One of the most significant roadblocks for companies that contract talent abroad is the lack of compliant HR and payroll solutions. Further complications arise for the growing number of organizations that hold mixed treasuries in fiat and crypto, or, in the case of DAOs, that compensate contributors from their multi-sig wallets. 

The demand for solutions streamlining both the compliance and payroll layer has kept pace with the rapid expansion of the DeFi ecosystem. 

The Opportunity: Efficient and Scalable Payroll and Compliance for Global Contractors

Pool Maintenance Labs is a startup that is focused on high-level technical IT contracting. While PML is a small company, they contract with variable numbers of international freelancers throughout the year.

Due to the nature of the IT services that PML provides to clients, their contracts with freelancers range from both long-term to to short term work agreements. Pool Maintenance Lab’s Finance Manager stated that for the company to contract with global talent in this capacity, “an area of principal importance is the ability to streamline both compliant onboarding and payroll.”

The challenge PML met was in finding a payroll and compliance solution that was sufficiently adaptable while providing a high-level of customization; they needed a service that enabled expedited and efficient custom statements of work. With the capacity at which they were contracting, this was an imperative that had to be resolved in order to effectively scale their operations. 

Furthermore, in several contracts of Pool Maintenance Labs, remuneration to contributors were required to be made in crypto. In order to compliantly streamline these payouts to global contractors, identifying a solution that could provide automated compliance and payroll was crucial for growth. 

The Solution: Compliance and Payroll in one Flexible, Crypto-Friendly Platform 

The launch of Pool Maintenance Labs in 2022 coincided with that of Rise’s crypto-friendly compliance and payroll solution. Rise enables streamlined compliance from onboarding to payroll for companies hiring both local and global talent. 

Compliance At Scale 

Rise’s compliance solutions were an important answer to Pool Maintenance Labs’ challenge of paying international contractors compliantly, in the desired currency, at scale: 

PML Finance Manager highlighted this feature’s critical role, stating: 

“We avoided having to open up bank accounts in random countries just to be able to work with contractors that happened to be based there.” 

Flexible Contracting 

Rise provided Pool Maintenance Labs with a solution to the issue of efficiently, compliantly and quickly drafting contracts for a diverse range of work agreements. While some contracts were for long-term hires, others needed to be drafted with urgency for immediate project-based assignments. 

This challenge was resolved with Rise’s infrastructure for automating compliance checks for contractors and rapidly drafting localized and compliant professional service agreements. 

In addition to the ease that Rise’s globally compliant onboarding provided, Pool Maintenance Labs was also seeking a platform that allowed for customization and flexibility. A feature of Rise that spoke directly to this need was the ability to customize onboarding and statements of work:

“One of the things that we appreciate at Rise Works is the flexibility to onboard and work with different types of contractors in a very flexible manner, both for them and for us.”

Crypto Payroll Options

Pool Maintenance Labs required the ability to pay contractors in a diversity of currencies. At present, PML is working with a grant received from the token holders at Lido DAO to provide IT services and development. 

Lido is a liquid staking protocol that allows its users to stake Ethereum without having to run their own validator. In exchange for staked ETH, users receive liquid stTokens, a tokenized version of their staked funds. These can be used on other DeFi protocols as collateral for yield farming and lending. 

Lido is a leader in the liquid staking derivatives market. Since its 2020 launch date, it has remained a blue-chip protocol boasting over $1.1 Billion rewards paid and an impressive TVL exceeding $20B. 

Lido effectively manages contributor compensation in Lido DAO's native token by utilizing Rise's capabilities to issue payments in both crypto and fiat currencies.

Outcome: Growth and Scaling with Increased Flexibility 

Pool Maintenance Labs has used Rise for their onboarding and payroll since their inception. As a result, they have been able to propel growth and avoid the inconveniences of going through traditional financial intermediaries. 

Due to their wide net of global contractors, with Rise, PML was able to streamline the processes of onboarding, managing and paying local and international contractors while ensuring total compliance:

“Being able to sign statements of work quickly and execute invoice payments in a compliant way is a huge facilitator for us being able to do our business.”

Rise is committed to providing the flexibility and optimization to enable traditional and crypto-native organizations alike to scale their global teams seamlessly and compliantly.