PoolTogether Community Podcast #49 with Roman and Mordi from Savvy

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast, and I'm your host, Hot Mike, aka Tim, aka how many cups of coffee did I drink? Well, it's none of your business. And I'm here with Savvy DeFi, and we've got a couple guests, a couple special, special ones from Savvy. I'm pulling up the— we got Roman Giller, right? We got Morty Klein. That's who we got, right?

Correct. Roman Giller, though.

Giller, even better. Yes, yes. Roman Giller. And it's not Roman.

We're so excited to be here, man.

Yeah, so awesome. And I think we connected because of, you know, pulled together community member Richard. I think that was the way that we get connected. But we're talking today about Savvy DeFi. And if you go to Savvy's website, you'll see it's the non-liquidating crypto lending platform. I mean, that just sounds so good. That sounds so, so warm and fuzzy to me. I like non-liquidating. Liquidating I do not like. Non-liquidating I do like. So we're going to talk about Savvy today. But first, I always want to hear, how did you get into this? crazy world we call crypto. We'll start. Who do we want to start? Morty, you want to start?

Sure, I'll give that a shot. So probably around 7 years ago, I was at a WeWork, and one of my friends there was like, hey, we're doing this Bitcoin thing. We're going to talk about Bitcoin. And I'm like, oh, I've always been on the internet for well, since growing up. And I remember coming across it earlier and I'm like, this is something that has always interested me. Let me go in. And I found a vibrant community in Miami of people just trying to promote Bitcoin and seeing it as the future. And that got me extremely interested. I started working on a project around that time, and then I focused on back to my marketing career and started working with finance and healthcare products. I even once represented the Jamaican race car team. And then around 3 years ago, somehow I fell right back into it. I think I installed Clubhouse and there was just some really interesting things going on. And I realized, hey, adoption got a lot further. So I started joining some different projects. Joining their DAOs, digging in deeper, and spending my time educating people on crypto because I felt that was the best way for me to learn and make an impact. And that's actually how I met Roman. And I guess the rest now is history.

Wait, so you met Roman at the WeWork, or—

I met Roman on Clubhouse.

Oh, on Clubhouse. Yes. Before Twitter Spaces, we had Clubhouse. That's right.

Exactly. And there was a vibrant Web3 community there that was just really interested in learning and teaching. And Roman and I connected there, and I was working with some other projects, and then someone introduced us, told Told me what he was building. And I'm like, this is really interesting. Let's get to work. So we have now a team at Savvy of around 11 people working really hard to make sure that Savvy is a reality, 'cause we think this is something really important, creating just safer ways to lend. Our community manager, Camilla, who actually has a degree in history, did a whole piece About how throughout history, if you follow the lending patterns, you see the busts and booms. When lending is working correctly, society thrives. When lending breaks down, we go into recessions, we go into really bad periods of time in history. So we think this is really important, as well as the education that we like to provide through Savvy for the future of Web3.

Yeah, I've been on a personal discovery about debt and lending just because growing up I really— I thought it was the devil, right? If you follow like Dave Ramsey, it's just like, do not go into debt. Do not— just don't touch it. It's the plague. And especially with DeFi, I'm more and more learning and seeing and being like, oh, that's really interesting. Oh, I see that. Okay. Like, it just— it's so— I've really been obsessing over it lately of just trying to get my head around proper lending. And I love what you just said as far as like the health of the market. Really, if you want a healthy economy, you need to have healthy lending. But Morty, I want to know what your first business was at 7 years old. By the way, the Savvy team page is awesome. I love like the little facts about people on here. I love that you have anons and non-annons on here. But Morty, you started your first business at 7. Now it's, it's gotta be a lemonade stand, right? Or like some sort of newspaper delivery service.

Actually really close. I first, I first started with trading my soda for cards and then I realized, wow, this is really picking up. Why don't I just buy a bunch of sodas, put it in my locker and start selling sodas at 75 cents apiece? And yeah, that was my, my first business. Selling soda. I actually had a fun growth marketing thing there. We had a teacher who, if you would ever take out a snack, he goes, do you have enough for everyone? So I ran a sale for $0.50, and I got everybody to purchase a soda except for one kid. He brought one from home. And I pulled out the soda. The teacher goes, you can't drink that. Do you have enough for everyone? I go, I do. And then there was a mad dash to my locker. And everybody got a soda. The teacher was not happy, but, uh, that, that was a, a fun story that I remember from middle school.

