Recession-Proof - a podcast by Ramp

Speaker 1:
You are listening to FinOps Today, a podcast from Ramp, where the world's most innovative finance leaders share what's on their agenda. Here's your host, Ramp's own head of finance and capital markets, Alex Song.

Alex:
We have Patrick Corker from Circle joining us on the podcast today. Patrick, do you want to spend a little bit of time introducing yourself, as well as Circle and who you guys are?

Patrick:
Absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity to speak to you today. I'm the treasurer at Circle. In addition to my treasurer responsibilities, I lead finance and strategy and do a lot of work with our CFO on corporate development opportunities that Circle has. I've been with Circle for about four years, which in crypto land is a long time, it's dog years in our world. That's my second tour of duty in Crypto.

Patrick:
Prior to Circle, I was at LedgerX for a year launching their business. LedgerX was one of the first CFTC regulated derivatives platforms. They're an exchange and clearinghouse which was recently acquired by FTX. When I joined Circle four years ago, it was a pretty different business than what it is today. We were a little bit of the crypto, everything to everyone, we had an exchange, an OTC liquidity platform, a retail crypto buying and selling platform called Circle Invest, we were just starting to think about stablecoins and that was actually one of my first primary initiatives coming in the door was hey, we think the market needs a solution for stable coins and we need someone to build the infrastructure for that. And so pairing up with a lot of other senior leaders at Circle, we did that and launched it within six months of joining.

Patrick:
So that was a pretty wild experience, but obviously one that I feel very thankful to have had looking back on it and also thankful for the opportunity to contribute to what was a big transition for the company, moving away from some of those markets, retail oriented businesses, to something that's primarily institutional and focusing on building around USDC and pleading in that future, I think a lot of which has come to fruition today with where we are.

Alex:
Maybe give us a quick highlight as to how is Circle different today than it was when you first joined four years ago? Obviously, it's doing a lot more now with stable coins, et cetera. Any other significant changes and maybe also give us a sense for scale, how many people were around when you joined and then how many people are around today?

Patrick:
Sure. So in terms of the look and feel, culturally it's the same and it's one of the things I love about Circle. It's always been very collaborative and collegial. I think if anything, we just were a little bit more circumspect as to where we were adding a lot of value to the crypto ecosystem and we believed very deeply in the future for stablecoins and specifically the one we were building around USDC and at the time, USDC was really starting to take off thinking back two, three years ago and a lot of the feedback we were getting from the market was, "We want more of this." There's more things we can do and we started to bring in other leaders in addition to myself that had a strong view on solving very traditional problems with stablecoin technology and so I think focus is probably a big difference and making a bet and one that panned out reasonably well in retrospect.

Patrick:
I think we believe a lot in the capital market's capabilities and the fluency with which we approach those opportunities using stablecoins as a method as a transfer of value. It is the conduit, it's the primary method that most people use when they think about CeFi and DeFi today, primarily in the United States. And so it's been a really fun journey in something that I again, feel very fortunate to be in this position and contributing to a lot of the growth that's happening. In terms of team size thinking back to when I joined, Circle was in a similar position. Given all the various businesses that we operated at the time, we were in a neighborhood of 350 people give or take. We've recently surpassed that number again with the current growth arc that we're on and I suspect we'll probably be well above 500 going to the first half of this year, maybe second quarter. So a lot of growth happening in Circle and very excited to be part of that growth.

Alex:
Moving into the finance side of the house, which is obviously something near and dear to both of us here, how has that evolved? How has the finance team evolved over the last four years? What was that like when you first joined and where is that going to look like as you guys look into 2022 and beyond?

Patrick:
So thinking across all of the different leaders we have today in finance, I mean, I think the new cadre of leadership under our new CFO who joined midyear last year... So Jeremy Foxdean is our CFO. I was part of a team that interviewed him and brought him into Circle and I'm extremely excited to have him here. It's one of the things that makes me very excited about our future.

