Consola Shutdown: Why Crypto Accounting Startups Fail or Scale

Consola Is Shutting Down. Why One Crypto Accounting Startup Failed While the Industry Is Booming

The story of Consola Finance is quite a ride. It goes from their founding and fundraising all the way to their acquisition and eventual shutdown as a standalone product. This serves as an instructive chapter in the maturation of crypto finance infrastructure. From the perspective of Breezing, it highlights how the market is consolidating around deeply integrated financial tooling. It also shows why high-quality data remains essential for Web3 finance teams.

Founding and Early Funding (2022)

Consola Finance was founded in 2022 by CEO Jacob Kobler in Vienna, Austria. Their goal was simple. They wanted to automate accounting for crypto-native businesses and reduce manual work in bookkeeping. This is an area where many finance teams were still relying on spreadsheets.

In September 2022, Consola raised approximately €1.1 million in a pre-seed funding round. This was led by investors including Speedinvest, Blockchain Founders Fund, and Diamond Hands Ventures. There was also participation from Bitpanda founders and others. This round aimed to accelerate product development and bring the alpha platform to market.

Product Vision: Addressing Crypto Accounting Challenges

Consola built capabilities to automatically handle several key tasks:

Ingest on-chain transaction data
Categorize complex crypto transactions
Generate audit-ready reports
Interface with traditional ERPs and accounting systems

The platform sought to serve Web3 teams across DAOs, NFT platforms, and exchanges by delivering higher accuracy and visibility than manual workflows could offer.

Despite the clear need and early momentum, Consola remained relatively early in its growth cycle. They focused primarily on product development and initial customer adoption.

Shift in Strategy: Acquisition by Request Finance (March 2024)

Rather than continuing as an independent product, Consola’s journey took a pivotal turn in March 2024. That is when it was acquired by Request Finance. Request Finance announced that the acquisition would bolster its financial operations platform by integrating Consola’s crypto accounting technology. This brought accounting into a broader suite of capabilities that already included payments, payroll, and expense management for crypto and fiat.

The acquisition combined Consola’s technology and team with Request Finance’s existing infrastructure. This enabled a unified experience for finance teams managing payments and reporting. While financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, the strategic intent was clear. It was to consolidate tooling to better serve enterprise and mid-market Web3 finance functions.

Following the deal, Consola’s product ceased operating independently. Its technology was integrated into Request Finance offerings. This effectively means Consola is shutting down as a standalone platform.

Numbers & Context Behind the Moves

Here is a quick summary of the key financial and timeline markers in Consola’s journey:

Milestone	Date	Details
Founded	2022	Built to automate crypto accounting workflows.
Pre-Seed Funding	Sep 2022	€1.1M raised from Speedinvest, Blockchain Founders Fund, Diamond Hands Ventures.
Acquisition	Mar 2024	Acquired by Request Finance. Product integrated into a larger platform.

Why Others Succeeded While Consola Shut Down

The contrast becomes stark when you look at what happened elsewhere in the market.

Breezing → Bootstrapped and Profitable

Breezing took a fundamentally different path:

100% bootstrapped
Profitable
Built as a crypto subledger rather than a surface-level tool
Designed to plug directly into accounting systems, auditors, and financial statements

That focus meant slower hype, but it built stronger foundations. In crypto accounting, credibility compounds.

TRES Finance → ~$130M Exit

TRES Finance was acquired for approximately $130 million. As we discussed in our analysis of the TRES exit, that outcome didn’t happen because of prettier dashboards. It happened because TRES built valuable assets:

Accounting-first logic
Deep reconciliation capabilities
Institutional-grade reporting
Credibility with auditors, CFOs, and regulators

TRES positioned itself as financial infrastructure instead of a tooling layer.

HT Digital → ~$200M Sale

The sale of HT Digital for around $200 million further proves the point. We covered the drivers behind this valuation in our HT Digital exit breakdown, but the core lesson is simple. Accounting firms and infrastructure providers serving crypto-native clients can command very high valuations when they demonstrate specific strengths:

Recurring revenue
Sticky enterprise clients
Premium pricing
EBIT margins that can reach 40–50% (especially in audit and compliance-heavy work)

Private equity doesn’t buy “experiments.” They buy cash flow and defensibility.

The Real Reason Consola Failed

Consola didn’t fail because crypto accounting is hard. It failed because crypto accounting is harder than it looks.

Specifically, here is where things fell short:

The product stopped short of true subledger depth.
It underestimated audit and regulatory gravity.
It lacked the distribution and scale needed to survive consolidation.
It was caught between being a tool and being infrastructure.

In a market now dominated by platforms, M&A, and private equity, that middle ground is the most dangerous place to be.

Crypto Accounting Is Not Shrinking. It Is Exploding.

Let’s be clear. Consola shutting down is not bearish for the sector. In fact, all signals point the other way:

Multi-hundred-million-dollar exits
Increased PE interest
Higher willingness to pay from crypto-native firms
Premium pricing for firms that “get it right”

Crypto accounting has moved from experimentation to serious financial infrastructure. The winners are the ones that treat accounting as a system of record rather than a feature.

Final Thought from Breezing

Consola helped validate early demand, but the market moved on. Today, crypto accounting rewards distinct qualities:

Accuracy over speed
Depth over UX gloss
Auditors over hype
Profitability over burn

The industry isn’t just alive. It is consolidating, professionalizing, and scaling fast. Consola shutting down isn’t the end of the story. It is proof that this market now has standards.