I mean, drinking soda in class, I mean, that's gotta lead to mayhem, but that's, that's a great story. But I do like Roman's, uh, suggestion that you trade— that you were options trader at 7. I mean, that's kind of options. Well, what about you, Roman? I would love to hear your, your, your Journey into crypto.

Oh man, yeah. My journey was not typical, actually. So I learned about Bitcoin really early from my friends in 2011, but I dismissed it because I wasn't really very mature at that time, and I just didn't really think about things like finances or money or what money means. And I just kind of dismissed it as magic internet money. You know, pasha. I was like, whatever. And then by 2013, like late 2013, I realized I was very wrong. And I started reading the Bitcoin white paper and I read it over and over and over again. I'm just like, oh my God, this is like, actually there's something here. There's, this is more than just, you know, magic internet money or online digital currency. There's like a whole movement here. There's, you know, sovereignty, sound money systems, et cetera. So it basically like opened this extreme intense curiosity. And I decided to make my first like small purchase. And I went to this small exchange. You might've heard of it. It's called Mt. Gox. And I made a deposit and I've been a hodler ever since. So, you know, they're really good for as far as savings plans go, because they've been holding my Bitcoin for me for a long time now. So kudos to them. But I didn't, you know, at that point I didn't have a lot of money anyway, and it wasn't much money. So. I could have either dismissed it all as like a scam or just some nonsense. Cause you know, that's what people were saying at the time. It's like, oh my God, this is, this is it. Crypto's over. And there was no like other cryptos then really. It was just like a few, if that. And I think Bitcoin was just basically the only one really. Um, and then Litecoin and, and I was just like, well, you know, I could stick around and kind of learn. So I got on Reddit and I started kind of like, you know, talking to people, going to Bitcoin meetups. Um, just participating in, in the ecosystem. Uh, and then I decided I really didn't understand macroeconomics enough. So like, I find myself spending all my time talking about crypto, talking about Bitcoin, thinking about Bitcoin, annoying the hell out of all of my friends and family, my wife, you know, everyone basically. And they're just like, dude, please shut up. Like, stop talking about crypto. Like, we want to talk about something else, you know, Super Bowl, World Series, anything else, please. So I started finding people that were like me that wanted to talk about this stuff and had ideas. And then I quickly realized, I don't know what I'm talking about. I have no clue. Like, I think I do. Maybe I read some stuff, but I'm parroting other people's, uh, like, you know, thoughts. So I don't have a single thought of my own. And I find myself inadequately prepared to have serious conversations with people about crypto and not even just the fun stuff, just like regular stuff. So I really thought like, you know what? I want to change this. So Bitcoin actually got me into regular finance so I can figure out what was wrong with it because everyone was saying something wrong. I didn't see it. I wanted to experience it. So because of Bitcoin, I actually pushed myself to leave my career path. At the time, I was doing really well with AT&T and their business sales department, and I just dropped what I was doing, dropped my whole career, and pushed myself and willed myself into finance and ended up working for JP Morgan and their private wealth team. So thanks to Bitcoin, I became a banker to find out what is wrong with banking. So that was kind of like what my journey really started as after. And by 2018, 2019, I had developed enough friends and relationships around the space to really branch out. I kind of found in a true Web3 fashion, right? Because I live for this space. I love this place. I found people online through Meetup that were hosting just kind of groups and chats. And, um, we were all anon to each other, but we were on camera, so that was kind of odd. We were talking about payment systems because this was a stellar space for the Stellar blockchain, and we realized that we had a lot of the same kind of similarities, ideas, and common understandings. And we all came from different spaces. I was already by then in, you know, high finance, um, and one of the other people was a developer. A third one was like a project manager, and Other people were just adjacent to the space. And we kind of decided to— the 3 of us, uh, after that call, uh, along with some other collaborators that kind of like gave us, you know, ideas and thoughts, we built this little prototype and slapped it together in like the span of 48 hours. That was very simple. It was just designed to help people here in New York, because this is where I'm based, accept Bitcoin or Ethereum and have it settle in, uh, USDC on the Stellar blockchain. Uh, while, you know, using their native wallets. So we kind of slapped this, uh, idea together, this Frankenstein payment system, uh, submitted it to the New York Blockchain, uh, Hackathon, won second place. And then Stellar approached us and they're like, hey, do you want to create a proof of concept and submit it to the community grant? There's like a fund, you know, et cetera. So we were excited and we're like, hey, let's, you know, do this. But first we had to ask permission. Like I had to go to my bank and say, hey, can, can I build this like for fun? There's no money here really, just kind of like playing something out. And because I was licensed and regulated by FINRA, I had to go through all these things. They gave me the opportunity. So JP Morgan was kind enough to let me kind of in my spare time, as long as it doesn't affect my job, go and play around with this. And we submitted to the Stellar Community Grant number 5 in 2020. And we won. So that actually kind of validated what we were building. And we quickly got a few people on board to try it out, showed proof of, I guess, scale with the tech. And another startup came and approached us about acquiring the technology itself and the team for consultation. At that point, I realized that maybe I have the ability to be here full time and not just be a participant as like an investor or trader, but kind of build stuff because it awoke like an intense burning desire for me to continue building stuff and kind of like help people because I got to see a merchant get paid, uh, and onboard into crypto at the same time. And it didn't cost them anything. And it was great because they were just like, yeah, sign me up, you know? So it was kind of cool. And then I just really lit a fuel, uh, and fire in me and I decided to leave JPM and started thinking about how I can, uh, bring cool lending options to the space because I'm also Pretty heavy DeFi user. So that is, uh, my story. And so when you—

