FAQ

DeFi is an umbrella term used to describe the public blockchain space. It is a form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as banks, brokerages, or exchanges, to offer traditional financial instruments. Instead, it utilizes smart contracts on blockchains to perform functions across the internet, basically cutting out the middlemen and providing the tools and freedom for anyone with an internet connection to be completely responsible for their own finances.

Right now, DeFi is going through a Cambrian explosion of sorts. There’s an abundance of new projects popping up which creates a lot of diversity when it comes to the opportunities available.

For new users of DeFi and crypto, this can be confusing and overwhelming. One key opportunity SyncDAO has focused on helping people with is Simplification. This means users can embrace innovative DeFi investing strategies and financial products safely and securely, using these building blocks of DeFi without the full complexity of the technical learning curve.

With that said, the role of Education is primary when it comes to DeFi and crypto, and supporting users with fun, engaging ways of learning that creates value for them as they engage in the space.

What this means is that education should be adaptable or optional and that it can speak to the different questions and needs of users. Adult learning empowers and interests users by helping them to achieve and actualise the personal goals that are attracting them to DeFi, such as building long-term asset portfolios or having income to meet their desired lifestyle and impact.

The impact of decentralization on finance means that over the next 5-15 years there will be an increasing number of people becoming bankless. DeFi innovations will transform power and control structures through technology and initiate a corresponding rise in Self Responsibility. 

For the individual user to become ‘bankless’ means they become the person that controls their vault or treasury of income. As the individual replaces the bank, they become the security guard, the CFO, the CEO, and are in charge and fully responsible for it. This movement in self-responsibility is an important element of long-term social change.  

Three of the biggest problems that DeFi faces right now are:

1. High Complexity

2. Sustainability Isn’t Valued

3. Education Gaps

High Complexity

Things are too complex for an everyday person. If the goal is mass user adoption where everyone is using DeFi, then there’s a need to simplify the entire user experience.

At a technological level, the tech is still too hard to navigate for the everyday user. There’s too much information, too many steps, too many different platforms, too many processes to follow to master this brilliant new technology. This needs to be streamlined in ways that support adoption and ease of use.

Sustainability Isn’t Valued

Projects that evolve to solve just one aspect of a problem don’t always create sustainability or longevity. Short term thinking means some people approach DeFi with a ‘maximum gains’ mentality and are focused on getting as much as they can right now at the cost of future evolution.

When so many people are primarily focused on short term games, then products are designed that give people quick wins, yet are not necessarily focused on long term sustainable wins. DeFi needs products and solutions that can be here for a lifetime, rather than just for a season.

For long-term growth, projects must be asking how they can ensure they continually serve the different needs within their ecosystem AND in their project to be sustainable. Solutions that put a high value on sustainability inherently guarantee they can continue to grow in ways where everyone gets a good win, without choking the project from existing and continuing to develop.

Education Gaps

With such a broad spectrum of users interested in DeFi, there are some huge gaps when it comes to the general understanding of financial products. Users might range from someone where it’s the very first wealth product they’ve used,  to someone being an ex-Wall street financier. This creates a need for products that inherently educate the user whilst they use the product. This might be to support them in crypto/DeFi knowledge, or to share basic principles about wealth, risk and investing, so users are better equipped to make strategic wealth choices.

Without this education, DeFi experiences problems where users might be too adventurous or lack strategies around risk so they get hurt in the crypto space. At the other end of the spectrum, some are inactive, fearful or unwilling to play at all as they don’t have any comprehension of how to work with a mix of stable and volatile assets.

At SyncDAO we see that it’s important to solve the lack of user adoption in DeFi. This broad problem can be divided into three smaller targets by solving issues in high complexity, undervalued sustainability, and education gaps, to really push the DeFi community as a whole to the next level and help people access the potential of this brilliant technology.

What that looks like are products that focus on being simple to use, whilst teaching the user as they use it – AND have that product produce great long term, sustainable returns.

There are a few important players that have a role in the SyncDAO ecosystem. First of all, we have Product Users. These are people who want to use the perpetual vaults and get great returns. They want to build cash flows, savings plans, dollar cost averaging tools or myriad reasons they might use the products to support their financial goals.

