How Music NFT Marketplace Royal Saved 30 Hours Per Month

Founded in 2021, Royal is a marketplace for music NFTs, allowing users to purchase tokens which contain unique artwork and other perks selected by the artist in addition to a percentage of streaming royalties in the music.

Royal operates globally, with hundreds of thousands of users and has helped artists raise millions for their work. Less than three months after announcing a $16 million seed round led by Founders Fund and Paradigm, Royal raised $55 million in a series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz in November of 2021.

Before and After Grid

Before TaxBit

  • Labor-intensive crypto accounting process that took 40 hours per month

  • Manual bookkeeping across multiple systems constrained resources

After TaxBit

  • Simple and resource-light crypto accounting process that now only takes 8-10 hours per month

  • Automated transaction reconciliation and accounting system integration offer a speedy way to accurately manage crypto transactions

  • Easy-to-use UI allows for actionable insights and informed decisions across the business

PROBLEM

A complex and manual crypto accounting process decreased productivity

Royal was founded with one goal: to allow fans to invest in culture and participate in the success of their favorite artists, but they quickly realized that significant resources were being devoted to their back-office accounting and bookkeeping functions.‍

Jerry Hsiang, the head of Royal’s finance team, was tasked with manually accounting for tens of thousands of crypto transactions every month. Throughout the month, Jerry could be found sitting with developers, spending time manually pulling transactions and reconciling them, taking time away from building the product.‍“

As a finance team, we need to track the minting process, account for new ‘drops’ when artists sell tokens to their fans, and pay for artists’ gas fees—all of these increase transaction count and complexity so, in total, it would take us over 40 hours per month,” explains Jerry.‍

Automating manual tasks and saving time for himself and the developers at Royal were Jerry’s main priorities. “I knew we needed software that could pull transactions for several wallets, calculate the cost-basis, and track the value of our treasury at any given time,” says Jerry.

SOLUTION

TaxBit automates the crypto accounting process and integrates with the rest of the accounting stack

After researching several different solutions, Jerry was confident that implementing TaxBit would be the best way for Royal to accomplish its goals.

“TaxBit was able to simplify our process and had all of the capabilities we were looking for in a crypto accounting software. The ease of use, clean UI, and ability to quickly understand what was happening with our crypto transactions was unmatched,” Jerry says.

“We just pull all of our transaction data from TaxBit and give it to our third-party accountants,” explains Jerry. “There is very little if any, clean up required and the UI and dashboard are something our accountants love too.”

RESULTS

With TaxBit, Royal devotes fewer resources to closing the books and has increased its audit preparedness

“We may dedicate 8 to 10 hours a month to crypto accounting nowadays,” Jerry says. “It has helped tremendously to go from looking at 10,000 transactions to just one dashboard. Our finance resources are now able to spend time on mission-critical items like the payment infrastructure of our business.

”Royal’s benefits have extended beyond time-savings. TaxBit's crypto accounting platform automates gain/loss calculations, accounts for gas fees, and calculates the appropriate cost-basis across assets. Most importantly, TaxBit can automatically account for the NFT-specific use cases like  to account for royalties to community members and artists and improve insight into the overall business.

With TaxBit, Jerry is empowered to make Royal’s operations work more seamlessly by building a foundation towards Royal’s financial goals and spend more time focusing on its business mission to empower artists.

“We’re excited to make payments to token holders and enable a world where anyone can own music and earn royalties alongside artists,” says Jerry. “With TaxBit, we have experienced outstanding customer support and have experienced tremendous dedication to implementing our needs into their product. I am excited for what we can achieve together moving forward.”