when you didn't— when you interviewed at JP Morgan, you weren't like, I'm here to find out what's wrong with you. You didn't say that. I mean, that would have been awesome.

No, no, no. What I said was like, I don't know enough about economics and macro, but this is like an intense curiosity of mine. And I find myself spending my whole day just reading, learning, and thinking about it and talking about it. So please hire me, give me a chance, give me 90 days to pass all the licenses. If I fail, you can fire me right there on the spot. Um, I came with good sales pedigree, but I never did banking. So I basically kind of bullied my way through the interview because I told them like, if you don't hire me, I'm just going to go to Citibank and I'm going to go to Bank of America and then I'm going to go to Wells Fargo and I'm going to go to Republic and, you know, RBC, whatever. I'm just going to keep going to all of them until someone hires me. So, you know, if you want to look good, you should hire me. And

then what did you find out that was wrong with the banking system?

I mean, the biggest problem with the banking system that we have today, in my opinion, is that it's obfuscated, right? We don't really see how the money moves around on a granular level, which allows people to create a lot of shady kind of financial products or just do a lot of shady things. So it's not so much that banking is broken, it's that we don't see all the things that are happening. If, if, um, there was more clarity and insight, I think it would be a lot better, uh, in terms of being able to service more people. I don't think banking necessarily inherently is bad. I just think that, you know, through the mechanisms that banking serves, they end up wielding outsized power without much, uh, regulatory clarity. And even the regulatory clarity that exists is self-regulating. So, uh, in a way, you know, it's, it's kind of like a cartel. So that's kind of what I— the real conclusion I came to. And I wanted to take some of the things that do work in their systems and, you know, see if we can recreate it here for everyone to, like, lower the barrier to access.

Yeah. So, so how does Savvy fix this? How does Savvy kind of attack those things that you saw that you didn't like, the cartel, if you will?

Well, how does Savvy solve that? Uh, one of the things that we're doing here is We have in DeFi amazing risk management tools and capital efficiency tools. What we don't have is a lot of the education that comes with it. Um, so with the products that we have today, you're able to very effectively use your capital just like you would if you were financially literate in the TradFi world or just really rich. Uh, so those tools already exist. The problem is that this space does not know how to risk manage the capital that they have. and inherently put themselves out on a ledge, um, and get liquidated. And that creates a lot of churn and burn for, for our industry here. So what we want to do with Savvy is we want to help, uh, alleviate some of the, the churn and burn by creating safer lending opportunities while simultaneously bringing more liquidity to the space. Uh, so we do that through a non-liquidating self-repaying line of credit.

Yeah. So when I first saw this, when I first looked at Savvy and saw them meet the non-liquidating crypto lending platform, I was— I'm in the peer-to-peer lending mindset right now. I'm thinking about, you know, what does that look like? I did my first loan on Pawn. Somebody had some Pool and they took out a loan. They needed some USDC. So I funded that loan. But this is different. This is like you're actually You're depositing, you're basically putting the asset into Savvy, whether that's ETH, Bitcoin, stablecoins, and then you're borrowing, then you're borrowing against it and your loan repays itself based on the yield that Savvy is able to get for those tokens. How'd I do? How'd I do?

You did really, really well, man. I think we have a job opening if you're available.

Well, I appreciate that, but credit to your website. Your website lays it out for me.