The next type of user that’s important in the SyncDAO ecosystem is Affiliates. The affiliates are here to help the product users get the most out of the product. Obviously, the affiliate has a reason why they’re involved as well; because they want to earn a living from helping people get into DeFi, to be rewarded, and incentivized for their effort. In a world where we’re self-responsible, the affiliates become a decentralized customer service desk to help users through the process.

The types of people who might be drawn to become an affiliate with SyncDAO would include the obvious ones like Educators, Influencers, Coaches, Consultants, Authors or people who have some sort of an audience already. This might be in a related space like crypto, DeFi, wealth or investing, or a straight-up marketing-focused entrepreneur. If someone has the ability to generate paid traffic – perhaps sell a small education program at the front end, and then show users how to use these products and services on the back end – they would build themselves a revenue stream for life.

Another key group of affiliates that is less obvious is Technologists – people who want to build products or streamline user experiences through applications of their own making and be rewarded ongoingly as an affiliate for a whole wave of users using the product. This can become a primitive that can be used in the ecosystem when thought about this way.

The third type of actor that we have in the SyncDAO ecosystem, is the Governors. We believe that to make technology that will last the test of time, in a world with so many complex rules and systems, it’s important to decentralize who is in charge of this product. Operating as a DAO means that we can have more people able to access this product from more places in the world than a traditional finance company. This is a key reason that decentralized finance works – because you have diverse groups of engaged and interested people who can govern over the protocols, and drive future innovation.

Our vision of SyncDAO’s success 10 years from now, is that SyncDAO is an everyday household product. Users would have Perpetual Vaults, where their savings are earning great returns, and there would be PVTs in their SyncDAO wallet used as the dollars to spend at the checkout.

In the SyncDAO wallet, PVTs become the main balance, valued at $1. The goal would be that when a User pays a bill with PVTs; if the Receiving User had never received a PVT before, they are marked as affiliates of the User. Each user that convinces another to receive PVT as payment would be tracked as an affiliate. This means a user could pay a bill, sending money to someone else, and still be earning some of that money back.

In that world, what opens up for us is a shift that starts to integrate our thinking about the differences between transactions and relationships. Money can shift beyond its role as a tool to help us exchange value in more efficient and effective ways – “I’ve just got to pay this bill” – and to start to evolve the ways that we think about flows of money and the way we create generative rewards inside relationships.

These products will be a tool to open up new conversations about money and self-responsibility. And to start rethinking how we experience money, from isolated transactions to flows of money, innovative funding, never-ending legacies, products, and incomes. The impact on payment plan solutions and philanthropic funding is deeply transformational. It’s something that will allow us to open to new ways of thinking about value, and to resolve limitations in old, unsustainable ways of thinking.

At SyncDAO, we are drawn to crypto, DeFi and this whole world of technology because it can support people to disintermediate power. There is a powerful need for this ideology and taking a stand to counterbalance the overly centralized systems that exist right now.

While there is a role for centralized systems, it is decentralized systems that can act as a counterbalance to make sure that we have systems integrity in society at large. This creates more ways for individuals to act and behave with less conflict in communities over time. And what makes this possible is more diversity, more diversity, more diversity. We are big believers in that.

The SyncDAO solution was quite the rollercoaster to arrive at. Looking through the eyes of a founder, we were being met by frustrations and challenges in figuring out “how do we get this technology in more people’s hands?”

At first, we thought about how to create a product that affiliates would be interested in. We focused on how to insert the affiliate layer at a smart contract level, we experimented with a product called growUSD. This was audited by Quantstamp and checked to ensure that this solution was on solid foundations.

That was great. However, it presented another challenge; an affiliate might help someone into a great lending and borrowing product, but they’d only be rewarded for the amount of time that the user stored their money as a deposit in the system. Meaning an affiliate could spend three hours with someone to help them to deposit 100 bucks. And then two weeks later, the user withdraws the money in search of a better deal, leaving the affiliate with little reward for their initial effort. This created some headaches and frustration.

