#98: Managing Ops for a Web3 Foundation (Everclear) with Max Kalyuzhnyi

We basically have three different groups of token distributions. Investors was automated through custom contract, and they are automatically unlocked every month. Tocque is a token grant administration for employees and advisors, as it's required manual approval and manual signing of the transactions. Basically, every month, I do an expert, I reconcile amounts, I verify the wallets, and we just initiate transaction manually with the help of Tocque. And Sublier is the third part, basically at Hoc. If I need to send some distributions, some tokens with some lock-up, I just do a contract in Sublier and send it. Max Kaluzni started his career in audit at PWC Russia, then moved to restructuring at KPMG Russia before working for several years as a CFO in the industry. In July 2024, he joined the EvoClear Foundation as the head of ops, wearing many different hats and becoming proficient on Web3 tools like Tocque and Sublier for token distribution, integral for crypto-bookkeeping, rainfall spending, and the Cuta as a crypto bank. When I came into ever clear, we did have BitWave as a sub-ledger, but it was set up by some other team member who already left, and nobody actually had a clue how it works. I was looking for some other options, and I think also in the Accountant Quits website, I found few and I chose integral as a sub-ledger. Basically, it truly did the job from translating from the crypto transactions to the understandable lines of accounting operations. Welcome to the Accountant Quits podcast, where we help accounting and finance professionals learn how to manage a business using crypto. In this episode with Max, he shares, "Learnings from using Web3 tools, the challenges of a token migration and coordinating with exchanges, managing token distributions, fundraising and cost optimization, and how AI-assisted vibe coding is helping him build financial dashboards." Max, when you're creating your trolling accounts for your PNL, do you aggregate all fees from different chains into one-line item? That's also a very good question there are two things here. Max, welcome and thanks making the time to be here. Hello, hello. Thank you very much for having me today. I'm very excited for our podcast. Yeah, ready for the questions. Me too. So let's start with your personal background. So like I mentioned just now, you will create a more than a decade ago at PWC Russia. You started in audit, then you moved to restructuring at KPMG Russia. And then you spend several years as a CFO in the industry. You also co-founded a mental health marketplace called Yasno. It's one of the largest health marketplaces in Russia with over 40 million annual turnover and more than a million therapy sessions per year. So you work there as the CFO. Along the way, like I mentioned, you also went through two co-founders, Accelerator Programs with Anther and Startup Lisbon. Now in July 2024, you made your first move into a pre-by-johning the Evo-KF Foundation. Can you walk us through what drew you to this opportunity what the interview process maybe was like and ultimately why you decided to make the jump into Web3? Yeah, very good question. Actually, that was kind of spontaneous. So by that moment, I've already spent I think here and half entrepreneurial. So basically, after I left Yasno and moved to Portugal, I decided to join Anther and start some new venture. And Anther particularly for me was not very successful. So I didn't get money from them. I didn't find a co-founder. But after that, I still continue to do some entrepreneurial attempts. I tried to launch tax advisory marketplace then like platform for payment to contractors in Portugal. Then I was thinking about launching something in Brazil. And basically, by mid-summer 2024, I was already pretty exhausted by these attempts. And I was feeling that I'm running out of ideas. And at the same moment, I got some capital in crypto, some personal assets in crypto. And I just started to use it more and started to understand how it works. And at the same time, I just decided that I can back for operational role for some time. And actually, at that moment, I got like two consecutive opportunities. One in a small telegram mini app, also related to crypto. And another one was this nuclear foundation opportunity, which actually was just coincidence, where I was asking my friend that was CEO there. I was asking like, can you connect me with somebody from the finance team and ever clear? And I want to ask some basic stuff about Web 3 finance. And on that, he basically said that, you know, we do not have a dedicated finance person. And we were thinking that we probably need one. So would we be open to discuss this? And then like after several interviews, basically, I started as a part-time initiative. Now, Max, for this episode today, we won't be spending too much time discussing the ever-clear project, but rather your whole as the head of operations. However, for the listeners, I wanted to start with an overview of ever-clear, because maybe that's important for some of the questions that will go through later. So ever-clear is the rebranded version of ConnectS Network project, originally built to enable cross-chain transfers. So what that means is just like bridging assets and messages between blockchains. With the rebrand, Everclear has positioned itself as a cross-chain, clearing layer for blockchains, and the introduce chain abstraction via intents. For the listeners, could you explain, like, provide an overview of ever-clear, the problem you're solving and explain these terms, intents and solvers? Yeah, I can try. So I'm not a technical person, so my overview would be very high level, but basically everyone who was interacting with crypto probably noticed that bridging