DriveWealth, the mobile finance management platform which prides itself on being the number one virtual brokerage infrastructure, has acquired DriveLiquidity and DriveDigital in newly unveiled plans to offer cryptocurrencies to individuals at both partner and retail investing levels. The move comes after the company completed its acquisition of Crypto Systems, a mobile trading platform exclusive to digital assets.

“This next stage of growth for DriveWealth represents an additional milestone in support of our core mission, expanding access to notional investing,” said Bob Cortright, Founder and CEO at DriveWealth.

“No other asset class translates to notional investing the way cryptocurrencies do,” Cortright continued. “Creating DriveWealth’s crypto vertical strengthens our ability to empower retail investors to enter these markets, while also equipping our partners with the end-to-end technology they need to power the investing experience as we move into the virtual asset space.”

According to a press release, DriveWealth’s acquisition of DriveLiquidity will provide DriveWealth with the capability to trade cryptocurrencies on a proprietary basis. DriveLiquidity will act as a liquidity provider in both DriveWealth and to other cryptocurrency venues. DriveWealth also launched DriveDigital as its cryptocurrency exchange platform, as part of the company’s overall game plan to start dabbling in digital assets.

DriveDigital’s platform will offer Ethereum and Bitcoin as part of its initial launch. The move will undoubtedly draw eyes from companies like Coinbase, whose fee structure has resulted in scrutiny, even making the company hint at turning into a subscription platform in a recent earnings call.

Marc Anthony, former Chief Strategy Officer at DriveWealth and now CEO of DriveDigital, spoke about the importance of digital assets entering the portfolios of traditional traders, allowing both his company and customers a chance to learn and grow simultaneously.

“Crypto is the most requested asset class from our partners and their customers – DriveDigital and DriveLiquidity will provide that capability,” said Anthony. “Expanding DriveWealth’s business model into the digital asset space will give our partners access to the crypto markets while also enabling us to scale our businesses – together.”

Patrick White, CEO, Bitwave

“I don’t always believe people that say they are surprised about having to pay taxes on crypto. There’s a field on your tax form to say where you’ve made money doing illegal things. If you sell drugs, there’s a place to report how much money you’ve spent selling drugs. The IRS doesn’t care. Everything is taxed in this country.”

There is no such thing as too many crypto transactions when it comes to accounting purposes, according to Patrick White, CEO of Bitwave. Bitwave operates the software that does the accounting for major blockchain companies and retailers who have taken crypto as payment.

White says that the high volume of crypto transactions aren’t coming from individuals sending digital assets back and forth, but rather from the companies that host the infrastructure of these transactions.

“It’s not just trading, trading is fun and we all love the rat race that is trading, but where it’s a lot more interesting is how some of our customers who are in the NFT space are seeing millions of revenue transactions a month.”

These sites like OpenSea, a client of Bitwave, are seeing sky high amounts of these types of transactions. When asked about the cost of accounting for an individual doing ten-thousand trades a month, White laughed.

“Ten-thousand trades a month is nothing,” he said.

White spoke of an instance which is seemingly a common occurrence in the crypto world. “We had a customer who when we were running their [transactions], I couldn’t figure out [an issue] with one of their months. I went to go look at the data, and they had turned on a Binance bot and without even realizing it, they didn’t know this, they accidentally had 200,000 trades in a month. The volume is incredible.”

When asked about how digital assets have impacted the accounting world, White stressed that the amount of transactions have resulted in companies appearing larger than they are from a transactional-perspective. According to him, some of his clients are doing as many transactions as some of the largest companies in the world.

“[One client] is a one-year old company that is doing the volume of a sixty year-old retail business, it’s unheard of.”

When asked further about the difference of cost in accounting digital assets versus dollars, White explained that it isn’t much different than how larger companies have maintained their books for some time.

“No matter what, if you are a high frequency trader and you’re making hundreds of millions of trades a year, you will need software to deal with that,” said White. “I wouldn’t say that [the amount of transactions] are increasing costs across the board, it is a cost that you would already be expected to [have].”

When asked about the apparent vacuum of crypto-native accountants, White seemed to cast blame on the approach of the information. When hiring, he says he finds more value in people with engineering experience over accounting experience, and blockchain experience over anything else.

“[Other accountants] are trying to apply finance 1.0 things to this crypto world,” said White. “We look for good engineers. A good engineer can figure anything out, a bad engineer with accounting experience can’t. We’re looking for blockchain experience, as blockchain [technology] is more difficult than accounting in many ways.”

While most businesses will file extensions this time around and finish their taxes in October, White believes that blockchain accounting will become more widespread as new firms leverage the infancy of the space and settle into their niches.

“Cottage industries will come up in order to enable the IRS,” said White. “I don’t expect the IRS to build this technology or this understanding in-house. There will be people and businesses that will do it for them.”

With the IRS’ decisions about taxing crypto having the potential to change at any notice, White stressed the necessity for malleability when developing this kind of accounting technology in such an unpredictable space.

