There’s a change coming to DeFi.
It’s a shift from “move fast & break things” to something more considered.
More risk-managed.
More… useful long-term.
I’ve never been a fan of rushing anything blockchain-related. Sure, it’s nice (if you are a founder) to get a big wad of cash out of the gate, but have you seen how many projects get hacked & their funds drained?
When it comes to TradFi investing, boring is good.
Slow and steady is good.
To move into DeFi, TradFi need to see “measure twice, cut once”, but with code.
That’s one of the reasons I work with Spool DAO, and have done so for the last year and a half.
They weren’t looking for the easy win or the quick buck at the expense of the retail investor.
Rather, they wanted to build something that would redefine DeFi and how everyone, from institutions to the average investor, interacts with it.
That meant flexibility, risk mitigation, and ease of use.
Yesterday, on 21/11/23, we released Spool V2.
Any tech launch is a mixture of stress and excitement, and god knows I’ve been through enough of them inside & out of web3, but this one seemed calmer and more confident than most.
Mostly, it didn’t feel rushed, like we were pushing a product out into the world knowing it was halfway there, and trying to make money before it fell over.
Instead, it feels ready. Not just to be used today, but in a year, 5 years, even in a decade or more.
It has that feeling of longevity to it, where we know it works, we know it is needed, and we know institutions will come to it.
I’ve been lucky to sit behind the curtain on this one, to see the months of work that went into the UX and dev, listen to the discussions about the many new functions and why they are needed, and even look at the code and see how it’s been built.
Sometimes in a project, that’s a curse. In this case, it was a blessing.
It’s been a masterclass in how people who understand the needs of an audience, combined with experts in design & building can come together to create a really useful product.
I’m not going to talk about the functions, the gating, the risk management, or the flexibility for regulatory compliance, we’ve done enough of that through the official Spool Medium.
What I will say though, is Spool V2 has a weight to it, an importance, and a relevance that not many projects do.
After a dozen or so years involved in blockchain, and almost 5 years working in the the ecosystem, this feels like it matters.
It’s not fun in the way NFTs were, or exciting the way day-trading was when Eth then hundreds of altcoins first launched. That feeling of “will I be rich or buying instant noodles for a month” every time we checked the charts was certainly something!
But, the foundations of a building aren’t exciting. They are critical though.
To me, Spool V2 is the foundation of the next stage of investing, not only in DeFi but wider as we move to real-world assets being tracked and traded on-chain.
It’s the foundation that lets TradFi companies build products in DeFi and confidently bring their investors into an ecosystem they’ve previously only heard about from news reports about risks.
When people talk about mainstream DeFi adoption, infrastructure built the way Spool V2 has been, is the missing piece of the puzzle.
And, call me a geek, but that does excite me!
If you’d like to find out more, check out the new website Spool.fi.