assets between different chains is kind of painful, because there are a bunch of different chains. And for example, if you even see some interesting, defy opportunities on some exotic chain, you need to find a specific bridge to move assets from one chain to another. And there are currently, there are a bunch of B2CE-facing bridges, like across Stargate, Jumper, there are a lot of them that help to solve this problem for retail users. But on the back end, these projects, they have the problem of rebalancing capital by their own. So after interacting with users, they finally get some assets on some exotic chains where they don't need them. And then they also need to move big amounts of money between different chains. And basically, Everclear is trying to solve this problem because most of the movements between different chains could be netted in some way, because some user is moving funds from chain A to chain B. And another user can move in at the same time, assets from chain B to chain A. And Everclear made the, like, so name hub where all these flows can meet and net each other. And basically, you decrease amount of movements between chains significantly through this. So basically, Everclear is a like cross chain, clearing layer for B2CE for other, like, customer-facing products. Not sure that it's like super simple explanation, but it insured it sounds like we just move big amounts of assets between different chains and make it simpler for external users. So maybe to help listeners really understand how Everclear works in practice, can we go through a very simple example. Say, a user wants to bridge USDC from Ethereum to NL2. Could you break down the flow, like starting from when this user submits this intent through the bidding process among the solvers and finally how the transaction gets settled? Where is Everclear in this whole process? Yeah. So basically, user sends the intent. Intent is a transaction that, for example, I want to move 100 USDC from Ethereum to Arbitrum. This intent is submitted and basically this transaction. So 100 USDC on Ethereum is moved to initially to spoke of Everclear and then to the hub. Hub is the central space which accumulates all the liquidity from all the intents. So to get funds on our Arbitrum, there should be someone on another site who sends funds from Arbitrum to any other chain. So there should be a solver or another user who sends at least 100 UZC from Arbitrum to any other chain. So in the classic approach, this could be solved only if user 1 sends from mainnet, for example, to Arbitrum and user 2 sends from Arbitrum to mainnet. But the notion of hub, it actually allows to mix these flows. And for example, user 1 can send from mainnet to Arbitrum and user 2 can send from Arbitrum to Optimism. And user 3 can send from Optimism to another chain and they will be all netted on the hub. So basically, user 1 just gets the funds from Arbitrum after some other user who sends funds from Arbitrum. That's how ever clear it works. Perfect. Now, since the accounting quits, a large part of our work is to help accountants figure out like crypto accounting, I thought, hey, maybe let's just go through like the revenue streams of everclear. So maybe if you could, we don't have to win detail here, but what fees like the protocol catches and how these fees are allocated between foundations, solvers. Just to maybe understand the leader question, I'll be asking on subledges and how you recognize those fees. Yeah, sure. So basically protocol earns two types of fees. It's the flat fee for compensating the gas for every transaction. And it's the variable fee which is calculated in BPS in like a small part of the transaction itself, which is dependent on the amount. Basically, currently, bridging fees lower and our like average fees something like 0.3 BPS. So it's like less than one 10,000s of the amount of the transaction for some pathways. It's basically zero BPS. Solver gets some fees for solving on the ever clear. So part of the protocol fees are allocated to solver. Okay, we've spoken about how evic clear earns an allocase fees. I want to shift more to the operational side. So from the accounting and thin-up perspective where you're spending most of your time, could you walk us through the process that you went through to implement a sub ledger. How you had to design that like the chart of accounts in any specific rules, maybe that you had to create to track all these on chain transactions. Yeah, I can share this experience like in the short manner or in the long manner. But like initially I didn't have any idea of how the trip works from the financial perspective. And I was like new to the whole area. And I was new that we need to have some specific sub ledger. And basically, to be honest, I was kind of new to the US financial system and like zero quick books. I actually did not have much experience of working with them. So when I came into ever clear, I basically understood that we need to set up everything from scratch. We did have BitWave as a sub ledger, but it was set up by some other team member who already left. And nobody actually had a clue how it works and how it's structured and what are the transactions inside there. So at that time I was looking for some other options. And I think also in the accountant quits website, I found few and I chose integral as a sub ledger. It looked for me like pretty good from the interface perspective. Basically, it truly did the job from translating from the transactions, from the creeps of transactions to the understandable lines of. Accounting operations. And yes, so and we started to implement the sub ledger in parallel with getting up with the accounting itself. Because for some reasons, so I get into middle of 2024, but we did not have finalized like 2020 financials by that time. So