Lending takes steps towards decentralization

As the centuries have evolved, lending methods have been advanced to ease out the process of lending and at the same time secure the money of lenders. But since the past century, banks have exploited the trust of their customers to maximize their own profits, which resulted in resulted in defaults and bad credits. Very recent examples are the bankruptcy of the Lehman brothers in 2008 and the demonetization in India in 2016. These actions have allowed new markets for peer-to-peer lending to evolve, where participants are acting in the markets without the traditional banks.

Currently, borrowers in peer-to-peer lending are limited to local lenders mainly for the reason that lenders have better access to local credit scores compared to abroad. Moreover, international bank transfers might complicate the lending process and banking institutions are still not available for the 2 billion unbanked, limiting their access to finance.

These issues have been solved by ETHLend, a very prominent blockchain startup that uses the Ethereum blockchain network and Smart Contracts to create a decentralized global lending market. This market is accessed from all parts of the world. To a common Indian user, this global lending market means that the borrower can request finance from different parts of the world within one loan request.

Users of ETHLend use Ethereum’s native token Ether (ETH) to make transactions. By doing this, the participants of ETHLend can receive the loan capital within a few seconds. An Ether loan can also be based on a national currency such as USD or Rupee to avoid the volatility that has been surrounding the cryptocurrencies.

Secure by design. By using Smart Contracts, the collateral and transactions can be handled without the need to trust the counterpart. For example - the collateral based lending involves ERC-20 compatible digital tokens, which can represent any value from real life (such as share, commodities or even property). These tokens can be pledged into the Smart Contract, which holds the collateral until the borrower repays the loan. All transactions are presented in the blockchain, creating a fully transparent lending market.

Removing borders from peer to peer lending will increase pressure and competition on regions' specific interest rates. Currently, there are differences on interest rates between different countries. In Europe, interest rates on secured loans might be as low as less than 1%. However, in India or Russia, inflation-adjusted interest rates might be as high as 14%. ETHLend aims to democratize the interest rate differences and challenge local lenders by providing liquidity from all parts of the world with the help of cryptocurrency.

ETHLend has delivered a fully decentralized application (DApp) that is running on the Ethereum blockchain network and is accessible with MetaMask.
Opinder Preet Singh, Head of the Indian Subcontinent at ETHLend, has a vision to bring ETHLend to every city and to let the non-technical people use the revolutionary protocol that ETHLend provides.

In the last two months ETHLend has gotten the attention of many Indian cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts through different events such as at IMT Ghaziabad, Onecowork.co, Amity Noida, local meetups, and the Indian blockchain community. ETHLend even partnered with hackathon on the blockchain by Jaarvis Accelarator and provided mentoring and LEND tokens to the winners of hackathon.

Currently, ETHLend is translating the website and the decentralized application to local regional languages namely Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and Kannada.

Want to know more about how we can penetrate the Indian market despite some limitations in blockchain?

We invite all blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiast to attend India Blockchain week on 26th and 27th September, 2017. Looking forward to meeting you all!

Opinder Preet Singh, ETHLend
Join our Telegram and discuss more: https://t.me/ETHLend
More details: https://ethlend.io
White Paper: https://github.com/ETHLend/Documentation/blob/master/ETHLendWhitePaper.md