So we shifted our focus to “how do we figure this out?” – because affiliates are vital. They are the people who can refer others to the platform and really be a user’s partner when it comes to understanding how this stuff works.

We had to figure out how to ensure the affiliate gets the right level of incentives to want to show up to help people and to bring this technology to more people. This way, everyday people will be inspired to go out there and help other everyday people to start using the technology. Yet we also want to attract a world of professionals from all walks of life, different types of influencers, consultants, educators, to come and help people with this great new technology.

So the way we arrived at Perpetual Vaults was in really trying to solve this problem. To answer “how does the affiliate get paid today and forever for the amount of money that they get deposited into the product?“. When we go beyond the Perpetual Vaults, we’ll have the SyncDAO wallet, and affiliates will be able to do this simply on the fly with users, right from the palm of their hands.

When we brought our best thinking to these affiliate solutions and user challenges, we started to see other innovations around perpetual products, payment channels, legacy and philanthropic solutions that open entirely new ways of thinking about value, money and income. And that’s the kind of financial innovation and possibility thinking that we stand for.

At SyncDAO we are committed to seeing this revolutionary technology take hold and stick. Meaning that more users come into the ecosystem and stay for the long term benefits brought about by having this technology take off – and ultimately become a new experience of money in day to day life.

For us, what’s non-negotiable about this is that first and foremost, we absolutely believe that the user is capable of being their own bank. We know that beyond ensuring they have access to great technology and returns and all the tools to do this, we 100% believe in their ability to really be responsible for their own life. We know that if we can start to use this technology in such a way, we can build a thriving culture of responsible human beings. The world needs this right now.

Another core focus that’s important to us is for people to have a deeper understanding of why this all matters. Education is a big element of our mission. Internally, we as a team like to learn, and we hope that externally our users are learning, our affiliates are learning, and our governors are learning. DeFi and the future of wealth is an exciting thing to learn about.

We also stand for lawful rebellion. Meaning we want to figure out how to disrupt the current system in a way that makes the most sense, in ways that support rebalancing all of the inconsistencies when it comes to centralized systems. Transparency is an important element of this. Permissionless systems are important. Accessibility is important. Most people don’t realise that there are 1.8 billion people in the world who can’t typically access the same level of basic banking services as others. There’s a human impact to that; a limitation of access to resources, decreased quality of life, a limitation on developmental capacity. That’s really unfair. Fairness, diversity, inclusion are all things that we care about here at SyncDAO.

The team at SyncDAO are innovative thinkers, but not always in the ways you might expect!

We think things through from the everyday person’s lens.

We overthink things and look at them from all different angles, all different beliefs and goals.

We focus on codifying what is really going on inside our user’s heads and hearts – what they are thinking and feeling when they’re going through the process of using our technology.

So we’re technology nerds – and we’re also personal development nerds. We love understanding ourselves, understanding other people, understanding what drives people, and how to create positive change is a big part of our culture.

We are unbelievers, meaning we don’t see that there’s any challenge too big that we can’t jump into solving. We won’t believe that any obstacle is real, to the point where we will push through challenge after challenge after challenge as a team. Our journey to date has proven that to us to be both helpful and true.

This is how we describe who we are as people. Apart from that, we have good ordinary values of family, friends, taking care of the planet. We want the world to feel more connected and prosperous, and we want to play our part in making that happen.

The idea for perpetual vaults was a simple outcome to a complex problem.

Our research and experience in supporting new users into the crypto space demonstrated that when it comes to using crypto, many users want help because of all the complexities of the technology. They might ask someone that knows about it, or they’re going to go looking for help or information online to help them on their crypto journey. The outcome is they find someone to help them learn and grow through this learning curve. It takes a bit of time.

What this means is we need to figure out how to incentivize that person (the educator) for taking their time and helping those users into DeFi products and services. This is the origin of the idea that the affiliate could be that person. SyncDAO creates an incentive for them to help users into different products and services.

