10.4k sats \ 4 replies \ @isaacfain 13 Mar 2023 \ on: Best article to make a case to a CFO for allocating some treasury to Bitcoin? bitcoin
About a year ago my former biz partner and I wound down our crypto treasury startup to bring cryptocurrency to corporate balance sheets, with Bitcoin being the biggest selling point and driver. The biggest problem remains to be the accounting.
Bitcoin is still considered to be intangible asset by the GAAP accounting rules. This flies in the face of all former mentions by Fed officials of Bitcoin being considered as a commodity, and therefore as a separate asset from token based crypto in the eth world, or stablecoins - which we treated effectively as an unregulated derivative.
When you're a public company and hold an amount of intangible assets that is material - you must regularly test the asset for something called impairment. Here's how it works: say you're a CFO and you buy $20 million BTC at 15k for a rainy future bank-run day. A month goes by and the price falls to 13k - now that asset is considered to be impaired, and you now only have 13k btc on your balance sheet. Another month goes by and next quarter comes - time to report to the markets. Lo and behold, BTC has in fact gone back up to 17k ... but since the asset is impaired, you have to report it to your investors at 13k!!!
That means that while spot market value on exchanges has your bags sitting around 22.7 million, you have to report 17.3 million and a loss of book value of 2.7 million in assets.
The real kicker is that these rules are different for hedge funds, banks, and securities brokers, who have different accounting rules since they're financial firms. This is also why there was and still is such a big pressure to issue a Bitcoin based ETF on Wall Street to serve as a Fortune 500 friendly vehicle.
How do you sell it to CFOs? If I knew that, I'd still have my startup.
Hasn't this changed October last year? Michael Saylor also mentioned this problem.
But seems like the FASB pivoted and decided that fair-value accounting for crypto assets should be used: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/13/fasb-mulls-fair-value-accounting-for-crypto-holdings-report/
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Looks like they still need to officially update the accounting standards, but that this is definitely the direction of travel.
The Board directed the staff to draft a proposed Accounting Standards Update for vote by written ballot, with a comment period of 75 days.
This is from this page dated 8 Feb 2023: https://www.fasb.org/Page/ProjectPage?metadata=fasb-Accounting-for-and-Disclosure-of-Crypto-Assets
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Hey Isaac
Thanks for this response. What are you working on now?
I decided to give you the bounty. Tbh, none of the replies to this post met the criteria I set for the bounty, so I gave the bounty to you because I learned something and appreciated how honest it was.
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@gunson, thank you, that was very gracious and unexpected. Truth be told, I've been a bit rudderless since we closed up shop.
We had pivoted over to a Web3 wallet but didn't find much success. To better align with my background in B2C and consumer Internet, I've moved my projects over to be almost entirely focused on media now and back to being exclusively focused on Bitcoin. In fact I've been working solo and in isolation for the past year, and my hope is to make an ANN here on stacker.news in the not too distant future to get feedback.
In keeping with your request for an actual article, I can share a white paper I co-wrote with my previous business partner. We managed to get featured on TMI and they hosted us in their solutions catalog. The company has since been dissolved, but I think a lot of the ideas and intent in that doc are still accurate and directionally correct. There was, at the time, an enormous pressure for custody based solutions for corporate treasury due to regulatory concerns, and we were trying to reconcile that with the writing on the wall that self-custody based products was going to be the only end-game worth pursuing. As the common refrain goes - we were too early.
best,
isaac
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