Lakshmi
We let people from underserved communities access loans from the crypto world.A trusted organization with deep insights underwrites their loans,fronting the expected value of repayment as collateral
Demo
About
The problem it solves Billions of people around the world still lack access to basic financial services. We function as a bridge between people in these communities and people from the cryptocurrency world by offering unsecured, pre-disbursed loans in a manner similar to kiva.org. We assess the risk of a loan and always provide the expected value as collateral (probability of repayment times principal requested). This way, loans are very likely to be filled by the healthy and growing ecosystem of Dharma relayers.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into We had a lot of trouble using the web3.js library, which isn't very well documented. These hurdles led us to change our lending model: initially we wanted to be the creditor of the loan, but since we weren't able to authorize transactions from the server side, we arrived at an arrangement we like more than our original idea: the trusted organization will be the underwriter for the loan AND the on-chain borrower, fronting a collateral on behalf of the original borrower that matches the expected value of the loan repayment. We also had trouble integrating a barebones node.js app with a React app, since neither of the teammates had any prior experience with React. We worked around this by deploying two apps that communicate with each other.