Patrick:
So Jeremy was most recently a public company CFO at a real estate focus investment operation and before that, he was a long term McKinsey guy. He was a banker, a consultant and then was a C level executive at McKinsey and so bringing through that to what we do to Circle, to crypto, a lot of discipline, a lot of process oriented blocking and tackling and that is critical to scalability and I think Alex, this is something that you definitely appreciate given our various conversations is the little things matter and I think we're thinking of Circle 5, 10, 15, 20X what it is today in terms of what we're capable of and he's helped to put in a cadre of leadership that is just really impressive.

Patrick:
And so we think about our new head of IR, John Andrews, who was the head of IR at three different global investment banks. That's one example. Sumerk who just joined us in tax who was a very senior bank company tax professional who brings a breadth of experience on the tax side. A lot of folks on the accounting policy and the SOX control side of the house who have experience building and growing and being at a company that has this type of velocity in terms of change and the need for adaptation. So I think we have a lot of the leadership in place to take advantage of both the opportunities that we have and the challenges that we're going to face and I'm excited about that journey. Now it's about filling out the teams underneath them, which is a little bit of where we are now.

Alex:
Yeah, very interesting. I mean, obviously this is a critical juncture for you guys, right? Facing the public markets, it sounds like clearly a lot of consideration's given to things like tax, like you said, IR, SOX compliance, accounting and whatnot sounds like a monumental challenge, but obviously one that will be rewarding over the long run. Tell me about your day to day.

Patrick:
Oh man. I'm not sure if we have enough time to go through what a typical day looks like given my various responsibilities, but I think it lies in a lot of thematically what we've talked about, which is there's so many changes happening at the company, there's so much hiring that's happening and I live in a role where it's fairly non-traditional finance professional and so while my nominal responsibilities are with treasury finance and strategy and Corp Dev, we are going out to hire some of those individual roles. So for example, we have a listing right now for a head of Corp Dev. We need somebody to actually own and build that function. That's really exciting. I'm a huge part of that search and look forward to working with that professional. We're looking for a few other key leaders to really institutionalize much of what we're doing and that's super exciting.

Patrick:
I think I get involved a lot on the business development and sales side of the house. So one of the things that's happened over the course of my experience at Circle is I've been one of the builders of many of the products and services that we have today, mostly around USDC and so having that context, that history and that knowledge has lent itself well to helping our sales team and our business development efforts as we go out and we talk to customers about what we do, more so on the technical side. And so there's a bit of an SME component it to a lot of my involvement with the outside of the house and then thinking strategically with our other members of the executive team on what comes next has been a big part of my role.

Patrick:
And so that is maybe nontraditional for a typical finance professional, but a part of my job that I really, really enjoy. And I think the rest of it is a lot of the things you would normally expect. Hey, we have to continue to build on what we've done historically. We need to get better and more precise, more efficient because again, the business is growing and scalability matters and having people for example, in the right seats, folks who joined us a year ago were doing great work, but we now learned a lot about them. What are their core strengths and where are they not as strong? And as we build out the team, we can create tighter swim lanes, so figuring out where people go and giving them an opportunity to really shine within our organization is a big part of what I do as well.

Alex:
As you're looking forward, I mean, any major strategic initiatives you have in mind? Any large projects that you are particularly excited about or daunted by?

Patrick:
There is always daunting things when you're trying to grow a business in crypto. That certainly is going to be true for us and many of our compatriots in this space who are leaning into many of the opportunities that are right there in front of us. In terms of daunting, I think we continue to work towards regulatory clarity, some of which impacts us, some of which just impacts the space. We are working with a lot of regulators around some of the guidance that's come out from the presidential working group, how do you regulate a stablecoin? What should that look like? And I think we've leaned into the idea that we probably need to become a bank or something along those lines, and we've said we will do that. We'll do all the right things that we need to operate that way today and so going back to your earlier question, what are some of the challenges is in many ways, operating as a bank would and a lot of us have that experience and that pattern recognition.