how did you go about given that I mean these transactions from BitWave already when you started implementing it in integral. Would you start by uploading like all the wallet transactions from like the beginning or did you upload like an opening balance maybe that you had from BitWave. And how did you go about like creating the like the first rules because you came in and this was like a new tool and you didn't have any experience on it. What were some of the challenges that you were good question. Basically the problem with BitWave was that there are all the wallets were implemented there and some of the wallets had thousands of operations and all these thousands of operations then were transferred to QuickBooks and QuickBooks was not able to handle that amount of operations. So one of the decisions that I made I actually separated operational wallets and product related wallets like related to protocol operations because there are a lot of operations that are actually like last minus and you have very small change in the balance. But you just have info outflow info outflow. So I decided to put them aside completely and just initially focus on the operational wallets operational. I mean like for example wallets from which we pay to contributors or where we get some inflows. So this was pretty straightforward because the number of operations was like 10s every month. But the problem was that we didn't had all the accounting records for some period before me and we needed to get this data from other sources from asking like my colleagues from looking into some Google Excel spreadsheets and basically we spent a few months just allocating all the historical transactions. Correct accounting accounts and here I also made a decision that we just finalized and didn't change anything that was before 2023. So we already had the financials for 2022 and we just decided to implement all the new tools starting from 2023. So we were able to get some data back to 2023 of course with some gaps and these gaps were just allocated to I don't know other expenses. But still I believe like we managed to find and allocate like 95% of all the crypto operations. So two key challenges were related to data completeness and data volume and two decisions that were made were like that we just cut some of the volume and we only like do this integration job for some specific time period from like 2023 and going forward. For your revenue for example are you lumping like because you're earning like fees from a lot of different chains like in your PNL at the end of the day that's lumped into it like just one line item and you aggregate like all the chains together when you create that specific role in the sublegial or you want to get very granular and maybe do it per chain. Yeah that's also a very good question there are two things here. First of all Everclear did not generate fees for some period of time that helped me to just focus on there on allocating the costs without thinking to my channel the revenue side. And then when finally fees were implemented the other thing that basically these fees are allocated to different entities so we have labs as in like R&D software house we have foundation which is overseeing the protocol and we have Dow and basically all the fees are going to Dow and as Dow is like not regulated entity we basically consider that they can just have this revenue numbers they can. And then they have them in Excel spreadsheet but they don't need to have specific accounting for this and again like that was a decision of simplification in some way but it helps to just complete some basic level of accounting. And then like step by step improve on the other parts. Yeah that makes sense and maybe the last question on the sublegers what would be I mean in hindsight or based on your level of experience using the sublegers for the past year. What do you think they could improve today? Yeah that question actually reminded me of one of the technical problem that I faced when implementing them so basically we will speak about this probably more later about the token part so the project has its own token and token migrated like initially token was TGE so it went public and then it also migrated and all these changes they should be reflected in accounting. And again as I didn't have much experience I initially I didn't realize how this token part would be played. very complicated thing because of the several things. Overall, your own token has some price and comparing to some public token that is like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and USDC, that price is not always public. And we had a situation where, for example, before TGE, we had tokens and we had token movements on a private external valuation price. And after TGE, that public price increased dramatically. And after these public movements, we also have token movements. And we just got a bunch of crypto-tax gains and losses due to these movements, which initially were not obvious. And when we posted all the data from sub-ledger to QuickBooks, we unexpectedly got millions of dollars of some crypto-tax gain and loss, which we didn't know where they come from. And we needed to just delete all the data and change some transactions manually to change the price to some other item to get this forks gains correct. And coming back to your question of what could be improved, basically, to think between sub-ledger and QuickBooks Xera is very important thing because currently, most of the sub-ledgers, they work in one sync way. So basically, you do all the changes related to crypto in sub-ledger. Then you push data to QuickBooks and you cannot do anything on the QuickBooks to change the data in sub-ledger. So if you push the data to QuickBooks and you understood that you did something wrong, you just need to delete this data and do the push again, which is prone to errors and it's kind of complicated to manage. So in my experience, I think we did this three times. So the first push was a complete disaster. We needed to delete everything. Then we did some changes. We did another push and we found some another mistakes. We deleted data again and we did the last push. So after this, I already probably can do this without mistakes, but still not sure. Before we continue, let's take a quick commercial break from our sponsor. If you're serious about running your business using crypto, you need tools built for crypto. One of my favorite apps and yes, one that I use multiple times a month is Request Finance. This app has been a game changer in how I invoice my clients and receive stable coins and crypto directly in my wallet. But hey, there's so much more to it. 