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george grombacher 0:12
Bob Leffler Defy. This is George G. And the time is right, while today’s guest strong and powerful Gabrielle Musella. Gabrielle, are you ready to do this? Hi, yes. Hi, everyone. excited to have you on. Gabriel is the CEO of coin rule. They are a Y Combinator backed startup, which is all about catching the next market opportunity on your behalf by helping to automate your investing. Gabrielle, tell us a bit about your personal life. So more about your work and why you do what you do.

Gabriele Musella 0:42
Cool. Hi, guys. So yeah, I’m like the CEO of Carnival, we started this company three years ago, called we will have retail investors to automate the crypto trading. So usually, you know, in your crypto journey, you buy your first Bitcoin on by Nance on Coinbase. But then after a few months, what we saw is that people want to automate the trading because they don’t want to spend too much time looking at graphs. But most of these people, it turns out, that are not programmers. So good coders, so. So that’s why we came up with Coiro. So we’ll call it rule, you can say something like, if bitcoin goes down 3% by the Select coin and the specific price, given certain conditions, then you press play in this machine goes on the market and trades on your behalf. So in all effort, you can create an algorithmic trades in few seconds, and then let you run on Cloud. Really, we don’t we know hustle, we know programming skills. Nice. So you are passionate about crypto, or what was it that sort of attracted you to the space in the first place? I didn’t invent in the very first place that when I was at MIT, I had a lot of was 2012, I had a lot of friends already playing around with Bitcoin. And then when I went, I bought a couple of them, I paid some, like $300 each of them, and then I resold them, I made 6%. And I was so happy that you know, what, what’s gonna, what’s gonna happen. But then, I’m sorry, I got really interested back then. And in 2016, you know, by checking my Coinbase account, I really got to know Aetherium. And then when I really started, I started studying my blockchain and all the technology behind it. From 2016, I’ve always been involved with the FinTech products, in, you know, working in narration labs of a few banks. So I was already in the space. But what really got me it’s the idea that you can really send, you know, a transaction from one part of the globe to another without any having any intermediary in between. And that’s kind of it’s like delegating the trust to a consultant mechanism that is agreed beforehand. That’s really for me, it means financial freedom is so how is trading? Crypto currencies, crypto assets different than trading stocks? Or is it in some, I mean, some aspect is really, really similar. I think what’s different is probably the analysis you do in crypto, what works, what doesn’t work too well, so far, it’s a lot of fundamental analysis. So really studying the project, re understanding the technology behind it, the credibility of the people, and then investing something long term with stocks, you know, you can argue that, you know, you can have several strategies short, long, but also technical analysis can have a role in deciding your investments. So I would say like, in a way, stocks is a little bit more sophisticated. And, and also, it’s more mature, obviously. But crypto, you know, if you if you like tech, it’s interesting. And also it’s easy on the trading point of view. So, yeah, a little bit different. But what we saw at coil is that a lot of people that were trading FX a few years ago, now they’re the only encrypted because it’s much more fun, and many, many more returns.

Unknown Speaker 3:58
So that’s, that’s interesting. It’s okay. And for people that are potentially not that aware that there are people that trade FX and they’ve done it for a really long time, and they make a lot of money doing it, there’s people that that trade stocks full time and are there I assume that there’s no people that are trading crypto full time.

Unknown Speaker 4:20
I mean, that a lot. I mean, the market is grown and grown and grown. I think just yesterday we did Bitcoin at all time high. So yeah, there’s more people joining and even governments now they’re thinking about having digital, you know, stable coins, like the digital euro, the trademark for that is already been resisted. So, you know, that’s also coming and when institutions are coming to the space and already started like couple of years ago, then it means that you know, the market is going to be less volatile, more mature, and actually, you can start using those coins for what they were meant to be used. So as a currency as a as a utility token to exchange values of some sort. You know, there are a lot

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Two very good use cases at the moment that you know, make you realize people that the factory you know, these are these are all, not not not lost, like the NF T’s, that obviously became famous because of like random JPEGs. But then when you apply NF T’s to proper digital art, video arts, then it makes total sense. It’s like you’re giving a certificate of singularity originality to a certificate to our, to our art piece. And then there is a proper artist behind it. And so in London, we had like, I think a month ago, we had like one of the first real exhibition made of like, artists that were well known. And also bit bit for bit for some, some some pieces.

Unknown Speaker 5:42
And that’s where we’re sort of, so there was, for example, case series, that is the Metro processing this programming language for generative art, it has been around for 50 years, and now it’s using NF T’s to actually sell the his art, you know, without having any any fake fake pieces around any any fake copies of his art going around. So I can see a huge value in NF T’s, for example. But then, you know, there are so many use cases with the energy with the gaming, anything, even with the will challenge, you know, you can have tokens, that child can only use a specific specific applications, and is all coins that are compatible with a specific protocol, like ERC? 20 So yeah, I think it’s Ido blockchain started with all the blockchain tech technology started, like, become famous with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. But the actual real value is, like on the endless use cases that you can have on all other applications. Yeah, it’s fascinating and really thought about the the use case of having money that you give to your kids, they can only use it for certain things, but that’s probably extremely interesting to parents out there

Unknown Speaker 6:53
has has has been a challenge for for trading crypto, that there

Unknown Speaker 7:02
is there an active enough market for people to trade as much or as little as as they want?