Uh, yeah, no, we, we do have— like, I'm really, really, uh, excited about the, the people that are building out our, our, um, not only our front end for the actual dApp and the actual website itself, because we took a lot of time into making sure that our SEO was correct so that people can find us, make sure that it's legible and people can understand it. But, uh, what we do and what makes us a little bit different from the P2P lending market is that you're actually borrowing from yourself when you go through. We do not expose you to counterparty risk in typical like P2P markets, like an Aave or Geist or Venus. If you're on Binance or you know anywhere, you you have this system where you're depositing maybe hybrid versions of collateral that could be like your ETH, your BTC, you know a governance token from a project or a combination of all of the above, right? But your debt is always denominated. in a single stable currency, usually dollars. So you're coming in with these assets that are hot and fluctuate quite heavily, as we can see in the market today, and you're getting out a loan that's typically pretty stable. So the problem there is if your crypto goes up, great, but if it doesn't, you have to bring more collateral. Otherwise, someone who put up that USDC or DAI or FRAX or whatever stablecoin you borrowed, otherwise they would be of money. So, so in that system, there has to be liquidation in order to keep the protocol secure, in order to make the, uh, original lender safe. That has to exist, right? But if people don't know how to properly use that tool, right— and Aave is a great tool, I've used it many, many times for many things, and it's awesome— but if you don't know how to use it properly and you, you don't know the volatility that you're exposing yourself to, you can just end up losing it in the first place. and end up with no crypto whatsoever. And whatever you bought is worthless too. So it's kind of like, you know, you want to make sure that you keep the really valuable things with you and try to extend it as much as you can without getting wrecked. Um, so, so with us, we, we don't have that problem because what you're doing is you're taking a strategy position with whatever yield options exist today, right? So DeFi is very composable. It's like money Legos. We build on top of each other and with each other as projects and products. So you would go through like an option, for instance, let's say Money Pool was an option for a user to deposit into, right? And it's earning yield on the back. We would be working with you guys, for instance, as like you're one of the options to find a way to auto compound the yield for them, right? So that the user doesn't have to be exposed to any kind of tokens they don't want to be. They just get the same crypto they came in with, SAVI. And deposit it through Savvy into Money Pool. So while we're doing that, what we do is we allow that user to mint a synthetic credit line in a soft peg derivative. So it's a mirrored asset. We don't have a hybrid collateral singular debt model. We have a hybrid collateral hybrid debt model. So when you come in with ETH, AVAX, BTC, or stables, you're getting Savvy USD. BTC, ETH, or AVAX to make it easier. So it's kind of like, in a way, you're basically borrowing from your future yield. And if you don't want to do anything, your yield is going to pay itself off eventually, and you'll just have your original deposit plus that line of credit you borrowed. But now, you know, you have it back essentially, or you can come back and pay it back yourself. And to make sure that we always maintain that promise of having that 1-to-1, uh, you know, ratio and peg, you, uh, user can repay their, their debt balance with either or at any time regardless of its market price. So that's kind of one of the things that we wanted to ensure happens so that we don't have forced liquidations. At worst, uh, what happens is you have a non-liquidating, uh, loan that does not repay itself because there's no yield out there for some reason. And even that, we're kind of working to ensure that doesn't happen, obviously, because, you know, as DeFi grows, there'll be more options for yield on, you know, different projects with different levels of risk. But also, this is still very early in the space. So we're building on top of the belief that the space will grow regardless.

So I've linked the whitepaper in the chat to the Savvy whitepaper, but it sounds like there's a couple different variables here, right? So there's the amount that you deposit initially. There's the amount that you take a loan from, or yeah, the amount that you loan yourself basically. And then there's that, and that time varies. And then the yield that repays that rate varies, right? So is there any, you know, how do you kind of plan or know what you're getting into? Are there ways to like sliders or something that you can say, I want to keep it for this long? And so that means I can only take out this amount or any— how does this work as a user experiences it?

I'm glad you asked. We spent a long, a long time, uh, working on creating the user experience. So there are sliders, um, there are no like predetermined, uh, terms like 12 months or, uh, whatever. As, as the yield comes in, obviously we're gonna do, uh, our best to ensure that we can find the best yields for, for users, but ultimately the choice they make is on them. We're non-custodial. As obviously The real, the real strategy that people should think about is not necessarily how much yield is coming in on your original deposit, but what does having 50% of your capital on top of your original deposit do for you? So how much more capital efficient do you become, um, by taking out that, that leverage, right? So like what we really do is we allow you to, uh, generate more yield by roughly in, in essence, 40% on whatever strategy you end up doing or combination of strategies, because half of your yield is working upfront for you today. The other 100% of your yield is working to pay down that, that working capital. So you become extremely, extremely efficient as a, as a trader, as a user, as a DeFi, uh, participant, uh, by, you know, mitigating risk and also you're able to create different opportunities for yourself, from lending to borrowing to trading options, buying self-repaying NFTs, for instance. Right. That's how I would use it for myself personally. I like JPEGs. So if I want to go speculate on some NFTs, I don't necessarily want to sell my ETH or my AVAX. I might want to sell my Solana because I'm not sure what's going on there. But in general, I'd rather borrow against this so I can go into NFTs because it's still pretty speculative and Uh, you could end up parking your crypto into a JPEG for a really long time. So for me, it would be less risk to kind of safely borrow against my, uh, my Ether, my AVAX, and then go NFT shopping, if that makes sense. So there's like no limit to what strategy you can do. We just make you very, very safe and efficient in doing it.

