How SuperRare automated token operations with Liquifi and Integral

How SuperRare automated token operations with Liquifi and Integral‍

This Case Study builds on previous work between SuperRare x Liquifi and SuperRare x Integral.

It highlights SuperRare’s operational efficiencies, enabled through the combination of Liquifi’s automated distributions and Integral’s real-time on-chain reporting.  

Read on to learn how—together—we’ve turned 2.5 hours of manual error-prone work into automated 40-second flows, while returning 10's of hours per month back to SuperRare's leadership.

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The challenge

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. He immediately began looking for solutions that solved 5 main challenges: 

1. 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. 
2. SuperRare relied on a complex set of Excel spreadsheets to track the business's activity, which was hard to maintain and prone to error. 
3. 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.
4. SuperRare needed a tool with an approval account to maintain visibility, security, and internal controls.
5. 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 it came with few internal controls.” 

He went on:

“That was our biggest pain point—and there’s not many tools that 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, their inefficient, manual approach was also prone to errors, leaving room for misreported information and inaccurate financials.

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The solution 

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, it's imperative that financial operators use systems to deter potential bad actors and prevent errors.

Liquifi’s solution accomplished this for SuperRare.

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Integral’s crypto accounting platform enabled real-time, efficient, and accurate reporting for SuperRare’s on-chain transactions. 

With Integral, SuperRare's team no longer needed to manually pull in recent transactions.

Instead, they gained 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. 

Integral’s rules engine could categorize common transactions—handling 95% of all on-chain activity—leaving only one-off operating expenses for review. 

Finally, the seamless integration with SuperRare's existing tech stack made the experience transitioning to Integral a breeze.

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The results

As SuperRare continues to grow, they've benefited from a system that gives their finance team full control and visibility over its distribution transactions—all from Day One. 

Per Sushen, the SuperRare team received a best-in-class customer experience throughout the entire engagement:

“The Liquifi team has been phenomenal. Whenever we don’t know how to do something, we just reach out via Telegram chat or email. 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 helped 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 schedule.

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's stakeholders now have a centralized place to see and understand their traditional stock options and their crypto compensation. 

With Integral, SuperRare's CFO and Controller were able to cut down their monthly closing time by over 5-10 hours, compared to previous solutions.

This improvement saves a significant amount of resources and enables better decision-making at every level of the organization.

Sushen described the experience onboarding with Integral:

"Onboarding with Integral was like no other; their team made an active effort to learn the basics of how SuperRare did crypto accounting, such that they would be able to help implement, transition and ensure all our pain points were addressed and resolved. Their team is committed to their customers, and they act on feedback + feature requests!"

The reduction in manual data entry and error-checking meant that SuperRare's team could redirect their focus towards more strategic initiatives.

SuperRare's team felt confident that the financial data they presented was not only accurate, but also insightful—empowering them to improve decision-making across the entire organization.

Per Thomas Wu, SuperRare's former VP of Finance: 

"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 and world-class design. Continuous improvement sets them apart from other accounting platforms on the market."

Financial operators in crypto-native companies are too often expected to make sense of crypto transactions with legacy tools. 

Setting up the right FinOps stack from the beginning empowers CFOs and controllers to make better decisions—and leave a greater positive impact as their companies grow.