was our biggest pain point—and there’s not many tools which automate the actual transacting of crypto. Most of the tools we found were read-only or they’d generate some analytics from the data, but they don’t do the actual generations on your behalf.”
There was also the problem of approval accounts: “Most of the other tools we looked at had no approval account, so we just wound up sending through 1 admin user. That means you lose all visibility from an internal control perspective, significantly increasing risk, especially if you’re distributing at volume.”
As a leading marketplace for rare digital art, SuperRare deals with hundreds of transactions daily. The team was drowning in Excel spreadsheets, struggling to ensure data accuracy in the fast-paced crypto market.
Before Integral, says Bob O’Keefe, SuperRare’s Financial Controller, this was inefficient, and this manual approach was also prone to errors, leaving room for misreported information and inaccurate financials.
Liquifi’s platform ensured all vesting and lockup schedules were correctly uploaded while automating all distribution.
With Liquifi, Sushen and his team could schedule distributions at the end of each month in advance—regardless of business hours or distribution dates falling on weekends.
The Liquifi team built out this capability on the smart contract side, allowing SuperRare to pick a date/time for their auto-distribution up to 8 months in advance. We’ve since used this solution with other customers.
This was a critical feature—especially since SuperRare needed a way to effectively manage vesting for employees, investors, and contributors—while also handling automated release of tokens along specific vesting schedules and tranches.
Additionally, Liquifi’s approval features provided Sushen and his team with the security, controls, and visibility they needed over their distribution transactions from Day One.
In smaller teams, it’s common to see a single person managing crypto finances. However, as transactions grow in number and size, using systems to deter potential bad actors and prevent errors is necessary. Liquifi’s solution accomplished this for SuperRare.
Integral’s crypto accounting platform enabled real-time, efficient, and accurate reporting for SuperRare’s on-chain transactions.
With Integral, the team no longer needed to manually pull in recent transactions. Instead, they could get a real-time view of all active wallets comprising their treasury at any hour of the day.
Integral’s simplified common ledger, enabled the team to filter and interpret complex transactions, ignoring spam and malicious airdrops.
Categorization of common transactions was configured in Integral’s rules engine, handling 95% of all on-chain activity, leaving only one-off operating expenses for review.
The seamless integration with SuperRare's existing tech stack made the transition to Integral a breeze.
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As SuperRare grows, it has benefited from a system that has given its finance team full control and visibility over its distribution transactions from Day One.
Per Sushen, we’ve also worked hard to provide the SuperRare team with a best-in-class customer experience:
“The Liquifi team has been phenomenal. Whenever we don’t know how to do something, we just reach out via Telegram chat or email, and their team provides amazing customer support, and on-the-fly updates.
Liquifi’s platform has also given SuperRare’s finance team time back to handle other operational priorities.
We were able to help Sushen’s team turn a process that “takes 2 and a half hours per month at best, into a flow that takes about 40 seconds. We totally avoid having to manually spend hours sending and recording transactions via Gnosis.”
Sushen explained:
“This feature saves our lives because our scheduling vests at the end of the month—so theoretically we should pay out stakeholders on the 30th or 31st. Sometimes that happens on a weekend, and without Liquifi we’d literally need someone to go and initiate transactions to send via Gnosis.”
Lastly, Liquifi gave all SuperRare stakeholders an easy way to understand their vesting scheduling.
Most employees at crypto orgs generally feel “left in the dark” when it comes to information about their token distributions and lockups. With Liquifi, all SuperRare now have a centralized place to see and understand both their traditional stock options and their crypto compensation.
Integral enabled the CFO and Controller to cut down their monthly closing time by over 5-10 hours compared to previous solutions, saving a significant amount of resources and enabling better decision-making at every level of the organization.
Integral enabled the CFO and Controller to cut down their monthly closing time by over 5-10 hours compared to previous solutions, saving a significant amount of resources and enabling better decision-making at every level of the organization.
"Onboarding with Integral was like none other; their team made an active effort to learn the basics of how SuperRare did crypto accounting so that they would be able to help implement, transition and ensure all pain points were addressed and resolved. Their team is committed to their customers and acts on feedback + feature requests!" - Sushen Talwar, former Controller at SuperRare.
The reduction in manual data entry and error-checking meant that they could redirect their focus towards more strategic initiatives. The team had the confidence that the financial data they presented was not only accurate but also insightful, enabling better decision-making at every level of the organization.
"Working with Integral has been a game-changer for us. The platform not only streamlined our accounting processes but also gave us a level of control and insight that we never thought possible. The team behind Integral is not just building a tool; they're building a solution that understands the unique challenges of the crypto industry. They're committed to customer feedback, world-class design, and continuous improvement sets them apart from other accounting platforms on the market." - Thomas Wu, former VP of Finance at SuperRare.
Financial operators in crypto-native companies are too often expected to make sense of web3 transactions with web2 tools.
Setting up the right FinOps stack from the beginning empowers CFOs and controllers to make better decisions and have more impact in growing companies.