I mean, you technically could redeposit it into Savvy.

A lot of people— so there's like different strategies. Some people would use like the flipping degen box option to kind of go very long on the asset. Uh, other people might, you know, do like a delta-neutral kind of position where they sit in cash or do something else. Or, um, yeah, there's like really no limit. Like, we don't limit the strategies. We just make sure you don't get your original crypto taken away from you.

And then as far as like swapping, right, you're gonna— you're going to receive this like, you know, savvy version of Bitcoin or ETH. So it's 1-to-1, right, when you, when you get those tokens back. And you're swapping out on Savvy itself, or I could also swap out on exchanges?

So there's 2 ways to kind of move between the base collateral, let's say, like, you know, what you deposited, your BTC, ETH, AVAX, or stables, and the SEVI assets denominated in SV, and then, you know, BTC, AVAX, and ETH and USD. So there's 2 ways, right? The first way And for most liquidity, probably the least amount of— well, not the least amount of slippage, but, uh, with low slip— with very low slippage and very high liquidity, you would go through a secondary market like an AMM. So a Trader Joe or a Platypus or KyberSwap or something like that. Um, and then, uh, you would basically, you know, end up in the same kind of asset. So if you brought in ETH and you have Savvy ETH, you would go to like, you know, Curve, for example. And then you would swap out from Savvy ETH to ETH or go into something else if you wanted to. The second way that you can swap the 2 assets is you can go through the Savvy Swap, which is not on the secondary market. It's through the Savvy protocol. There, there are some limiters because that is basically one of the peg defenders, and it's a promise that you'll be able to swap 1-to-1 between the 2 assets. So if there's, like, for instance, a depeg between Savvy ETH and ETH price, someone out there can arbitrage Savvy ETH token by depositing it into the SavvySwap protocol and then extracting ETH from Savvy. Um, there, like I said, there are some limiters and limitations to ensure that someone can't try to, you know, destabilize price and bank run, um, on the protocol or the users. But generally, it's going to be kind of like— think of it as like a, like a timer, uh, that every hour you'll be able to extract more of the original asset. And by doing so, you would be burning the SAVI ETH derivative. So it would help rebalance the, the secondary markets because, you know, the arbitrageur or the borrower, if they see a chance to repay their loan at a discount, would essentially buy up the SAVI synthetic asset and rebalance the pools for everyone at the same time. And that is, that is the second way to swap the 2 assets. But it's not like a yield strategy. It's really— Just a way to defend the peg and to help ensure the safety and health of the protocol. Most people will be swapping on just regular exchanges because they don't want to wait, you know, days or hours to get their swap. They just want to swap.

And there's also staking. So could you explain staking?

Absolutely. So for staking, we have a very interesting tokenomics model. For the utility and governance token, the SAVI token, you have to have a little bit of it in your address in order to use the contract. So the contracts won't work unless you have some of the SAVI utility token to begin with in your wallet. And as a borrower, we actually incentivize the behavior by using the vote escrow model from Platypus and Joe. If you're— if there are any developers in the room, it's the MasterChef V2 contract that was modified. So we create this very interesting model where a borrower is getting their yield from whatever yield strategy they chose, obviously, and they're going to have staked SAVI if they obviously, if they, you know, have any that they want to stake, that's going to earn more SAVI for them if they claim or when they claim. And the process there is actually really cool. The counter does 2 things. One, it looks at how long you staked the SAVI governance token. So it's kind of like a running stopwatch. And then it looks at your debt balance across the platform, and based on your percentage of ownership of the debt as a user and the amount of time you've staked SAVI, you would get boosted SAVI rewards. And also by staking the token in the platform, you're getting the revenue generation that would be happening through the platform itself. So it's not backing any of the collateral. We're not using it as a way to kind of create some sort of, uh, additional hybrid collateral model. Like, it's not going to do that. So we don't want to put people's funds at risk with, with a, you know, utility or governance token that is separate from the assets. But it is really vitally important for, you know, participation in the platform overall and gaining, you know, the most out of not only your line of credit but just the protocol itself. So it's really like a way to incentivize the users, uh, of the protocol, not just market makers.