Patrick:
Whether it be myself or other folks I've hired, building that repertoire and operating in that fashion is a big challenge for a company that's rooted in entrepreneurship and a little bit of moving really quickly, which banks typically don't do. But again, the major blocking and tackling of process procedures, documentation, adherence, controls, all those things really matter and so marrying those things, not slowing down, continuing to build and doing things the right way are all part of the core discipline that we're trying to instill across the organization and we're a big part of that. So the other thing is just execution, right?

Patrick:
So a lot of great ideas, a lot of opportunities, but getting after it and making sure that we went on key fronts and I think we're out there today talking a lot about that as it relates to growing USDC and circulation and new use cases. And so we've talked a little bit about, for example, how USDC is impacting very mainstream businesses like global remittance. Last fall, we announced a big partnership with MoneyGram with a potential to disrupt how global remittance works. We've talked about working with global PSPs and the idea that USDC can be a form of payment and settlement, which is something that the networks have bees used to like Visa, MasterCard, they've been super public about that.

Patrick:
We've talked about working with banks in a variety of different capacities and we talked about building yields, which is something that obviously Grant knows really well and the need to meet a higher bar in our minds in a lot of different respects and be people that you can trust, that you can go to and trust your money with and know that what we tell you is what's going to happen. The very, very simple things, but again, execution matters and we're super excited to be on that journey.

Alex:
That's great. I think just for the benefit of listeners out there, Circle yield is something that Ramp indeed has been happily collaborating with the Circle team for a while now. It is an enterprise focused solution that essentially allows us to allocate a certain amount of our corporate treasury into USDC for which obviously we're able to earn a pretty interesting and pretty compelling yield on that. So hence Circle yield. So we've been very, very happy that for the last half year or so, we've been able to collaborate with the folks over at Circle.

Patrick:
And we thank you for that partnership. It's been awesome.

Speaker 1:
You are listening to FinOps Today, a podcast from Ramp.

Alex:
Maybe let's chat just tactically, right? I think most of the stuff that gets airtime is really the large strategic initiatives and the larger strategic visions and whatnot, but tactically, maybe talk a little bit about financial operations, your day to day amongst the team and maybe specifically within the context of the pandemic and how that's forced you guys to adapt various practices, various controls, how you communicate. I know that obviously here at Ramp, when we were building the business in 2020, guess what? Everyone was completely remote and clearly that created some challenges with respect to cross-function work, collaboration, transparency, communication. I want to hear from you how Circle was able to navigate that and how the day to days of financial operations had to change.

Patrick:
It's a great question. I point to the fact that the Circle team going back about a year looks a lot different than it did today. A lot of the growth in my teams in particular happened over the past year so I would say probably something like 70, 80% of my teams were hired after the pandemic started, which is pretty wild and so we had this core team of people, 2, 3, 4 people, as we were reinventing the company, right? We were refocusing on USDC, we were building products and services around that that was capable of handling the load. We obviously had to grow quickly with the arc that we experienced, which is largely a derivative of USDC growing 10X in two consecutive years. I think people just naturally felt very comfortable connecting with us digitally and so communication was probably the biggest thing. It's like, how do we connect to one another? And that's over the obvious channels being Slack, email, Zoom, et cetera, et cetera, but conditions permitting, there was travel involved and so I went out and I met with people.

Patrick:
I'm a huge believer in in-person time and certainly there were times where that wasn't possible, but over the course of the pandemic, there were windows of opportunity to connect with people, get together and build relationships and that connective tissue, that glue that holds teams together and in particular as we were growing so much. I mean really, we grew five, six X across my teams over that period of time and certainly not without it's challenges, but I think you do things like ratchet up the frequency of communication, even if it's something simple like one-on-ones, and so get outside the context of the team and how are you doing? And tell me about it and making yourself available in off hours because again, most of the people coming in were busy in a normal work day, 8, 10, 12 hours, whatever the case was. We've been super busy trying to grow the business. If I need to be available early in the morning, late in the evening on weekends, not to say that's the expectation, but if people need to talk about things I'm there and I think knowing that's been super helpful.

