Simplifying crypto payroll & invoices for Decentraland

Problem

Decentraland was processing their crypto payments manually, involving banks for transfers, and Disperse for batch transactions.  However, when Disperse was no longer supported, they had to revert to manual transactions. 

Invoices were received at different times through various communication channels, making it hard to group them together for a batch transaction. The beginning of each month involved executing 40+ crypto transactions, which was a laborious task.😅 

Solution

Request Finance has helped to: (i) standardize invoice requirements for all team members (no more forgetting their wallet addresses) (ii) centralize all our invoices in one easily accessible dashboard, and (iii) pay all crypto invoices at once

The Decentraland team first heard about Request Finance from TheGraph or Edge & Node. The Finance Ops lead and CFO were involved in the evaluation process.

When evaluating their options, the team wanted a platform that was simple, decentralized, and supported multiple crypto options, even if they don't offer them as a form of payment right now. Decentraland is a crypto native company, and they wanted to work with a company that was too.

They did demos with Deel and Bitwage. Deel was overkill for what we needed and it required people to get paid through Coinbase wallet only, they wanted team members to be able to choose whatever wallet/exchange they wanted. With Bitwage, like Deel, you have to send them the money and they basically carry out the transactions for you. They’d rather stay in possession of they funds, which Request Finance does.

Currently, the Finance Ops team is the main user of the platform, to pay team members every month. They might onboard grant recipients in the future.

Incredibly easy to use

The team enjoyed using the approve / reject button more than they knew they would. As a growing company there were new team members joining every month and for most people using invoices is a completely new experience. 

If there was anything wrong with an invoice, be it a new or existing team member, the Operations Manager, Giuliana de Luca, could easily hit the reject button and tell them what was wrong with it in the comments. They got notifications fast and for some reason, they corrected their invoices a lot faster than they would have in the past. Probably because Request Finance made it easy for them.

Saved 80% of time

The time they spent on processing crypto payments went from a week to a day or two. Request Finance really helped streamline the process with its scheduling feature as well as the ability to approve / reject invoices and expense claims.

“When evaluating our options, we wanted a platform that was simple, decentralized, and supported multiple crypto options, even if we don't offer them as a form of payment right now. We're a crypto native company, we wanted to work with a company that was too. The time we spent on processing crypto payments went from a week to a day or two.”‍

 Giuliana de Luca, Operations Manager of Decentraland

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About Decentraland

Decentraland is a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain that enables users to create, experience, and monetize their own content and applications. It offers a unique concept of virtual land ownership, where users can purchase, develop, and trade parcels of virtual real estate within the platform, or LAND. 

The “title deeds” to LAND within Decentraland are represented by unique, non-fungible tokens that track ownership on the Ethereum blockchain. Virtual real estate in Decentraland is purchased using MANA, Decentraland’s native cryptocurrency and can be traded like any other virtual asset.

Owning LAND gives the digital bourgeoise free reign over the environments and applications that they create within their parcels of LAND. which can range from anything like static 3D scenes to more interactive applications or games.

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Decentraland was founded in 2015 by Argentine co-founders, Esteban Ordano and Ari Meilich, with the goal of creating a virtual world, owned and controlled by its users. Conceived by the duo at a crypto hacker house in Buenos Aires, they envisioned the metaverse platform as a utopian alternative to the real-world economy. But unlike earlier virtual worlds like Second Life, or The Sims, Ordano and Meilich pioneered the introduction of blockchain technologies like NFTs and cryptocurrency into the genre.

The company's initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 was a tremendous success, raising over $24 million in just 35 seconds. One of the other key moments in Decentraland's history was the launch of its mainnet in February 2020, which marked its transition from a purely conceptual project to a fully functional virtual reality platform. 

Today, Decentraland is home to a thriving virtual economy, with users buying and selling virtual real estate, and developers creating new games, experiences, and applications. In recent years, Decentraland has attracted partnerships with high-profile brands in various industries, ranging from fashion icons like Dolce & Gabbana, to financial institutions like J.P. Morgan.

How did you manage your financial operations in crypto before using Request Finance? 

Pretty manually. Banks for transfers, and Disperse for batch transactions, except it seems to no longer be supported. That's when I had to go back to manual transactions.