2022, at first glance, seemed a pretty bad year for the DeFi and crypto ecosystem. From new price and TVL highs at the end of 2021, prices across the board crashed, businesses collapsed, and centralised scams were exposed. These are what hit the headlines, both in crypto-specific and mainstream media…

2022 was a challenging year across the DeFi and wider crypto and web3 ecosystems. Ending 2021 on highs meant, to many, it seemed the party of huge yields, new projects, and unlimited profit would never end. But, like all parties, it had to. As the year progressed we moved into…

2022 was a challenging year for the DeFi industry. Scams, CeFi collapses, and reduced investor confidence have created hurdles many projects have fallen at. But, at Spool, we’ve spent the last 12 months building, launching the product, and then building some more. This week marks one year since our Balancer…

What happens when a cryptocurrency or a DeFi project has a single key person, a figurehead that drives the community and developer teams forward? Can this create a risk for both investors and the entire project? Do all blockchains have central figures? It seems simple. When you buy a cryptocurrency you hold the asset, you understand…

As technologies evolve, so does the terminology around them. In the decentralised technology space, the rapid growth and evolution of the technology mean terminology used is often complex, hard for the novice to understand, and can create confusion. In particular, this is a challenge for new investors looking for the…

Spool is the infrastructure for institutional DeFi. It enables institutional investors to create bespoke DeFi yield solutions, called “Smart Vaults”, for themselves and their clients to use. These Vaults are tailored to the institution and their exact requirements, can be set up based on their specific regulations, and enable…

In 2008 the world faced a global banking crisis. Due to fractional reserve methods, combined with cheap and lax lending practices, the banking system started to fail due to sub-prime mortgages, and we saw scenes globally of people unable to access their money or pay for the basic essentials. Centralised…

It seemed like just another “hack” in the DeFi space. This time it was Mango Markets, a DeFi trading platform operating on Solana, that someone took a $117 million bite out of. The attack was due to a price manipulation of the native MNGO token, and the Mango Markets team…

The blockchain trilemma: decentralisation, scalability, security. The idea simply is that you can only focus on two out of the three functions, and to increase the third, you need to partially sacrifice one of the other two. Traditionally in DeFi, scalability is the final hurdle projects need to face, but…