Patrick:
So I think approach to this and just people knowing and reinforcing that there are many channels of communication. They're always there. We understand that this is stressful. Getting around and even if it's maybe once a quarter, two or three times per six months, getting in front of people and doing something fun, going out to dinner, having a social, allowing people to travel for example, to New York and having people be here. Again, conditions permitting with COVID, but that has been extremely helpful and I think there's another side of this, which I think is really, really positive and constructive, which is you sort of change your mindset a little bit about how you search for talent.

Patrick:
We became a remote first company, largely in line with a lot of other FinTech, I think roughly the same time, for example, that Coinbase announced they were going to be a remote first company and it just opens up many different domiciles to go and say hey, I'm just going to get the best person. It doesn't matter. They don't have to be in New York. They don't have to be in Chicago or LA or San Francisco or London. You just go find the best person and I think that in and of itself has been extremely powerful for our company. If I look at the geographic distribution of my team, it's super impressive. We're still working on growing the team internationally so that's super exciting, but there are certainly more domiciles that we're considering, more countries that we're looking at recruiting in than we ever considered before and I think that's a really powerful thing for what Circle's doing, which is a global business. We'll continue to do that.

Patrick:
We recently spun up an office space in New York City, which is going to be a hub for people. So it's certainly more space than we need for the people we have here but the idea is people can travel in, come here and stay with us for a week or two weeks and grab dinner with the team and go do something fun and spend time getting to know people. And even if there's less continuity in terms of having those personal connections, having periods that folks can look forward to and build those relationships has been really powerful.

Alex:
Absolutely. That's awesome. Although, I will give you the flip side of that coin which is to the great detriment of my accounting team and People Ops and payroll folks. Similar to Circle, now that Rev is hiring a lot of folks internationally across different domiciles, across state lines, it does create its own slew of challenges with respect to withholding taxes, benefits, 401k matching, et cetera. So clearly there's definitely an adjustment period for sure and I assume that probably is something that resonates with you guys as well.

Patrick:
It does, I think operational complexity, to your point, there's a high delta between the two things. I think the growth of our company, the complexity of our company and the geographic distribution therein just creates a lot of complexity and I think we're okay with that. To your point, the basic things like payroll, how do I pay people in Germany? What are the payroll tax rules? What are the pension plan rules and what are the insurance rules and how do I actually facilitate all this? And without creating undue complexity on things like treasury operations or financial operations. We have a huge, robust team that deals with a lot of that complexity. It's sort of straddles traditional finance and talent operations, but I think we've dealt with it well and I think the benefit has been well worth the cost, if that makes sense. I wouldn't change it for anything.

Alex:
Anything that in your day to day, whether it's within the treasury function or just broadly speaking within the finance function, anything that you wish you had more time to spend on and conversely, anything that you wish you could spend less time on?

Patrick:
I think the biggest thing that I wish I had more time for is teaching and so I have the benefit of a lot of context and history at Circle, and it's very easy to get in cycles of doing and growing and building, but not helping people to understand where we've been and why we're going where we're going, which is a function of where we've been and what we've learned, right?

Patrick:
So we try to do this so we have all hands, which is basically everybody in the company jumps on a call roughly every two weeks and we have speakers. And so there'll be a chance for someone like me or someone else who can talk about the journey that we've been on and give them a portal into that perspective, which is super helpful, right? The benefit of hindsight is massive in terms of understanding why we're doing what we're doing today, but getting in front of more people and helping them see that just because, I mean, I personally believe I'm still here and I'm still helping the business to grow. I personally believe it's such a powerful story of conviction and a little bit of being in the right place at the right time but the right idea, nonetheless. It's really helpful for people to create a stickiness because I do think it ties together a lot of the ideas of ownership. Do people feel like they're a part of what you're doing?