One of the values here at PoolTogether is no loss. So the idea is to save, the idea is to win. Yeah, go for it.

No, I'm just saying I love PoolTogether. Hey, you guys are like, we're from New York, which is cool. So I got to read about you like a while back and I was like, oh, dope. Uh, and like no-loss lottos are really amazing, um, as a concept, and premium bonds are pretty dope.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I— this— it was the killer app for me when I was learning about DeFi and crypto in general. I knew Leighton before PoolTogether, before he started it, and in knowing him getting into this crypto thing, I'm like, oh, let me go check out Leighton's thing. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. So yeah, it's— and also Brooklyn represent. And we're doing a climbing night tomorrow at Vital Brooklyn if you want to join. If you want to try rock climbing, bouldering, I'll hand you— I'll give you a PoolTogether towel. That's a little side invite. But what I was going to say is an idea for PoolTogether was what if there was a way to buy, like, simulate scratch-off tickets, right? But no-loss scratchies. So could you, like, put in money, say, like, $50? You want $50. And you want to like, and you can dial in your time and your prizes, like, or like how much you want to win, right? And those sliders would be variables. But it's like, listen, I got to lock my $50 up for 5 years, but I could win $1,000. You know what I'm saying? Like, what is those? What are those? And then you scratch it off and then you don't win and then your money's locked up. So anyways, I'm seeing this like Pool Together Savvy collab Going of like how can we encourage people to save no loss, but then have those chances at outsized prizes because of the premium bond model. So anyway, but Savvy is is giving me those vibes of the sliders and the time and the so we got to keep talking about potential partnerships. But I see Savvy's coming soon on the site. I'm trying to use it right now. I gave you my email address. I'm waiting to come. I'm waiting for Savvy to launch. So when? When savvy?

So I'm going to let Mr. Anderson answer that part of the question, but I will say that we have a usable testnet coming very soon. The contracts have been on testnet for some time now. We're in audits and there will be a usable testnet that people will get to kind of play with. I encourage for those that are interested and kind of want to participate in the testnet, Do reach out to us and hit us up after this group chat and maybe come into our Discord because that's where we show people things first. But for when launch, I'm going to let him take a crack at that one.

So we're very careful not to give out dates until we're 100% sure that date is going to work. But right now we're waiting on our audit. After we have the audit, we can understand, okay, we're ready to launch. But first we're going to go through our fair launch process. In this as well, as you can see, the Savvy team has a very strong ethos of decentralization, and we wanted to— instead of going through the VC route, we created a fair launch that ByteMason actually championed, which is a 2-step fair launch. First is a liquidity generation event, and then after that we're going to do a liquidity bootstrapping pool. After that, we're going to launch to people who are holding SAVI and our red-listed community. So red list is like a whitelist, but since we're on AVAX, it's red. So we picked a lot of communities, uh, in the AVAX ecosystem that is pushing forward proper Web3 values, building amazing communities, and just pushing forward this space. We also have lots of ways for you to join the red list. So if you're not on AVAX, there's other ways of participating. But also, NFTs on AVAX are pretty inexpensive, so it should be very easy for everyone to qualify for this red list. Um, also on the red list is they do get a bonus on our fair launch when they participate on the LGE.

Wait, wait, wait. So the— so I guess this red list is an NFT is what you're saying? That's why, because you said NFTs are pretty expensive. So if on the secondary you could pick up a red list NFT is a way— is that what you're hinting at? Was that— was I picking up what you were putting down?

Correct. So If you, if you own one of these NFTs, it's actually in our platform. You can just prove that you own it and you would be able to use the platform and also get a bonus on our LGE. We do have in our smart contract a lot of ways of using NFTs. Some of those you'll see later on in our roadmap, but to start, To get that bonus on the LGE, you do need a redlisted NFT. And to use our platform, you need to hold SAVI at the beginning.

Wait, wait, wait. So are you saying— are you suggesting that you could also deposit NFTs? Is that what you're saying?

