About Compound Treasury
Offering a fixed 4% on USD and USDC, Compound Treasury lets clients benefit from the transparency and liquidity on the Compound Protocol through a compliant counterparty providing white-glove service. Yield and liquidity are backed by the Compound Protocol, an audited, trusted source with over $3 billion in assets, and more than $285 billion in total transaction volume since launch.
User: Dean Swennumson, Operations, Compound Treasury
General Ledger: QuickBooks Online
Use Case(s): DeFi Accounting, Audit-readiness, Accounting Automation, Interest tracking across two assets
Bitwave Customer Since December 2021
The Challenge: The blockchain’s scale is unlimited, but time isn’t.
There’s a common fallacy that since blockchains are immutable ledgers, all the data needed for data accountants to do their jobs is readily available. But it doesn’t always work that way in practice. Unlike bank statements, extracting accounting data from block explorers is often easier said than done. The Compound Treasury team experienced this firsthand.
Compound Treasury provides an institutional cash management solution powered by the Compound Protocol, offering a 4.00% APR on USD and USDC with daily liquidity. The workflow itself is fairly straightforward:
- Compound Treasury converts US Dollar wires to USDC or receives USDC directly and supplies it to the Compound protocol
- The USDC then earns continuous interest, paid out block-by-block, with a portion of the net yield paid out in USDC and another in the Compound’s governance token, COMP.
When it became time to reconcile the yield from the interest-bearing assets, a unique challenge was revealed. “Manually tracking interest paid in two different assets that accrue every 12 seconds in a spreadsheet is a nightmare,” says Operations Associate Dean Swennumson.
While pursuing a credit rating with S&P, Compound Prime, the company behind the Compound Treasury product, brought in the accounting firm, Armanino LLP, to conduct an audit. It was during this process that Compound Prime realized that automating its accounting processes would be a prerequisite to scaling its Treasury offering
The Solution: A robust digital asset accounting platform with unrivaled technical expertise and customer support
After a brief period of due diligence, Compound Treasury finally landed on Bitwave.
“Bitwave has tremendous accounting and technical knowledge of DeFi applications and their underlying protocols. It was clear right away that they had a far greater deal of comfort and understanding of the smart contracts powering the Compound protocol than their competitors,” Dean continues.
The most decisive factor in the selection process was Bitwave’s flexible platform and robust DeFi Module that the solution team could tweak to support Compound Treasury’s unique business case: accounting for COMP accruals while the interest-earning assets remained locked in the Compound protocol.
The Results: Massive time savings and audit-readiness
Compound Treasury was up and running with Bitwave in a couple of months, and its impact was immediately clear. Deans says, “The biggest benefit for our accounting team – outside of the platform’s flexibility – was the ability to track interest accruals block-by-block while assets remained supplied, instead of running calculations when assets were redeemed from the protocol. On top of that, we saved several hours a week manually processing and reconciling our transactions due to Bitwave’s direct integration with QuickBooks.”
Outside of the day-to-day accounting, Bitwave will also play a major role in Compound Treasury’s yearly audit cycle – an area that Bitwave naturally excels at since it sources data directly from the blockchain.
“All the auditors we’ve spoken to want to see direct ownership; they want to see funds move, and they want to see the transaction signatures to prove ownership. So taking all that information directly from the blockchain instead of a manual spreadsheet-intermediary saves us and the auditors time. All transaction information they need is instantly verifiable,” Dean finishes.
Ready to learn how Bitwave can solve your unique digital asset accounting problems? Schedule a demo today and see for yourself.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this blog post is for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as tax, accounting, or financial advice. The content is not intended to address the specific needs of any individual or organization, and readers are encouraged to consult with a qualified tax, accounting, or financial professional before making any decisions based on the information provided. The author and the publisher of this blog post disclaim any liability, loss, or risk incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use or application of any of the contents herein.
