Franklin is a crypto payroll firm that provides tools for other firms to facilitate payments to employees and contractors across the globe, including the US. The platform is built on the Ethereum mainnet and Polygon, a scaling solution. The platform infrastructure automates payroll expenses and tax filings for a selection of cryptocurrencies. The project was developed internally at Serotin – a web3 marketing firm – that was in turn founded by Amanda Cassat, a key figure in the Ethereum blockchain. The Franklin platform prides itself as a facilitator of hybrid cash and crypto payrolls to streamline global workforce for firms while maintaining tax compliance and HR(Human Resource) management. The plaform was co-founded by Megan Knab– doubles as CEO, Erick Brown – doubles as COO and Shaan Savarirayan who also doubles as the platform’s COO. The platform has since gone live on the Cryptoworth app marketplace.
Recently, Franklin has announced the closure of a seed fundraising event that yielded $2.9 million. The event was co-led by Gumi Cryptos Capital and CMT Digital. While announcing the development, CEO Megan Knab said that payroll is one of the more complex financial transactions to solve in a ctypto native way.
On the other hand, Serotin’s CEO Amanda Cassat said that she green-lit the project after hearing from several of their partners and clients about the need to build crypto payroll systems.
Serotin also incubates projects and has spun off 3 in-house projects that will soon be rolled out as separate companies. Franklin’s seed round followed the success of Mojito, an NFTs back-end system used by Serotin’s clients that are trying to venture into the web3 economy.
A notable firm among Serotin’s clients is Sotheby, a legacy auction house.
The In-house strategy is efficient for Serotin seeing as it has not incurred any debt or sold equity to outside investors. However, the platform offers ownership stakes to its employees. In an interview, Cassat said that Mojito had $120 million in sales revenue in its first year of operation but has since dropped owing to the ongoing bear market conditions. She however, did not avail statistics for Franklin but confirmed that a third spin-off is in the books and will address issues in the creator economy.
Having secured funds from this round, Franklin aims to expand its operations into retirement accounts and health benefits. According to the press release, Franklin has garnered clients including Soul Wallet, Alto and Echooo.
Serotin is strategically positioned in the crypto food chain. It operates in an environment where it closely works with crypto clients to develop long-term marketing and business strategies. The firm also interacts with many venture capital firms funding many of web3’s major projects and therefore, well-placed to identify requirements and tools that need to be built to support the ecosystem.
By creating crypto solutions to existing systems, crypto aims to revolutionize traditional finance on a smaller scale to a smaller market. Whether crypto firms will scale up their products in this sector depends on the adoption and demand they attract in the market.