That created another problem for us, which was, if you’re incentivizing the affiliate, typically they’re only paid for the length of time when the user has money deposited. During this time there’s a stream of commissions being sent to the affiliate. Enter Perpetual Vaults, where the user deposits a sum of money, and can have their farms generating funds through our vaults. The affiliate is paid commission on that sum of money for life, even if the user later sells their tokens. This revenue stream is in perpetuity and exists forever as income for the affiliate.

1. Users Need Help – Enter the Affiliate!

In general, users need help in order to be able to use DeFi. In a decentralized model, the right person to help them would be a separate player, an independent affiliate or referral source, not the organization itself.

2. The Challenge of Affiliate Layers in Blockchain Tech

The problem with an affiliate layer in blockchain technology is the affiliates typically are only paid while the user has their money deposited. This is something that we had to really consider, because the affiliate might invest a lot of time to get a user to deposit a small sum of money. The affiliate might only get paid for a very short period of time if the user later withdraws their money. So we started to ask, how can the affiliate get paid on that money for life?

3. Solution – Perpetual Vaults!

This is now possible, thanks to perpetual vaults. What happens is the user deposits the money, the user receives a perpetual vault token or PVT. The user can stake their PVT to have their farm generating funds through the vault. The affiliate will receive commissions on this deposit in perpetuity. Yet when they want to “withdraw” their money, they cannot – however, they can sell their PVT.

4. SyncDAO Buyback Program

The final step in the architecture we had to resolve was how to support a genuine market for PVT. Beyond affiliate and usage incentives for minting PVT through deposits, it was important to be supporting the maintenance of value in the PVT market. A portion of the vault is cycled into a buyback vault that will be used to buy back PVT at $1. So if a user deposits $1, they get one PVT. They can go and sell that PVT for $1 through the buybacks program.

5. Unlocking Endless Innovation

Once we had the lens of Perpetual Vaults, and started to view PVTs as a primitive in the DeFi stack, new ways of thinking about money and income streams evolved. Perpetual Vaults have uses in perpetual products, payment channels, legacy gifting, piggy banks, long term savings, DeFi term deposits, dollar-cost averaging into volatile assets – and so many more use cases! All while sustainably supporting an affiliate incentive stream to educators, developers, marketers and those introducing users to these new financial products.

Perpetual Vaults are simply protected stores of cryptocurrencies that earn interest over time. The value of the collateral held in the vault is leveraged to take advantage of growth strategies in open markets known as Decentralized Finance (DeFi). What makes them perpetual is that because the collateral is locked and protected, it can never be withdrawn or diminished, thus producing interest in perpetuity.

A Perpetual Vault is essentially a machine where you insert your money and it would issue you a receipt. These receipts are perpetual vault tokens, or PVTs. The receipt entitles you to income from the vaults.

To claim your income, you stake this PVT into one of the vaults, and you can earn the type of tokens that that vault is generating. There are multiple different streams of income that you could earn – you might want to earn US dollars, Bitcoin, or your other favorite cryptocurrency.

When the user has their money deposited, all of the vaults are compounding, meaning that it’ll generate a stream of income to send to you. Yet it will also reinvest a small portion 10-20%, back into the vault to grow it. So it’s perpetually growing and unstoppable. We love the power of compounding and think this is pretty neat.

The point of this whole system is that you can have this machine that generates you an income without constant need for input, time or effort on your part. That income can be used for all sorts of things, whether it’s creating new cash flows for yourself, creating a savings plan, buying more of your favorite crypto assets, paying off your next phone, whatever it is!

The Perpetual Vault is essentially a machine you put money into so it makes more money forever!

Why would someone want to create a never ending cash flow for themselves?

What a great question to think about… what does it mean to have this never ending flow of money? And what could you do with it?

There’s a bunch of great things you could do with it. And all sorts of different ways to explore this idea of having money that flows continuously.

Think about absolutely anything you pay that is a recurring expense. Now with Perpetual Vaults, you could build a nest egg of capital that could take care of these expenses.

We’ve seen this idea of a universal basic income being discussed, this is how you could create this for yourself forever.

We’ve seen many diverse ways people create passive income for themselves so they could retire sooner, and live with financial freedom. Imagine a future where you don’t have to work the same way you used to – and knew that you would always have a flow of money.