Not at the moment. There are capabilities of that, but for right now, we're very focused on safe lending. But we have lots of ideas for the future that, of course, Savvy is going to be a DAO. So that is going to be built with the community, with the right checks and balances in place.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. That's, that's really interesting. AVAX. Okay. You're starting with AVAX. Sorry, I say it wrong. AVAX. Are you doing other chains, layers, that sort of thing? Is that also in the roadmap or?

Right now, for the— we don't— we're no— not maxis of any kind, but for right now it's important that we start on Avalanche because it's an amazing network there, amazing people, great community, and that's really where we want to begin.

Okay, very cool, very cool. All right, so what's the future? You've kind of given us a little peek into the future, but what's the hope? What's the vision for this? Like, if we're going to talk next year, what are you celebrating? And then let's say we talk in 5 years, what are you celebrating for Savvy?

So in 5 years, we'd— one of Roman's ideas is we really would love to see the DAO acquire a bank. For 1 year, we want to just see a really healthy ecosystem, provide education, and grow with our community, show people that, hey, there are safe ways to borrow. And our slogan is borrow like a billionaire, because nothing we're really bringing is brand new, which is really great because everything is tested and we're trying not to really take any gambles here. We're trying to really create a safe way. So if we can onboard new people and show people Web3 is a safe place and something that you should really get involved with, because we really believe that Web3 is the future and one of the only things that's really going to help push society forward. So if we have a vibrant community in one year, that, that would be amazing.

And what are you looking for in business development conversations? Like when you're talking about partnerships or when you're talking about user acquisition, like who are you talking to? Who are you looking to partner with, you know, on buying that? I love that, buying that bank. I'm like, now I'm like, ooh, ooh, which bank is it? What can we, But yeah, what do business development conversations look like for you? What are you going after? What are your goals there?

Yeah, I'll be happy to jump on that one. So our biggest thing that we're looking for is people that are looking to build in the bear market that aren't concerned with the challenges that we're all facing as builders in the space and as participants in Web3, but are just Very excited about the potential of collaborating, are obviously creative and smart and talented. So when we find those people, A, you can always kind of feel it right from the beginning, right? When someone kind of stands out. But B, we go through the conversation and we kind of hear them out, right? If ideas are coming that benefit the space down the road, and it benefits everyone now, that's great. But if there are ideas that don't necessarily benefit one party or either party today, but in the future will grow the space overall, like that's really exciting to us. So we look for people that are not afraid to kind of like grind out, right? And really build during the bear. So we spent, while we were in stealth building and conceptualizing Savvy, We spent a lot of time doing outreach to the biggest players in the space, and we've connected and made, um, you know, already we've built on top of a few protocols like, uh, Beefy, who we're big fans of. Me personally, I, I probably have a decent chunk of my crypto in, in Beefy across different chains. So I've always been a big fan of their service, uh, and what they provided. and provide to the space. And they're very security conscious, which is really important to us as well. So when I kind of pitched the idea to everyone on our dream team, I used Beefy as an example from the get, kind of like, this is who we're going to want to partner with and kind of talk with. So that was one of the first stops that we made on our BD kind of like roadmap. From there, we started connecting with all the facilitators in the Avalanche blockchain that would help us create effective pools of liquidity, like Trader Joe and Platypus. Obviously, we're talking to other big players in the AVAX system like Banky, et cetera. But we spent basically from, I want to say, May to now building out all our partnerships and connections and When we go live, we're going to have at least 3 protocols that are providing yield options and deposits. And probably, I want to say, 2 DEXs most likely that will have liquidity on already. So we spent a long time kind of planning all of that out so that we can have all the partnerships ready to go. And now we opened up— since we started coming out and telling people what we're doing, we're showing them, uh, obviously what we've built so far. And now we're in the community growth phase where the, you know, NFT red list really comes in, uh, handy and is starting to grow, uh, the community organically. So we're not trying to like, you know, buy bots or do any of that stuff like to like juice up metrics. We want organic real growth with real users because that's who we're here for, man. Like just like you guys, you guys have been here for a minute now through the, the bull and the bear and and you'll be around for a while. So we want to be like that. And that's kind of, kind of what we have been doing as far as reaching out to BD and partnering.

I need help with my conference strategy. I've so far been to ETHDenver this year, Permissionless, and NFT NYC because I live in New York. So any, any plans for events in the next, you know, 6 months to 12 ETH Denver, will I see you there? I think that's like my main one that I'm definitely going to next year. But any others on the docket?

Man, so I am not the right guy for that. There is someone in the audience, our co-founder Akshay, as looks like the platypus, G. Gloobta. He is the undisputed king of events, man. This guy has like every calendar in New York City Web3 events and just is the driving force behind the team's conference strategy. Like, he has it down to a science.