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All right, so let's stay on this topic that you just went through on this very large fair value gain that you had on your native token. So this happened post-TG and at the time you felt this gain didn't reflect the economic realities since many of those token movements were just technical allocations under the pre-TG agreements. Could you, I mean you already explained what happened, but maybe what accounting solution or guidance you ultimately applied to resolve this? Yeah, so basically how subledger works. If the token has a public price, subledger uses this public price from CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap. That works fine for any public token, which is big, like Ethereum Bitcoin, whatever. But that works not always fine when you are speaking about your own token. What happens in our case? Right after TGE, we like our entities, labs and foundations, they basically distributed bunch of the tokens to team members, to early investors and strategic supporters and also to airdrop token holders. And all of these distributions were actually contractually aligned before TGE on some specific pre-TG price. Like just a quick example, for example, every investor had a token warrant and paid $1,000 to get some allocation of tokens. And allocation was quite different depending on their actual equity share. So for $1,000, investor could get like 30,000 tokens or 30 million tokens. And actual price per token should be determined by this by dividing this thousand to the number of tokens that he got. But when we distributed all these tokens after TGE, subledger automatically used for all these distributions, actual TGE price, which was like thousand times higher than this calculated price per this agreement. So for example, if you take this $1,000 divided by 30 million, you will get like really like $0,000, $0,000 something price per token. But after TGE, the price was like 20 cents. So the difference was huge. And at that moment, we just get like very big forks game because we distributed forks lost because we just distributed some tokens at a very big price from our account where they were on a very low cost basis. We just like lost bunch of the assets. And the only accounting approach that I came with was just manually check every transaction and decide on each case by case. So if I know that this is like a distribution to investor based on old contractual obligation, I manually changed the price to that price that I consider to be correct. So the same as the cost basis or the same as it should be based on the documents. If I consider that this is just a regular transaction, which like for example, we pay for some services and we just paid on the market value of the token, then I do not, nothing can I use the automatic price. So basically we had bunch of these operations and I needed to decide on each case by case how to adjust the price, verify that this is the correct price, calculate this price and basically just verify that all the forks creeped against losses, they actually make sense after all these changes. Wow, these are the kind of thing no one wants you about. It's only you figure it out when it happens. Yeah, and the complexity here that there is no so many people that actually know how to do this correctly. So when I try to ask, so I actually asked in the communities in the accountant quit communities in Web3C4 communities in our like I asked our accountants, I asked chat GPT and I just get some combination of different points of views based on that. I just made my own decision that okay, I believe that the best decision best way forward would be like this that I described before, but I'm still not sure that this is like correct approach. It's just what looks to be the most reasonable and which in result gave us the most adequate numbers in our you know, that's it. Great, so I'll move on to the next topic Max. Speak a little bit more about this token migration. So in Q4 of 2024, following the rebrand, the ever clear Dow approved the migration from so the previous next token to clear token, the ERC20 token. So as the head of ops, can you walk us through what this migration actually looked like from the inside, for example, coordinating with exchanges because now you have to realize this new token. Did you have to do new additional KYB due diligence process and yeah managing the broader operational and community challenges that came with this token migration? Yeah, basically in the moment of migration, I was still head of phenops. So I was responsible kind of financial operations and my migration to head of operations was like kind of January, February this year. And And the thing is that initially migration process was not handled very well because team was not experienced in how to do this actually. And we just decided that okay, Everclear is a different product. And next token is still related to Connect Bridge. And people actually confuse