Perpetual Vaults, and forever streams of money will go as far as your imagination will allow you to! Start exploring and you’ll discover you can use these perpetual cash flows in order to do cool things.

A few more random examples.

At the small end of the spectrum, you might have a Netflix subscription (or something similar). You could pay for your Netflix out of a perpetual cash flow. What this means is, you would put more capital upfront into your account. And then if your Netflix bill is about $15/month, you would just need to have enough capital in the vault producing $15/month in interest.

What’s cool about this, is that you might only need a couple of years worth of Netflix subscription in order to generate that sort of revenue per month. Meaning you could pay for two more years of Netflix upfront, but have Netflix for the rest of your life without ever having to pay out funds for the bill.

You could use this for your kid’s school fees, and you then change those flows as they moved from school to college or beyond. Starting your own Education Fund means you pay once for the fund, and then have income that covers fees and expenses for college, for a coach or mentor, for other education and development throughout the course of a whole life.

Another piece to consider beyond your own lifetime, is where you can create a charitable legacy or a dynasty for your family. It’s possible to move from seeing your finances in isolation into building real generational wealth if you’re smart and work towards that kind of goal.

The ideas are endless.

You’re only limited by your imagination as to why you’d want an endless stream of cash flows.

A Perpetual Vault is a long term game you play in order to build truly distinctive cash flows for yourself, so that you can orientate your life in a whole different way.

Essentially it’s like a money machine that lives on the blockchain that enables you to insert money once and earn money on that money forever.

What it’s doing is putting your capital to work forever.

The machine has your money, earning money in a safe and secure way using DeFi technologies. It pays you a portion of the money that it’s generating, and also reinvests a small portion back into the perpetual money machine that you’ve created for yourself on the blockchain.

What this means is that it’s an ever growing snowball. The amount of money it’s paying you grows as time goes on, outpacing any potential shifts in the underlying value of money from inflation or other price effects.

This is a long term wealth game, for long term strategic investors to play. This is the shift you want when you’re wise enough to see that you can completely change and reorient yourself to the way you experience money.

When you realise you could create a never-ending cash flow, which essentially becomes your own universal basic income, you see that this allows you to have more freedom and more time to do things you love.

You could create a revolution within your family and change the wealth of generations to come.

You could be supporting philanthropic causes or meaningful purposes that help create the stream… or it could just be to pay your Netflix bill.

Who knows? The future of wealth is yours to choose as you will.

There’s four main reasons to use SyncDAO Perpetual Vaults.

1. Cash Flows

The first is to create cash flows, streams of income, that will cover the cost of different recurring type bills or expenses you might have.

2. Piggy Banks – Long Term Savings

The second reason to use a Perpetual Vault is for very big, long term savings goal. Maybe it’s a retirement goal, saving for your child’s college fund, or you’re looking to build yourself a nest egg for another big goal you have in life.

3. Dollar Cost Averaging Crypto Assets

The third reason is you really love crypto assets, and want to dollar cost average into more crypto assets. Essentially you want the income generated off this capital to go towards buying more of your favorite cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

4. Perpetual Products

The fourth reason is that you want to pay for something once and then never pay for it ever again. This is quite a unique concept. Consider a product that you pay for on a regular basis, such as a laptop or mobile phone. Usually people want to upgrade these every couple of years, meaning that you have to fork out another couple of grand quite regularly.

The idea behind a perpetual product, is that you would pay for a phone one last time. You might pay a premium and put some money in a vault, then the income gives you a budget to spend on things that you have that are an intermittent expense. Whether it’s a perpetual product like an iPhone, or a virtual product, like your Netflix subscription, you might pay for Netflix for the next two years upfront, put the funds in a perpetual vault, and it pays your Netflix for life and you get to experience the subscription without ever paying again. The concept is simple, but it could really change your life and the way you think about income and expenses.

That’s the four main reasons people want to experience cash flows in different ways. They want to have long term savings goals, like college funds, retirement, those kind of things. They love crypto assets, and they want to accumulate more of them – so they dollar cost average using the returns from the vaults. And the fourth one is they want to buy one last iPhone, pay for a product one last time and never have to pay for it again.