I love that. I love that the tech lead, the CTO, is, is, uh, one, love particle physics at CERN, you know, generate black holes much, but then also would, would go and, uh, rep the brand at the conferences. That's awesome. Maybe Akshay, you should come climbing. I, I invited you up, but that's totally cool if you don't want to. If you don't want to come up, that's fine.

I'm not sure if he's able to talk right now, but if he is, he's the right guy to explain that because, man, I'm impressed. He just has it down to a science.

That's awesome. That's great. Cool. Well, I'll put the invite to the climbing event tomorrow night if anybody in New York City wants to join. And I'll have pulled together pool towels. They're really high-quality merch. It got voted best merch at Permissionless by Gabriel Haynes. You know, just a little humble brag there. But anything else? I think we should wrap our time up. This has been really awesome speaking with, with you guys about Savvy. I'm excited to get hopping in the Discord, get on that red list and, and just hype up the launch. That'll be really cool. But I want to, I want to give the mic over to you for any final things you wanted to say, anything that the Pull Together community should know about you, know about Savvy. Moving forward, I think one final question also could be just about hiring and building your team. I mean, you offered me a job, but I mean, who else are you looking for?

Okay, so as far as hiring, right now we have a team of 11, so we're not really hiring yet. When we get to the going live stage, I'm pretty sure we're going to have to look for some community leaders and mods, but we'll always be interested in connecting with devs, obviously, because you can never have enough developers to work with. But right now, we're just busy building and trying to ship the product at this point. For future, though, we do really want to get people to kind of help grow the project. It's for the community. We're building this for people to be able to participate. So we see a lot of grants and bounties coming out for people to kind of build stuff. For instance, we strongly believe in decentralization, like we mentioned earlier. We're going to open up the front end so people can build their own versions. So for whatever reason it ever goes down, people will be able to spin up a different version. So things like that are really important to us. Obviously, creating content, educational content, that will be super important. And you can't forget the memes. We got to get a meme officer and all those, all those things. Gotta get that handled.

It's all about the memes. Memes, memes of the—

yeah, you know, you can just judge the success of a project by the memes. That's

right. It used to be shitposts. I feel like shitposts were— uh, Do Kwon was on UpOnly yesterday and was talking about how

amazing

he learned about shitposting at like— you're supposed to shitpost when you're like down in the dumps, and he learned about it when he was on, on the top, which is Probably not very. That's pretty tone deaf. So, but awesome. All right. Well, Savvy, thank you so much for being here. Really excited about the project. This podcast will pump it out in a week. So everybody who's in the Discord, I encourage you to get in the Discord. That's where all the action happens. You get your podcast a week early. So thanks for joining us, PoolTogether community. Thanks, Savvy. We're out.

All right, thank you. That was a nice little chat.

Yeah, pretty tight. But yeah, seriously, uh, if you guys want to climb, uh, I don't know if anybody's climbing, but that's fine. Cool.

Well, we'll go to Empire DAO or Settlers Build.

No, I've never been. I've not been to each either of them, so I would love to, would love to do some IRL stuff.

Yeah, man, we, uh, we'll connect definitely. I'll, uh, I think We should get you into the Empire DAO Telegram chat. It's very live. A lot of the New York City builders are there. They either work out of the DAO or just come through, but it's super big on the crypto scene in New York, and it's a really great way for you to connect with more builders in the space. Obviously, other things like venture and design. Yeah. all these other things that are adjacent to the space are just teeming with activity. So despite it being bad vibes with FTX and Binance and all that stuff, builders are still building, man. I'm at a crypto WeWork right now, basically in Brooklyn, and it's not dead. People aren't jumping out the windows, or they're not fire selling everything. Yeah, the price sucks, but People are building, man. Like, it's— the space is growing. Nothing's changing, like, in that respect. So yeah, pretty bullish.

Which WeWork crypto thing is that? What's that called?

It's at settlers.build.

Okay, cool.

In Greenpoint in Brooklyn.

Okay, cool. I'll check that out. And then Empire DAO. Great.

And Empire DAO is getting pretty famous now.

I'm looking. I do still— go for it.

I was just going to say we're going to add your event to our Telegram channel. We have a lot of people interested in New York events.

Oh, that'd be so sick. Yeah, it's really cool to just like— it's a great gym. That's kind of my office when I'm not in my apartment at Vital, which is great. But yeah, cool. Thanks so much. This is great. We'll keep in touch.

Thanks for having us, man. Such a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.