between like okay, you're Everclear, why you have Next token, so we just decided that it makes sense from the external perspective to do the migration. But no one actually understood the complexity of this migration, like they're all the operational things that needed to be done. And yeah, initially we thought that as it's like the same how to say it. So actually the token that was renamed to Clear already existed. So we had Next on different chains, we have Next on Main Net and on bunch of L2 chains, Arbitram Optimism base and whatever. And we just decided to use this token on L2 chains, rename it to Clear and make it a new token. So for L2 chains migration was kind of done automatically basically because the same token was just changed the name, but the problem was with the main token that was old one and we needed to move it to the new one. And initially we thought that okay, we'll just go to exchanges and say that okay, this is our old token, this is our new token, you can see the ownership where the same token is one to one. It's just like change of contract address, change of the name and they will just do the migration pretty easily. And it turned out that none of the exchanges actually wanted to do this because they have so much and it was in Q4, 2024. If you remember it was a pretty bull period and there were a lot of mean tokens and exchanges were kind of interested in serving mean tokens with the big trading volume and they were not interested in doing anything with like low trading volume token from some defy infrastructure project they don't care about. So basically what happened, we did the migration on ourselves and none of the exchanges actually did the migration. So since like beginning of December to meet January we didn't have any trading of clear token on any of the exchanges. We only had Uniswap pool and we did some explanations to our token holders that okay, we did the migration, you can do this, we did the UI to do the migration from next to clear. But basically there was little sense to do this because all the trading was still on next and clear was just a government token that had no real value for that. And then after Christmas we just decided to approach the second time and we just went to all the exchanges where we had next and we started to push them again. We did it with more extended deadlines and it was more chill time and we agreed with couple of smaller exchanges first and then we paid for some exchanges to do the migration and then one by one. So when you go to exchange X and say them that we have exchange egreg ZAB that are already migrating on that date, they are like more supportive in doing this migration. So basically starting from like January, I think to end of January we did the migration exchange by exchange. We unfortunately lost by bit somewhere in between that was like one of the tier one exchanges where next was present but clear was not present and we were unable to actually recover this up to now. So we only have gate exchange now as like the largest one where we are present. But we were able to migrate all of the rest exchanges. So if I may share some insights there and then like first of all you need to plan migration not in like three weeks, it's a project that it's like two, three months because all the exchanges are quite slow and you need to agree with them that you will do the migration. Even if you consider this is like technical migration that's not that's that thing so they basically need to do all the like all the process from their side from scratch. Some exchanges would force you to pay to do this because they have no actually incentive to do this for free. So it's a kind of bigger project and basically you need to have some arguments why exchanges needs to do this migration. And it's very important thing. So end of December, token has a price of 13th cents, beginning of February I think it's like four cents. So we lost 70% of the value also partially due to these problems with migration because we didn't have clarity, we didn't have transparency, we didn't have volume on clear and people were like in confusion if the project is still alive or not, what happens, okay, let's better sell all the next that we have and just be safe on that side. So that's a big project you need to plan ahead, you need to have all the agreements with exchanges before you actually announce in it, you need to line up all the exchanges into the like some specific timeline which is like two, three weeks that okay, we will do the migration on that specific date and you need to have full transparency to token holders. In that case, ideally you should have some UI for quick migration back and forth if some people don't want to do this. Yeah, and be ready that you will lose some exchanges, some value of the token and some that would be a tough experience. Now during this migration from next to clear, whether some other service providers that you had to engage and collaborate with for example, what role did any legal counsel play, did you have to, I don't think so, but then re-engage like a two-convaluation firm or yeah, how would you, how would other external advisors support this process? Basically, I think we did everything in house, we did have consultations with our legal counsel on the tax consequences of the migration for token holders and we didn't have legal, written legal opinion and we didn't give this tax advice to any of the token holders, but consensus from what we heard from our consults, that's this is a technical migration and this would not be considered a taxable event because the migration happened one to one and basically the total, so the successor token has an underlying locked predecessor token. So basically when you migrate to clear, you just lock your next into the lock box. So all the mechanics of