Unknown Speaker 7:10
Every day there are a set of values that have very deep liquidity. So you can go there like finance, coin base decentralized one or they send decentralized one like unis weapons, which is work and it depends on the assets, right? I mean, overall, the market really moves towards to three main point like like

Unknown Speaker 7:31
attractive magnets that are like Aetherium Bitcoin and nowadays the new the new challenger that is Solana. So if you take these three ecosystems, you get a lot of trading activities, very good, interesting communities, you know, smart people really thinking about, like, you know, the intrinsic value of the coins and how to trade them. And when, by obviously, if you go on the more like, no emerging projects, you know, on the new on the new chains, like polygon avalanche, or the layers to applications, you can see that the liquid is not there, just because, you know, these are like really embryonal, like, projects, you know, the satellite, probably, you know, like, for example, like, avalanche, like really taking off, like last two weeks, in terms of how many dots you can have on the ecosystem, what you can do. So trading this there are traders in the crypto space, I think it’s a big community, but obviously, they just move on specific blockchains according to the opportunities.

Unknown Speaker 8:32
So, how long has coinrule been

Unknown Speaker 8:37
on on the market? And how long have people been using it? And then what, what, if anything, have you been surprised by with, with how people are using it? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the actual big lunch was in in 2019. So we’ve been around for two and a half year. And, I mean, we have like a huge growth in the last, the last 12 months, we had like something like 35% month on month growth. So and, you know, obviously, there were ups and downs because of the bear market, the bullish market. So when we got into Y Combinator, for example, our focus not not was not to get the first 1000 customer, but was actually how do we reach the 2x 3x and revenues in order to go from seed to actually series A fundraise. Then we did a seed seed funding, with 2.2 million with very good investors, such as, like the founders of Twitch, the founders of Fitbit, the guy from kayak.com, and other notable customers, investors. And then this journey, you know, obviously, we learned a lot of things on these journeys. So first, that people like to create strategies altogether. So they we saw in our telegram group, the publisher strategy that someone is built, and everyone just chips in with ideas. They optimize them and some users the most active users

Unknown Speaker 10:00
They spend like three, four hours a day just like tweaking those strategies, they really enjoy it. So on average, our users login around, like 13 times a week. So it’s like twice a day. So you can really see that we know it’s actually we are like adding value to their life. But we told that core rule will there be a set and forget type of rule by Shin right? You set up your rules, you go away, it trades on your behalf. But then what we discovered that a lot of things.

Unknown Speaker 10:33
So our users actually like to have an active platform in that sense. And we are now modifying the experience to accommodate that need. So with the marketplace, with the more like charts and community aspects with some gamification, and more like the sense of having this agora, this place where you can go and actually talk about trading, while you’re also experimented with rules. So that has been a huge, big discovery, that the big social element into crypto trading, you know, if you go on eToro, for stocks, you can see there is a social mix social elements, that that that one has been pushed really by, by the company itself, right? Well, for us, it’s actually emerged slowly. And we want to really leverage on that. Yeah, I think that that’s cool that you’re finding that people are, are connecting and sharing their strategies or their approaches, and people are helping to improve and build upon those.

Unknown Speaker 11:30
So I think you mentioned education, that’s, that’s probably a pretty, pretty interesting thing, from your perspective, because you want to provide value.

Unknown Speaker 11:42
Are there for lack of a better term compliance or regulatory issues that that are worrisome or challenging?

Unknown Speaker 11:52
Oh, that’s a good question. That’s always in our mind. And since the beginning, we structured the company in a way that we will need

Unknown Speaker 12:00
political license appointed with the license. And so there are always I mean, I believe there is always a way to actually ever, you know, the customer feels safe. And also having no like big risks. And the company also have no much liability, it’s just like, you need to think strategically long term. So the way we did it, we started to be a layer on top of exchanges, so that the wallet is actually on the underlying platform, that, you know, that being called rule Coinbase, binance, Kraken, and then we only connect a call to an API, right. So basically, we don’t touch your funds, you do your KYC. On binance, we only send buying and selling instruction at specific points, according to your strategies. So in that way, we don’t have liabilities, the user super safe. Also, another thing that kind of came up to this approach is the price, right? So nowadays, when you trade, you have a lot of fees from exchanges, and they are hidden fees that you don’t necessarily see. So without agenda, paying for big trades, like you know, sometimes hundreds of 1000s of 1000s of dollars, we decided to go the opposite way to be very transparent, very clear to the user and to have a subscription model. So the user with us, they pay, I mean, there’s a free version, or they can buy a paid plan that starts from $30, and goes up to $500 for professionals. So by paying that, and you’re just like, happy and safe, and you know that you know how much you’re spending every month.