Patrick:
And some of that is challenging in an environment where you're a distributed workplace and that's for certain true, but I do think part of it is understanding the story and having a perspective of someone who's been here and helping them to understand why certain decisions were made and where we are today and where we're going. So it's a little bit of past present future. I'd love to have more time to talk to people about that, because I think given a little bit of time with a lot of people, they can see the same things I do. It's not to say they don't, but I do think it creates a sense of belonging to the company and I'd love your views on this as well, Alex. That sense of belonging, that sense of ownership is what drives the team forward in many respects, particularly when you're in a challenging environment and doing a lot of hard work, in particular on a remote basis.

Alex:
Yeah, absolutely. That's a really, really good point. Out of curiosity, how frequent is your all hands?

Patrick:
It's roughly every two weeks, sometimes it's every three weeks depending upon calendars, but it's a great opportunity. Jeremy Alair speaks often, if not every single time and just gives his like, here's my view, here's what's happening right now, here's some of the really important themes, and then typically we'll get some outside guest speakers. We'd love to have you on, by the way, if you're interested, no pressure speaking to the entire company at Circle about not even as much what we're doing together, not that that's not interesting, it's wonderful, but talk to the company about what Ramp's doing and some of the similar challenges that you guys have, which I know there's a lot of overlap between the two companies in terms of things we're trying to do really well and the challenges we're facing, but I think that'd be great. We'd love to have you on.

Patrick:
And then we have other leaders within the company and so maybe it's for example, Dante de Sparta, who's our head of policy and strategy talking about what are global regulators saying? What's the temperature in Congress right now for building policy around what stablecoins are doing and more broadly crypto, that's super powerful. One of the unique benefits of being in Circle spot in the global crypto environment is we're a bit of a center of gravity for a lot of things and so we have some unique perspectives and are plugged into a lot of different conversations about how this world is growing and developing and we sort of found that's really helpful for folks to understand.

Alex:
That's amazing. I actually think bringing an external perspective... We also have biweekly all hands here at Ramp, but I actually think it's a really good idea, at some point bringing in external experts, offering more of an external view, right? Because again, I think a lot of the times we're just really heads down, working on our own stuff and doing and there's more stuff that we could be doing.

Alex:
But on that topic as well, so at Ramp, the finance team actually also hosts a recurring, almost office hours. And so also to your point, we generally have a lot of the folks on the finance team optionally dial in and the rest of the organization has the ability to also dial in and just ask us questions or to pick our brains on something. It could be anything from options vesting to how do we calculate PnL? What are our gross margins? What can you tell us about calculating customer lifetime value? Stuff like that and it winds up being quite productive, particularly for our account managers, folks who are day to day talking to customers out there and a lot of the times they need to think critically about am I spending my time appropriately managing a profitable account? Right? And so that tends to be something that we also do to your point, with respect to teaching and helping folks and also getting us a little bit greater visibility across the firm. Do you guys do anything like that?

Patrick:
We do and I think that's awesome. It sounds like we're very philosophically aligned on the value of having people ask questions and have a chance to learn about what the company's doing. It's again, that sense of alignment and that's as much beneficial for my own team as it is for other parts of Circle, right? You come in, you're given a job, you do your job. There's a lot of pieces of the business you may not necessarily see and seeing how that all connects is really powerful. I think it sort of distills down to each individual understanding how their work contributes to what the company's doing. That's really, really powerful for people.