the migration, that's probably could be explained as a like just a technical change of contract, not a change of asset. That's why we just hope that it's not a taxable event for most of the token holders. Perfect, the next topic I want to go through is token distribution, so that's another big operational challenge. On the tool speech at the accountant quits, I'm mentioning this for the listeners, we've listed some tools like Magna, token ops, toco that help with token investing and distribution, and some projects even prefer to build custom contracts to handle their distribution logic. I want to ask you how did you approach token distributions, were there other any tools that you evaluated and which one did you end up choosing and why? Yeah, very good question, very big topic, I can probably tell, probably not ours, but a lot on this. So when I came to foundation, we already selected toco as a platform for managing token grants for team advisors, like external contributors. And we just like, I think the team was moving in integrating toco, I think since like January 2024 and we ended this integration somewhere in August 2024. So there was no any desire to change different platform at that moment. So with token grants, we continued with toco and currently we are working with toco and we distribute all the token grants with toco. I can say that that's, you just need to understand that toco is not a token distribution solution, it's more like a database. So you just store all the information on the best thing and unlock and current token allocation for your employees in that platform. So every person has information about his token grants, what is vested, what is not, what's the best thing scheduled. But all the distribution happens like manually, you just have, you export data from toco, you reconcile it in spreadsheet, you then upload this to save like a CSV air drop and you just initiate transaction in save. So you only have the front end of the database, but on the backend is completely manual. That's important thing. For investors, distributions, we were looking for different options for different options. different platforms we were in talks with token ops. And I think they are building very good product, but we ended up not working with them. We ended up initially creating our custom distribution contract because of the complexity of our initial agreements with investors. So most of the creeped-on-aative token distribution agreements with investors, they have some kind of linear unlock. So you have some allocation of X tokens, and they just unlock linearly through like 12 months or like 18 months or whatever. But as we have our token allocations migrated from equity share holdings for some reason in our legal docs, we had this monthly unlocks with specific amounts, which for some reason was not very easy to distribute last year through any of the platforms. All the platforms offered linear distributions, some nonlinear, whatever. So but some mathematician part, there was no option to just distribute on like six day of every month for like 18 months. There was not such an option from the box. And we just needed to create a custom contract. And we went with metallic slabs that are our long term legal partner, and they just helped us to create, to adapt their custom contract to our needs. And we just distributed initial allocations to investors through them. Later already in this year, I found out that Sublr actually supports this monthly unlocks. And I still don't know if they supported this before or not. So if I did that research, or they just added this support only recently, I don't know. But I think all the last six months, like three to six months, if I need to do some occasional distribution of tokens, I use them because they are pretty convenient, pretty simple. You just select what you need and initiate transaction from safe, very convenient. So for the listeners, the tool you just mentioned is Sublr, you can go to sublr.com. So then now, how do you move like-- before you were saying you were exploring the data from Tuku and then initiating their transaction from safe, now how does it work? Tuku said the easy. So investors was automated through custom contract. So we did custom contracts. We allocated all the investors and Baker fans there, and they are automatically unlocked every month. So we spent a bunch of time setting this up. Then we just send the transaction and it works. Tuku is a token grant administration for employees and advisors, as it's require manual approval and manual sending from the transactions. Basically, every month, I do an expert, I reconcile amounts, I verify the wallets, and we just initiate transaction manually with the help of Tuku, customer success manager. And Sublr is the third part, basically at Hogue. If I need to send some distributions, some tokens, with some lockup, I just do a contract in Sublr and send it. It's like once in a month or couple months. Perfect. Thanks, Sharon Max. Now, when we were preparing this episode, one of the topics that you mentioned you like to go through is the cost optimization exercise you've had to do. So since 2021, Everclear have had several backers, including Polychain, OneKX, Pantera Capital, and more recently in 2025. Everclear announced a strategic investment from the NIEF Foundation. Could you walk us through this cost optimization exercise that you did? And yeah, the different ways you worked on extending the runway at Everclear? Yes. Basically, it's a combination of efforts and some miracles along the way, as usual. So when I joined Connects Foundation, Everclear in last summer, basically that was few months after they fundraised from Pantera. And when I joined, I started to calculate the numbers. And I just understood that we were burning like a bunch of cash. So our