Game Changing DeFi: Earn Yield On Your Own Terms (Spool)

Hey guys and welcome back to Box Mining. So this is a really cool interview that we're going to have next because it's all about decentralized finance and how that's disrupting the traditional finance space. As you guys have been following, DeFi has been blowing up and there's been a lot of misunderstandings, right? Like is this the future of finance or is this just a bunch of traditional finance packaged in a DeFi way? What's really happening and how can you take advantage of this? Today we're talking to Phil Zimra who is a core contributor to Spool. And Spool is really connecting that bridge between complicated decentralized finance and between what people can have access to. We all know that people are taking more attention to and paying more attention to governing and making sure that their finance goes to the right places and this is where Spool really comes in and can make a huge disruption in the space. So Phil, welcome to the channel. Thanks for having me. Really glad to be here. Really excited to talk DeFi today. Awesome. And just to jump into this stuff, like I guess I would do the big picture first. How do you view traditional finance being disrupted by decentralized finance? I think traditional finance right now, it's kind of like, I think, and this fits into the current meta narrative economics in general, right? So to give an example, I think that traditional finance right now is stacked against those that are uninterested in it. And it's sort of like kept boring so that people don't really care about it and don't really know what's happening. And I think a very concrete example we can see in the current world where COVID hits the economy really hard, right? And then you assume that, okay, the economy is getting hit. So finance, the financial markets, they should also tank, right? This happened in early 2020. And then what really happens is that central banks like the Fed and so on, printing a lot of money, and they're kind of propping up the security markets, buying a lot of the securities, putting it on their balance sheet, right? The Fed massively expanded their balance sheet. And obviously, now as a lagging effect, we now are starting to feel that in terms of inflation. And inflation really is kind of a tax on those that are not active in the financial markets, because those people are not earning a proper yield on their capital, because they don't know how to. So it's very hard for them to enter legacy traditional finance. Whereas other people that are in the financial system, they also get hit by the same inflation, but in exchange, their assets appreciate in value. So their net buying power... The rich get richer here, like the bankers, the people who know how to get yield, they know how to get more of that money being printed, you know, like they can catch it with their buckets. But if you have like a, you know, a little pea-sized spoon to catch the money, like being printed out by the Feds, that doesn't work, right? Exactly. Yeah. And I think there's a great example here, which, you know, we had, you know, the financial crisis of before, and we thought, you know, the problems with banking were fixed, right? Because we knew at that time, you know, with everything that was happening, it was like, there were bad habits being formed in banking, but those were not only not stopped, but they're continuing. And I think that's where, for me, I think that's where, what inspires DeFi to go forward, because DeFi has a lot of transparency. You see exactly what is happening. You don't have that kind of, that kind of opaqueness of transactions. You see exactly where the flow of the funds are going to be. And you see exactly how much fees are being charged. You see everything and you see that interaction happening as well. So far for me, that's huge, right? And what is it for you though? Well, for me, it's the fact that we basically live in a world now that kind of forces you to think about like the economy more than we used to, right? And we see that a lot more, like at least in my personal circles around me, a lot more people are getting interested in investing, managing their finances and so on, because there's this kind of sense of having to, or having all of these opportunities to do something with your money. I guess it started with the advent of these new brokers, right? That made buying stocks much more easy, like Robinhood and so on. And there's generally a lot more interest. And like we said before, right? On a systemic level, in a world where inflation becomes more of a topic, you're also kind of, even if you're just a regular person with a regular job, you don't want to lose buying power. And if you want to kind of stack up savings, you're not just, it's not as simple as just dumping it in a high yield savings account anymore, because those yield very little compared to the yields you can get in the rest of the financial market, right? So we've identified that there is a need to disrupt traditional finance, that people are interested in controlling where the money goes and to maximize what they get instead of letting other people maximize them, right? It's becoming a product. So what are you trying to build here? What is Spool trying to do here? So Spool is, I think, better described as infrastructure that empowers people to take control of their money on their own terms. For that to happen, we cannot just build a product with one user segment in mind, right? We need to build something that allows access to DeFi as a whole, impartial, and that can result in solutions for everyone, right? For people from all walks of life, either directly or indirectly. So what Spool essentially does is, it allows everyone to essentially set their own terms for their capital, and then use these terms or have these terms, like everyone has sort of something in mind in terms of their own investor profile, right? Like everyone would have some sort of answer if you ask them, are you more of a risk seeking person or are you risk averse? Are you looking for... 100x? Zero. 2x, you know? Just crank everything to the right, right? Right, right. Crank everything up to max. But how much do you want to risk? Everything? Yeah. So it's basically about finding out what everyone's risk profile is and then kind of guiding them along, right? And I think something that is even quite more interesting is that not only does it allow people to do this, but it allows you to share this too, right? So it allows people to allow people like me to even create a financial product even that someone else can destroy, right? Like it's like it allows people to like, if you don't like creating your own product, you can find someone that you really care about and maybe follow their strategies too, right? That's kind of how different tiers it is, right? Exactly. And there's really good example. That's a really good example that you brought up right now, right? So Spool allows you