1. Perpetual vault

The first version of SyncDAO includes:

• Deposit stable coins, receive PVT as receipt
• Receive a cash flow of stable coins
• The interest generated will be allocated: 80% flowing to the nominated address as cash flow; 20% reinvested and compounding so that the capital and cash flow are ever growing.

2. Affiliate layer

The launch product includes an affiliate layer, meaning users can invite friends to get the benefits of creating cash flows from Perpetual Vaults, and then also be rewarded for that for a lifetime.

For example, when a user deposits $100, the affiliate will be rewarded a small % of the interest on that $100 for life. This is a tool for users to create lifelong streams of income as an affiliate when they share and support others to use the product.

We can break this down into three different mind spaces;

The first mind space would be Vaults. We have great projects that have created secure and effective vaults, which show the viability of having multiple strategies happening inside of the vault that generates yield or APY. This means there is a diversity of assets within that product that continuously generate yield. This further protects the downside, if anything should happen to any one of those strategies.

The second thing we’ve seen in DeFi is Aggregators. These are products that grab different yields from different places and combine them with more fixed style returns than traditional vaults. While vaults have flexible, dynamic strategies that can be changed on a day to day basis whereas a DeFi aggregator typically just funnels different streams of incomes and points it at you.

The third type of mind space is Affiliate Smart Contracts. There’s a few different products out there that have started to play with this notion of having affiliates. None of them have come up with this perpetual edge that we have. But there’s lots of great incentives out there, and incentives have definitely worked when it comes to crypto, driving user adoption and go to market strategies – there’s a lot of scope for affiliates to continue to play a big role.

1. The product is for life and focused on being a long term game for long term wealth builders. That is distinctly different from many DeFi products that are transactional in nature. SyncDAO is here to serve our customers for life and beyond, passing the baton of generational wealth and innovation to the people who come after us.

2. SyncDAO has been built from the ground up with the intention that someone is going to help users through their journey in cryptocurrency. The future for a decentralized customer service team is on the frontline of support – and this is the role of affiliates.

At both philosophical and structural levels, decentralized affiliates play a deep role in helping people use this powerful technology. In DeFi and crypto, people don’t generally like the idea of middlemen, yet what they forget about the user landscape is that some people just don’t even know how to turn the computer on, they are unfamiliar with financial products or technical navigation – they’re going to need help.

The person who helps them should be rewarded for their time. It’s not about recreating the old system inside of the new – it’s about giving users the experience they want, and are in many cases demanding. The rapid growth in cryptocurrency programs and educational tools, is because there’s a huge demand for people to want to learn and be educated in the space. SyncDAO is a tool that enables the system to be more sustainable as a whole.

3. SyncDAO’s unique lens is that we completely and utterly un-believe that decentralization is a core part of the way forward. That as a DAO, we are creating a timeless system, with goals and priorities to guide 100s, if not 1000s of years of evolution and growth. That the systems, the wealth, the ideology we leave behind can be something that supports people into a deeper understanding of who we are.

We are driven by the question of actualisation – so when we have things like cash flows covered, and we’ve achieved all our long term goals, who are we? Who’s that person, that society we are going to meet? On the other side of embracing this grand technology?

There are greater things that are possible with this system. Also, we don’t see ourselves as purely only going to play in the DeFi space. There’ll be a myriad of business development officers, as affiliates, who will bridge this DeFi world to the traditional finance world. We will see in the not-too-distant future from now that banks will help people into DeFi. And we have some very strategic plans to tackle this.

The other thing that we see as possible are finance professionals like financial planners, being able to offer DeFi to their clients. We know that this requires longitudinal studies on the impacts of DeFi, and that’s something we’re already starting to build from a grassroots level right now so that we can build long term sustainability, and, like any new system that comes about, integrate it with the world where the world is at.

So this is really about creating synergy. Yes, we ideologically love DeFi – we’re all about it. That’s where our principles and our core values come from. But we also can’t ignore where the world is coming from. So we will be bridge builders between the old world and the new. And we will link these two territories so that everyone can access this incredible new revolution that’s happening.