Your hot new NFT project is on fire, Discord swelling as legions pour in to snap up your newly minted jpegs. Your token is mooning, with Crypto Twitter catching light with thousands of new mentions and retweets as the price shatters all resistance on the way up. Your project is booming, with VCs beginning to sniff around your early works and red hot blockchain development talent petitioning your DMs for work.
You’re a successful crypto start up that’s leaped the first hurdle where so many fail. You’ve got the eyes and the attention. Now the hard work begins. Most projects don’t even realise how much more help they’re going to need. How much they’re going to have to organise. How much they’re going to need a Rain corporate crypto card.
Hey, Big Spender! Putting Treasuries to Work
Any project building the next killer app for crypto is going to have to spend to maximise their potential. These funds usually come from a project’s treasury. Whether it’s ecosystem tokens awarded during the TGE, or a stack of funds built up from royalties of NFTs, or even external capital they’ve got their hands on. The treasury represents the beating heart of any project, and it needs to be spent wisely for one to succeed.
Sure, at the smallest scale, a few hundred or thousand dollars, with infrequent or one off spending, treasury management is no big deal. However, most serious projects will have regular ongoing fiat expenses they need to pay for to take their mission to the next level. The world of web3 hasn’t yet integrated entirely with the traditional business systems of the world, and Rain is fixing all that.
The Difficulties of Paying Expenses
Currently, DAOs are run in a very ad-hoc manner. Often, project leads spend out of their own personal finances, before being reimbursed by the treasury of the group they’re working with. This is already a messy and inefficient way to run a business, but it’s only the tip of an iceberg of potential problems that look set to afflict DAOs when they try to turn their dreams into reality.
For every expense, like laptops for your team, there needs to be a full on-chain vote before funds are moved from the treasury. Those funds will be in crypto, something a company like Apple does not currently accept. Therefore, a DAO would have to offramp their funds before then buying the laptops. This requires further admin and further fees, drastically reducing the nimbleness and efficiency that is so essential for any great business to work.
Disaster Lurking in the DMs
A properly integrated corporate debit and/or credit card that works for DAOs just starting their journey as fully fledged business operations is essential. Rain’s cards can be given limits, multi-sig security set up, and clear allotments and allowances for business expenses pre-agreed by the DAO before spending begins, with no danger of the treasury evaporating either through either poor judgement or malfeasance.
The Type of Expenses Web3 Businesses Need to Make
Most importantly, Rain’s cards for businesses will allow for easy disbursement of the treasury towards company goals. Flights to Columbia for the latest crypto conference? – no problem, put it on the Rain card. Paying GoDaddy for your website hosting? – no problem, put it on the Rain card. Want to reward every member of the day with an Amazon gift? – no problem… you get the idea.
Companies need payment rails for their crypto treasuries, and right now they don’t have them. Rain, therefore, seems well placed to help handmaiden start ups from planning to doing, by giving them the corporate tool they need to spend their money.
How Do Rain Cards Work
Rain cards work by simply connecting to an individual’s or multi-sig wallet, setting a limit on the card, and – when a purchase is made – handling the conversion of USDC to fiat and paying the merchant on the Visa payment rails. The project is building, initially, on Ethereum and Polygon. They’re a simple, fast, and cheap way to deploy a DAO’s treasury in the real world with zero obstacles and no friction. As Charles Naut, co-founder of Rain, says ‘We want to be that translation layer from web3 to a traditional financial system.’
The need for this is brazenly obvious, as setting up an account on a centralised exchange can take months, and no bank wants to work with a random DAO and set up a business account for them. The world is advancing fast, and the need for Rain’s payment tech for DAOs is arriving not a moment too soon. $6 million in seed funding was recently announced by the project, and the names involved are impressive. Lightspeed Ventures led the round, alongside other notables like Circle Ventures and Uniswap Labs. Some of Lightspeed’s businesses are also on the waitlist to utilise Rain’s cards for themselves and test them in the real world, and over 600 companies from all over web3 are on the waiting list.
Letting DAOs Work
Translating the $16 billion in AUM by DAOs (a number growing so fast it’s likely already out of date) in working capital for businesses will bring the true potential of web3 to life. Businesses need to spend money to make money, and a Rain corporate debit card will let them use the USDC they have their treasuries with the absolute minimum of fuss and the maximum security. A simple, easy offramp to unleash all that idle capital in DAO wallets and let the engine of growth that’s driving web3 march on.