Patrick:
Yeah, so at least for myself, every single week I have an hour, it's open to every single person on my team that they can come in and ask questions. Anything they want, doesn't matter. What's the company doing? What's sales doing? What's BD doing? What's policy doing? They can ask about what's happening within finance. They can ask me specific questions about things that I'm doing, things that are important to my list of initiatives, which we have a big process around OKRs which I believe you guys do as well. We've talked a little bit about this before, it's like hey, what are we trying to accomplish? How do we hold ourselves accountable? How do we measure success? All those really important things and people will want to understand, why is that important to the company?

Patrick:
And so this goes back to the one thing I wish I had more time to do, I wish I could do that a lot. I wish I could do that every day because there's so much ground to cover and I was coming up through the ranks, always the one that wished I had more time to ask questions because I wanted to understand so much more and it's a bit of just... Availability is the constraint. We're all very busy professionals but yes, we definitely do that and hopefully look forward to doing that more in the future as we build up the team.

Speaker 1:
You are listening to FinOps Today, a podcast form Ramp.

Alex:
I want to cover three, let's call them special topics. As you guys are thinking through additional scale, additional growth and potentially also the scrutiny of the public markets, I wanted to pick your brain about three things and feel free to chime in as much or as little as you feel is appropriate. But I want to hear actually, super curious about how you guys may or may not have adapted your practices with respect to number one, the audits and number two, taxes and number three, just best practices or maybe pitfalls or things to avoid with respect to crypto accounting specifically. So those are three topics I was wondering if you could chime in on.

Patrick:
Absolutely. So I'm also happy to share my thoughts with you. I would disclaim that Tim Sing who runs accounting and tax for us is going to be your subject matter expert, but I do get involved in a lot of matters that touch those areas so maybe I could share a few thoughts on that. As it relates to the audit, I think a big part of what we do and I suspect a lot of crypto companies are the same are educating your auditors, right? And that kind of happens regardless of what business you're in. I started out as an auditor, I was a [inaudible 00:26:16] two years before I got into traditional finance at Goldman. And so it's tough because these folks are coming in and you have two things that are [inaudible 00:26:25], number one, at least from the outset, they have no idea what your business is, right? So you need to educate them regardless.

Patrick:
And number two, there isn't really a lot of robust accounting guidance on crypto. There's just not, so you have to spend a lot of time, for example, creating accounting policies. How are you going to deal with something? How is that rooted in how other, for example, public companies are dealing with, for example, crypto on balance sheets. There's not that many, but there's some and who are their auditors? So for example, Coinbase or MicroStrategy, right? They have to publish their financial statements. They're a public company so you can go in and you can look at these things. We also happen to be really strong colleagues with a lot of the folks at some of these companies and we can talk to them. So it's a little bit of socialization and pattern recognition, what are other folks doing in this space?

Patrick:
It's also you're lobbying a little bit. It's like your accounts are necessarily going to be a little bit risk averse. That's understandable, right? Particularly your external accounts, they have to sign off on the financial statements and given some of that grayness to more broadly, how FASBI is dealing with certain issues like market to market on crypto positions, which is not allowed. So not really an issue for stablecoins, but it is an issue for things like Bitcoin so it's cost basis as an example. And there's other permutations of that, but just the lack of clarity, the lack of very robust accounting guidelines on how to do certain things makes it really challenging and so partnership is important, education's important and using mosaic theory, how many data points can you glean from other available public market information and your relationships is super important to building a robust accounting program, which naturally fees into your financial statements, right?

Patrick:
So it's a lot of work and I give my counterpart on the accounting side, Tim Sing a lot of credit for all the success that he's had in that area. On the tax side, I'm less dangerous on that, but I would say thematically, it falls along the same lines as we have. And so we use big four for accounting both as subject matter experts so more so on the advisory side, but then also the filing and tax returns. We just hired Sumerk, who's coming again from a [inaudible 00:28:26] company and very, very senior and can bring a lot of smart, fast moving with a lot of velocity, dealing with a lot of very complex issues where there's a lot of nuance. And so we're very excited to have her on board to up level what we do on that side of the house. So maybe more to come on that side in the future.

