Digital assets management made easy in three steps: defining the Skytale roadmap

With the MVP complete, we at Skytale have turned our attention to the next phase of the roadmap, which includes advanced analysis of decentralized finance transactions and QuickBooks integration.

Now that the engineering and product teams have moved heaven and earth to launch the first Skytale MVP (contact us to try it out), we caught up with founders Enrico Mariotti and Massimiliano Gerardi to find out their plans for Q4 and beyond.

Skytale’s current functionality allows users to aggregate, tag, search and filter their transactions across multiple networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain and Fantom. Additionally, details about any subset of transactions can be exported to a .csv file, to assist with the preparation of crypto tax reporting.

“The three main areas we will focus on for the next phase are integrations with bookkeeping software, tokenomics and — most exciting of all — our classification engine,” says Enrico. “And of course, we will continue to test and validate with our first customers which features they find most useful. For example, we need to understand if the integrations with exchanges are important to them, or whether analysing crypto wallets is sufficient.”

While integrating with exchanges such as Kraken or Bitfinex may be useful for some individuals, we have started to figure out that information from these transactions may be less useful for users than the more detailed data we can derive from transactions on decentralized exchanges (DEXes).

“We have to balance the benefit we get from analysing these transactions with the limited data some exchanges provide,” explains Massi. The use of internal wallets, the decision of some exchanges to provide historical data that does not cover all periods, and also the fact that extra time is consumed when exchanges change their APIs can all be problematic.

“Unless you do a real trade between coins [rather than an internal exchange transaction],” you may not be able to see the whole story,” adds Massi.

Integrate with accounting software

Whether the incoming data comes from centralized or decentralized exchanges, ultimately it has to be exported somewhere for users to fulfil their crypto tax reporting requirements.

“We need to integrate with accounting packages because it’s the way to go that closes our circle,” says Enrico. “We offer the chance to consolidate multiple sources in a single view. We allow you to tag your transactions. And so the goal here is to simplify crypto tax reporting. Initially, we will start with QuickBooks, but we see integrating with bookkeeping solutions as an important part of our offering.”

Develop classification engine for cryptocurrency transactions

“The most important thing we are building is the classification engine,” says Enrico. “This is the most important thing on our Q4 roadmap. There is a huge opportunity there because nobody else is doing this.

“One of the main advantages of using our classification engine will be the ability to spot scams, as well as classifying transactions on a variety of different chains, so it is possible to see trends and use this information to get ahead of the game. To give a concrete example, we could provide a subgraph of malicious contracts — like the VERA tokens that were used to drain the wallets of unsuspecting investors — so that users could be warned ahead of time.”

As more and more people start transacting on decentralized finance networks — not just Ethereum but Polygon, Binance Smart Chain or Avalanche, the number of malicious contracts and outright scams increases along with the number of legitimate transactions. In fact, the lower fees on some of the newer networks compared with Ethereum makes it much cheaper for bad actors to airdrop scam tokens. This increased volume means it becomes impossible to gain an overview of what is happening on all these different blockchains without using some kind of AI — and that is where our classification engine comes in.

“At the moment, we are looking closely at the best way to monetize this data,” says Enrico. “We would definitely like to open-source it rather than keeping it locked up as proprietary data. We are looking at this as an oracle, and would probably look to provide it as some kind of oracle service”

Begin the tokenization process

Along with developing the classification engine and the integrations with accounting software, our primary focus over the next few months will be refining and finalizing our token model, with a view to releasing our own token via a bonding curve contract on a decentralized exchange, so we are working on the tokenomics right now.

In order for holders of our tokens to be able to access our premium features, we will of course focus on integrating MetaMask and other Web3 wallets so that our platform can recognize whether a user is premium or not.

In addition to figuring out how and when to launch our token, we will also need to decide which areas of the platform will be free to access, and which will be available only to premium users.

We firmly believe that the functionality we offer, particularly the insights offered by the classification engine, are premium features that are worth paying for, not only for the analysis of users’ own transactions but also for identifying and analysing transactions within the wider decentralized finance ecosystem, across multiple networks.

Along with this three-part focus on the classification engine, accounting integrations and tokenomics, we will also be working on a White Paper for the technology underlying the classification engine, and increasing our team by hiring more key players in the areas of engineering and community management.

Skytale empowers organisations to access decentralized protocols in a conscious way. Sign up for our private beta here.