to essentially create your own sort of vault, right? That is exactly specified to your needs. So you essentially front load all these decisions, you put in your terms, what strategies do I want to be exposed to? What's my risk tolerance? How do I kind of define risk, right? And then it allows you to deploy a vault. And then once you've deposited into the vault, you're in the system, Spool takes care of the rest. So we're going to rebalance, Spool's going to rebalance your portfolio. If like the yields of your chosen strategies change, or if any risk parameters change, it auto compounds your yield for you. So once you're in the system, you can just go on with your life. So now here comes the challenge, like you said. So you might be able to create your own spool easily, because you know what you're doing in DeFi, right? You know what strategies to choose, because you've done due diligence on all of these strategies. But there's going to be end users that don't want to do this due diligence, or they're not able to, or it's simply not worth their time, because they have a couple dollars to invest, or a couple hundred dollars to invest, and they don't want to spend weeks of their life to become DeFi experts. So these people are more likely to trust a product, right? They're more likely to trust a person, or a group, or a friend, right? So I have, I frequently have like acquaintances, friends, family come to me saying, hey, what are you doing with this blockchain stuff? I heard about DeFi, I heard you can earn yield. I'm uncomfortable giving financial advice. I mean, I think this resonates with a lot of people, I think that listen, because when you give financial advice, there's two outcomes. Either you give the advice that makes them money, and then they're the genius investor, or they lose money, and you're the idiot who told them you gave them bad advice, right? So what you can do with the school is, you can essentially just create your own vault, right? And front load all your decision making with your knowledge, and then share that school with other people to deposit money into it, and to deposit capital into it. And essentially, they're going to be exposed to the exact same things as you at the same time as you, because they're sort of like copy farming, in a sense, right? It's like, exactly. Very comparable to copy trading. And this concept is very scalable, right? Because you can build entire products on top of this. And that's essentially what we have in mind, right? It's not just a personal vault creator, or it's not just intended for you and your friends. We have an SDK that, or we're building an SDK that allows users to integrate the spool that they've built, the vault that they've built, into any front end or application or back end they want, right? So they make it part of their product. And then they can make it even more beautiful and more exciting and have an app, a quick button, right? So this is where I think, I think like, this is where the middleware comes in, right? Because, you know, on the website, you know, they're talking about middleware and, you know, why is this in the middle? And then like, I think a lot of people probably wouldn't understand that. But at its core, it's kind of bridging where all that, you know, crazy coding, that's, that's where it's really, I defy is really at, right? You're looking at these smart contracts, these exposed variables, that's too complicated. Then there's some interfaces around that, that may or may not work, but you're kind of in the middle here where you're talking about, look, you can create different financial products for different people. You can then create your own spool if you want to, and people can join that spool. Then you can integrate that into, you know, some more, you know, come mass market kind of products. So, so that's kind of like, that's my understanding of it. I feel like that's kind of cool. It's it, it takes a time, a little bit of time to grasp because I feel like, you know, there's just so much around us and, you know, we see both sides, but the middle side, I do think it's actually quite lacking where, you know, not many people are identifying this area of creating, creating something that can create more, right? I guess that's the best way to describe it. So now that we understand spool, so how, how would you get the audience to do more? Like, you know, what's the next stage for everyone here? What's it called the action? We're going to do our spool academy talks. So those are really good, right? Because we're going to sort of tackle different areas of spool. Like we're going to tackle different use cases. We're going to tackle different user groups. Things like how does the token economy work, right? How do, how does this, how is governance supposed to work? How do risk models work, which we haven't really gone into. So a lot of details that would take hours and hours to cover. If you want to find out more about those, then you need to like tap into those, uh, spool academy, um, uh, appointments, right. Or you can just watch it because we're going to record them and we're going to, going to put them up. It's a, it's a good knowledge base. And when is spool launching? So, so what, what are the key days? When is spool launching? When is a DAO being activated? What's happening next? Yeah. So, uh, like our, uh, pre-DAO so to speak, our founding DAO has been at work for, uh, over a year now, as you well know. Um, but the, the, when it's getting really important or when it's getting really interesting is when we're actually opening the gates to the actual DAO. And that's going to be, uh, our fair launch out, auction on balancer and copper, uh, starting on the 13th of December and going for three days. Uh, you can find more insight, uh, info about that. If you just join and follow all our socials, our Twitter at school, I'll leave a link down below here. Nice. That's a convenient, uh, join the discord. There's a ton of activities going on in the discord. You can claim a faction, all the, the, uh, there's a lot of fun going on activities and, uh, participating in them is going to be worth it in some way. Hint, hint. Right. Uh, you, you guys like everyone in DFID knows how it goes by now. Right. So, uh, participating is worth it and we've already got a really good group. It's growing really fast. Uh, and I'm usually also hanging out in the voice there, uh, during the day, uh, just for quick chats. So everyone can just come in, talk to me. It's like, sort of like unscheduled office hours. If I had to say it in one sentence, just join the community, join us, have fun, talk, take it easy. Don't take it too seriously. And yeah, enjoy, enjoy the ride. Nice. All right. So thank you so much, Phil, for coming on. I definitely enjoyed the stuff that you shared, the knowledge drops that you'll share with our community. And yeah, if you guys want to check more, check out the links down below. Thanks for the attention. All right. Awesome.