Unknown Speaker 13:25
Now, obviously, we have a lot of push from your devices to actually change the pricing. But we prefer to be really upfront. And by doing that, as well. The third thing that also derived from from this approach is that the FCA sees us as a software provider. So but by the way we charge and also because we don’t we are not custodial. So we so we get really the best of both worlds, the users are happy, everything is clear for them. The funds are safe, and we don’t have liabilities. And to be honest, I’m not I’m not looking to change that model, because it has worked so far. And it’s something differentiator for us. And it it also goes into the direction of a marketplace with a community.

Unknown Speaker 14:08
Yeah, I think if that makes sense. You’re not actually holding the money or the the the assets.

Unknown Speaker 14:16
And the people it’s it is an interesting thing. I’m sensitive of fees and expenses at every level of somebody’s money. And that’s a for lack of a better term like a buyer beware that if you are invested in crypto, you need to understand or do your best to understand what all the fees and the expenses are on the platform that you’re actually or your wallet rather. Yeah. And I know something on top of that in terms of user experience. Who wants to open another wallet, right? I mean, we already have probably should already have like five, six accounts everywhere. You just want to connect your main wallet to a new platform. You don’t just want to go again to the KYC.

Unknown Speaker 14:55
So

Unknown Speaker 14:58
not that you need to make an argument for

Unknown Speaker 15:00
or what what would your argument be to somebody who says, Yeah, I’m interested in crypto, but I don’t know that I want to be actively trading, maybe I just want to buy and hold? Why would you potentially advocate or just say, hey, maybe you should think about using our platform. Okay, so if you just want to buy a hold a specific project, because you really started it, and you believe in it, take that, that, you know, take a huge chunk of that coins, stake it and just live with it. So if you want to ask, but if you already have access to having two or three projects you think are interesting, you know, you can already run a rebalancing strategies that, you know, allows you to take all the upsides when the market is up, but also protects you and there’s like, some crashes, so you can rebalance across them. I think that’s one of the best strategy rebalancing works well, when you have five or more assets, we have a few templates that you can choose from our library, we have more than 200 templates, we explained very well in plain English, what they do and how you can use them. So I think that will that will be thing, it’s like holding a hotlink by it’s like smart hodling. Basically, you can hold your for five projects and be sure that they’re growing, but they’re not actually going down when the market is bearish. Nice.

Unknown Speaker 16:12
I, I know that you don’t need to be a coder to be able to use the platform. And I think it’s cool that that you have, like you said 200 different templates that are available. So people that it would be maybe a little intimidating to get started, they can go and get started maybe with with with one of those models that are already there.

Unknown Speaker 16:32
Yeah, totally. Like, our approach was always to, to have to be transparent. So you know, there are some some a lot of platforms out there where you can just put the money in a black box, you know, you come back every year, you get your five to 10%. You know, the smaller farm there is like all the staking product is amazing, you know, they’re good. But our product is for people that want to see, you know, what’s in the box? And actually they want to play around. So even when selected templates on color rule, you actually see what are the blocks, what what are the ingredients of that specific recipe, and you can you can change them out. And you can also add or modify. And that’s, that’s a way for us to respect the users, and to also give access to finance to everyone, you know, and also to make a statement saying like, look, finance is not rocket science, even if you take like, you know, some of the family offices and hedge funds, maybe not, yeah, frequency traders, because they really do something more complicated. But the more traditional stuff, what they do, they do swing trading, they do like rebalancing, you know, slug emulations liquidations, right. And just a concept that, you know, everyone can understand if just, you know, they get like, some simple material to it. So our approach is really to give the tools but then to give the people the power and understanding that they can choose their own destiny. I love it. Gabrielle the people are ready for your difference making tip do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 17:55
So in terms of tips on the market, I mean, one main tip like read read about a project and you know, put your money where your heart is. So that not don’t just stop on Bitcoin or Aetherium. Because bitcoin is kind of was the first project right? It was the you know, breaking the ice. But then after that there are also many ecosystem that are much more interesting. So do your research on the new chains like this, the salon ecosystem that’s very fast, super fast transaction, very low fees, and other new lots of new project on that there is the polygon ecosystem, avalanche, and also the layer two projects. So do your research, find the project you really like, and you think you can invest long term and then bet on it like, you know, be brave to bet to bet on it. And I mean, it is the main tip, like do your own research and escape from the from the FOMO from the big pumps

Unknown Speaker 18:46
that made the main topic demented. Again, I think

Unknown Speaker 18:50
I think that is great stuff that definitely gets to come on, come on. It’s fascinating.

Unknown Speaker 18:56
Just it’s fascinating, the speed at which so many smart people are working on new projects, and these they’re coming online. And so I think that’s great. It’s a great thought to find five that you really like or a handful that you really like and to learn and, and then then to get involved. So, Gabrielle, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with coin roll? Yeah, I think I’m on a website called rule.com. Or they can just message me on Twitter. I’m fresh news, or just like Google Mia. I think my email is everywhere on the web. Okay, excellent. Have you enjoyed this as much as I did, so Gabriel, your appreciation and share today share with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, go to coin rule.com and educate yourself and get started on the platform. And you can find Gabriel on Twitter as well or just google and find his email address that way. Next kid Gabriel. Thank you very much. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We are all

Unknown Speaker 20:00
In This Together

Transcribed by https://otter.ai