“We’ve designed Bitwave from the very beginning to be able to rapidly adjust to the new laws that are coming out,” he said. “Even back then, it was very obvious that we couldn’t build this tech in such a way that it is inflexible.”

After building the infrastructure to accept donations through software like Venmo and PayPal along with digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2019, the Salvation Army is set to have its highest donation totals for a third year in a row. 

The 156 year-old non-profit organization not only doubled its donations from 2019 to 2020, but is now on track to beat that number coming into the end of 2021, according to American Banker.

To get started, the Salvation Army introduced Kettle Pay, a program that allowed them to accept digital donations instantly at their Red Kettle donation sites. There are now 25,000 Red Kettle locations around the United States that accept these types of donations.

The Salvation Army is continuing to innovate their digital acceptance platform by partnering up with a Canadian fintech startup TipTap in 2,000 of its Red Kettle locations. TipTap’s technology will allow donors to give fixed amounts in any digital payments application of their choice, up to $20 through an NFC wired card.

“Lots of people don’t carry cash anymore, and our research shows that when you give people a simple digital approach to donate, organizations typically see a fourfold increase in the amount of money they’re collecting versus cash,” said Chris Greenfield, Tiptap’s CEO to the AB.

Donors who wish to contribute crypto currency can utilize Crypto Kettle, which is backed by crypto platform Engiven and allows charitable blockchain folks to make a dollarless contribution.

It is unclear how much the Salvation Army is currently holding in blockchain assets, as the organization claimed it was still too early in the process to share specific totals.

“The effect of adding various digital acceptance channels has so far increased total donations to the nonprofit by 100%, said Dale Bannon, the Salvation Army’s national community relations and development secretary for the U.S to AB. 

“It’s been a priority to expand our traditionally cash-based program to offer more contactless options to donors, and we’ve seen an incredible increase in the use of these tools over the past few years.”

I attended NFT.NYC in Times Square on Wednesday and was blown away by the amount of energy around not only NFTs, but blockchain technology. For the first time, people like street-artists and musicians who rarely take an interest in investing are now developing a liking to extremely niche, complex, and heavily unregulated investment platforms. In a mix of Silicon Valley tycoons and seemingly broke college students trying to make it big, I poked around NFT.NYC and tried to figure out how any of this stuff could be useful to the traditional financial world.

Here’s what I found.

-Blockchains Have Potential
In terms of record keeping, a blockchain’s ability to function as a ledger is the first thing that comes to mind in terms of real world practicality. There are companies out there that are attempting to put mortgages on the blockchain through things like NFTs, but no one at the event was talking about banking documentation. Things like loans, credit history, customer information, and merchant history all would thrive in an objective virtual record keeping database that could cut data processing and approval times into fractions of what they are now. Imagine having all of the information needed for a deal in one place, accessible by anyone that had the credentials to get it?

-These Companies want Cash
With the amount of money in the crypto world being thrown around, startups are popping up everywhere to try to get their piece of the action. With gaudiness and flamboyance being the marketing technique that’s dominating how these companies talk about what they do, it is clear that the key to starting a successful company in the crypto space is how quickly you can legitimize your company to your customers. If lenders are looking to expand their marketshare, this is the place to look. A lender, who will remain unnamed, was handing out business cards at the main showcase of NFT.NYC, and said “we are here looking for opportunities.” There is a huge potential for funding an entire industry in this space, and it seems as if lenders haven’t quite caught on yet.

-It’s marketed by Gen Z,  but Operated by ex-Wall Street
The mix of people who work for these companies is interesting. Outside of the Gen Z people talking about the notion of monetizing art and creativity, it seems the X’s and O’s of the industry are being run by a large portion of former Wall Street people. I met former commodity traders, investment bankers, stockbrokers, and hedge fund people that left that world to get into crypto; and it seems like they’re the ones running the books of these companies.

-Learn what an NTT is
A non-transferable token is what one CEO told me will innovate the everyday processes of finance more than anything else in the crypto space. Although he described it as an up and coming, abstract part of blockchain technology, the individual said that these types of tokens give access to information on the blockchain on a one way-basis, primarily eliminating the ability for anyone to access personal information if stored on a blockchain. He said this is an extremely mind boggling topic for most, even in the crypto space, and is largely not talked about because of the complexity of its nature. As more people work with NTTs, this CEO claims that anyone in the field of moving, borrowing, or lending money in the future will be working with NTTs on a daily basis.

-Digital Art is Part of the Hype, the Value is in the Technology
When people hear NFT, they associate it with a JPEG of a funky design that can be purchased and viewed solely the internet. This is true, but will not be the future of this type of technology. The artists who are trying to promote digital arts via NFTs are there to profit off of the hype of the space. The idea of buying a virtual picture for half a million dollars, which actually happened at the event, is just a combination of the excitement around the industry, and it’s widespread financial boasting mentality. The concept of a fully independent, tamperproof form of virtual record keeping that can be used by financial companies to speed up everyday processes is where the ones who have the most knowledge about finance that work in the crypto space are keeping their focus.