Alex:
The third topic was any best practices, pitfalls, things to watch out for specific to crypto accounting.

Patrick:
Yeah. Maybe we'll talk about what that looks like specifically from a stablecoin perspective and again, thematically consistent, it's a little bit of a gray space and in particular and you guys have dealt with this to some degree, how you account for USDC on balance sheet, for example, if you're participating in our yield program. So now you're purchasing a crypto asset, that's USDC, you're then lending that asset and from our perspective, it's even a little bit more complicated because we create the USDC. So you give us dollars, we give you USDC, you then lend that USDC back to us. It's a little bit of an accounting nightmare.

Alex:
Yeah.

Patrick:
But going back to T accounts, it's like the basic blocking and tackling that we do and ensuring that your assets and liabilities match up and it's a lot of work and it's a lot of redundancy, but just making it clear effectively what the flow of funds is. A lot of times our accounting programming, our accounting guidance, our accounting policies are rooted in flow of funds. What is the movement of fiat money? What is the movement of digital assets and who has ownership of those things? And then the rest tends to fall in line. And just making it really crisp what that looks like with your accounting partners and your tax partners has been critical to our success, and that's something that Circle does really well and in fact, we spend a lot of time talking through those exact topics with some of our partners and so very familiar with the challenges. It's one of those things that's not super clear on the face of it, but something with a little bit of work we've been able to get to a reasonable conclusion.

Alex:
That's incredible. I mean, we here at Ramp, we only see one side of that, right? I can only imagine how if you're seeing both sides of it and you're seeing multiple counterparties, how challenging some of that becomes. And is the right solution there? And I'm just curious, is the right solution there just to A, build it internally by hiring tons and tons of people, or are you also relying on a slew of external vendors, external technology, outside folks to also support a big part of that? What would you say is the division of labor between internal and external?

Patrick:
That's a great question. It's a super bespoke approach because in a world where you're living with both fiat implications and crypto asset implications, there are certainly systems available for the fiat side of the business, right? And so if Circle is a combination of USDC as in a bridge between fiat money and digital money in both directions. So there's a lot of movement there. There's our payments business, there's our capital markets yield business, there's a lot of different ways that we see money flow and there are a lot of traditional systems out there that can help you with that, off the shelf type of stuff. And so treasury management systems is a good example and without disclosing who it is, it's a top two or three global treasury management system in terms of a provider for corporates and Fortune 50 companies.

Patrick:
So we're super excited to be working with them, but we build a lot of things ourselves because you may talk to a lot of providers and traditional systems on the accounting and the treasury side for example that are really good at dealing with the typical implications of cash movements in a variety of different capacities along the lines of what I mentioned, but then they fall short on the crypto side. So then you have to say, well, can I build on the crypto aspect to what they do or do I want to go out and just get a different system altogether? And so one of the partners that we've worked with is Lukka, so L-U-K-K-A, has been a partner for quite a long time and they build a world class platform for effectively front to back processing across a number of different crypto assets, have connectivity to a lot of different exchanges and OTC platforms and through that have sort of figured out... Here's how I, for example, would dovetail all of our crypto movements with the necessary, for example, GL entries in a system like Intact, which is our current GL system, right?

Patrick:
And so there are some folks that figured that out and we're very happy to partner with them, but even with that, it's still a very nascent space in terms of crypto systems specifically and so what we end up doing is we end up partnering with a lot of these folks to build something that's bespoke. That's true of USDC as well and so I think we've done that with Lukka. We're excited to do that, hopefully with a few others this year, but you kind of have to be willing to take on that challenge. It's like, hey man, we want to do the right thing, we want to work with Circle, we want to work with USDC, but we don't really have the right thing today. And so then you have to make a bet that you're going to work with them and build something that works for both sides. So that's been a great approach for us so far and I expect to continue to do so.

Alex:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for being part of the podcast.

Patrick:
Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
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