burn rate was kind of incredibly big. And I don't know, but probably there was no such transparency before. And actually, founders and management didn't realize the amount of spending they were under impression that burn was less. But at that moment, there was like rebranding, tokenomics design, some marketing events, and it was like new team members payments to recruitment agencies. So basically, we were like spending like, I don't know, like crazy. And with that calculations, there was already some first science that will be running out of cash by end of March 2025. So we started to do some cost optimizations. We decreased marketing efforts significantly. We just understood where we spent an extra on infrastructure, where we spent extra on some unnecessary probably marketing and PR. We got this like the first wave of cuts was kind of easy. So you just take all the strange costs and you just eliminate them. Then we still get, I think we get runway up to probably June 2025. Also not too much. And in September 2024, we just launched ever clear main net beta. And we were like with the high hopes that by the end of year, we would have 1 billion in reaching volume per month. Because connects was huge success. And we had a brand and everything. And the product should be good. The thing is that by the end of December, we actually had I think 2 million volume per month. So the product did not generate volume, because it was so complicated and some things were not working. And we were not understanding how to attract users there. So basically in January 2025, we had an offsite. And we just calculated all the numbers. And basic idea was that OK, we probably need to show some results by the end of March. Otherwise, in April, we would need to cut all the team and just leave some money for the shutdown of the company. That was the basic plan in January. And in January, we focused on just attracting users and generating volume. So in January, we had 5 million in monthly volume. And by the end of March, I think we already have 100 something. So basically, we just focused all the team on product and generating volume and did some small efforts. We cut all the costs. Like we didn't have any marketing. We only had mostly team costs and infrastructure costs. By that moment, a couple of people also left already because we just got some potential directions. So the product, we decided not to do them. So we basically minimized the costs there. And also, important thing during that period, Ethereum price decreased. So we did a pretty stupid mistake, but we had bunch of our treasury in Ethereum because part of the investment was in Ethereum. And we didn't want to sell it below the price that we got this investment. And I think we got investment when Ethereum was 3.5K. And in February, it was like 1.8K. So we lost part of the money due to Ethereum price depreciation. So our runway squeezed again. But then a couple of miracles happened. We found out that we had some token ground, like I think optimism token ground, several hundreds of thousands. We found out some funds somewhere in crypto pools in Konex Bridge, which were like allocated there before. So we just get some money from Sky, basically. And that helped us to extend the runway, I think by end of May or something like this, in May, June. And combining with this traction that we started to show. So January, February, March, April was exponential growth. And that moment, founders, so basically Arjun and Dima, they started to just showcase the ever clear to all the investors that they possibly could. And we had several conversations in place. And Mayor Foundation was the one that actually ended up investing in us. So basically the deal was closed in June. And in between, we also had some optimizations on the team. So basically, initially when I joined the OBS team, we had three full-time employees, currently I'm the only one. So, and such optimizations happened in all the areas of the company. Thanks, Eric Max. I want to move on and speak about some of the other tools that you use in your operations. So you already mentioned the sub ledger, you mentioned some tools like Toku and Sabdi. Or there are some other web 3 or maybe web 2 tools that have been useful for you to manage the operations. So from the top of my head, pretty useful tools are usually related to some financial operations. Because like we have Kaiman Foundation, it's pretty tough to open a bank account. We actually managed to open one, but it was in pretty old school bank and it was not very convenient to use. And most of the assets are in crypto, so you actually need to have some crypto native product to spend your crypto in a traditional world. And two products that help us very much is the rain cards. So you can pay for a bunch of the services by card. And I'm not only telling about food or travel, but also there are some vendors that allow you to pay by card. And if you could not do a swift, you can just pay them by card. So that was very helpful. And somewhere end of 2024 emerged the Kotabank and they also started to open bank accounts to non-US companies and were lucky to open bank account there. And they actually helped to pay some US vendors in Fiat. Also they offer international swifts, but as we don't need them too much, I actually I think never ended the compliance process to get them. So initially I tried to use some common tools like request finance, but I actually didn't find them very useful, not very useful, very convenient. So I always had some friction with them and I was looking for another tools and ended up with the two that I shared with you. Perfect. And for the lessons, if you want to learn more about rain, I mean we interviewed there Kufa and the Charles on episode 46. Also the Kotab we interviewed there CEO Ryan Bozoth on episode it was 76 so you can learn more about what they're building basically. Now maybe one of the last topics that I want to go through with you today Max. Again while preparing the episode you mentioned that you've been building some of financial reports and dashboards for internal purposes and these were built from vibe coding. Like for the lessons less familiar what is vibe coding. It's essentially yeah it's a slang term maybe it's like AI assisted coding where you can put type something very quickly without having the foundational like technical skills of a developer. So tools like cursor have become very popular for this type of work. Can you share some of the reports or dashboards that you've been building and maybe what resources have been helpful along the way? Yeah sure I think that vibe coding is like the most powerful thing that happened over the last couple of years. So everyone is an engineer now everyone can build some tools for their use and I'm personally very happy to be able to do something like this and encrypt it's particularly useful because for example as a like financial manager I want to see all the cash balances. All the wallets that we have. So if you operate traditional banks you have all these APIs and you just and you have bunch of web tools when you just connect all the APIs and you see all the balances in one place. If you operate a crypto company and you have like fiat banks here like you have several entities you have fiat banks here you have wallets there you have some coin base accounts here that's like a bunch of different places which are not connected to each other and like every week I was just manually collecting all this data until I just spent also like I think a couple of months iteratively working on it. I just vibe coded API connectors to every single tool that I needed to coin base prime to other scan to some like sole scan, tron scan like every part where we have some funds I just built all the APIs, added all the wallet addresses that we have on all the chains and then like in after a couple of months of iterative work I actually got the dashboard which can in real time show me the current assets on infrastructure. So currently for example I can see if some of our infrastructural wallets are running low on funds and we actually need to fund it to keep the product working. Also we currently operate the solver capital for internal solver and also it's a very important thing to track the balance every day and before that I was using debunk manually just to check the balances and looking into transactions and what happened here and there. Now I can just open the dashboard and I see all these assets allocated between different types of assets like Ethereum, Bitcoin, stablecoins, total amounts and compare them to expect values. So I really believe that everyone currently can build some simple tools and it's really satisfactory feeling when you just had nothing and then if you just build some tool and it actually solves your most painful problem which like you spent hours on doing this manually then you have a tool. Very cool. Very cool Max. I think the listeners will agree when I say you're not the traditional finance professional. I always like to whenever we have people like you who started at a big four but then yeah this curiosity that you had made you eventually learn a job at a Web 3 company. I want to ask you maybe if you could share it for people also considering like a similar leap into Web 3. Yeah what maybe advice would you have on making such a transition? Particularly on transition. Basically I would better say some advice in general. So I moved to Web 3 with solid background in finance but little background in Web 3 and in US finance. So I did some experiment and I decided that probably I can learn just in the woods. So I will jump there and then we'll see what happens. So the bad case I will just be fired after some time but the best case I will just learn and we'll get some great experience and everything. So basically my advice is just go and try and do what scares you. Usually you are capable to overcome it and to learn things when you really need to do this. So don't be afraid. That's a great advice Max. So maybe we can I think I mean this advice was such a good advice that I'm not sure if I want to ask you but it's a tradition on this podcast that I usually end the podcast by asking the guess for the favorite food or maximum. Continue my last thoughts of basically learning by doing you you never be prepared for some new challenge. So you just get into this challenge and you try to learn during that. So I think over the last year 90% of things that I did first time and in many cases it was that nobody in the team had a similar previous experience and you just do your best and you hope that it works and in most cases it actually works. So learning by doing that's my motto. Perfect thanks sharing. I mean we met a few times Max and I always hold you in very high regard for your level of knowledge and experience and obviously that's the reason why I wanted to have you today to share your experience with the listeners. You also the second alumni from the crypto accounting academy that we've had on the podcast. I'm always happy for that as well. If people want to reach out to you Max if they want to connect on some social networks where should they do so. Yeah super happy to connect. It's basically telegram Max underscore collusiony. It's probably hard to know how it's written and link it in also. I pretty responsive in both. Perfect well Max thanks a lot for your time today. I look forward to maybe meeting in person and at one of the upcoming small meetups that we've been organizing in Lisbon and until then yeah we'll stay in touch. Yeah looking forward to thank you very much for having me again. It was pleasure.