A Lender in Decentralized WonderlandThe title gives it away, doesn’t it? Some mysteries are simply not meant to be. Besides, lenders hate surprises. They prefer low risk, low friction transactions, guaranteed returns and completely protected custody of their funds, preferably decentralized custody. They love smart contracts.
If you are one such lender, welcome to Lendroid. You’re going to love it here.
Lendroid’s Lending OriginsBefore we zeroed in on Margin Trading as the ideal use case, Lendroid was already a full-fledged, decentralized, trust-independent lending platform.
For those who know what this means and possess a streak of scepticism, here’s a neat demo of Lendroid ENS loans on Kovan. Right?
On Lendroid the non-custodian margin trading protocol, the lender is the primary participant. How good or effective the protocol is depends on what kind of an experience the lender has on it.
Rules and fail safes have been put in place to not let down the Lender’s basic expectations — of protecting capital and earning risk-free interest in a low-friction manner. If the experience is low on risk and friction, and if it is invariably profitable, then he’ll come back. If it isn’t, he won’t.
Broadly, the process was designed thus:
1. The lender defines specific terms for the loan — amount, interest rate, loan period, loan to value (LTV) — set in a smart contract.
2. A borrower pledges digital assets into an escrow account, and If the lender’s and borrower’s terms match, the smart contract is executed, locking in the collateral and releasing the funds to the borrower.
3. If the borrower satisfies the loan obligations, his collateral is unlocked automatically.
4. If the borrower defaults or the collateral drops below the agreed LTV, the collateral is liquidated.
Try the demo. You know you want to.
A Lender’s Journey on LendroidWhile this journey is described in full in the whitepaper, here’s a quick stroll through a short cut. I trust you will appreciate the trust-independent nature of his experience.
To begin with, like the ‘Maker’ from 0x, the lender broadcasts a loan-offer to all decentralized exchanges. This is an off-chain action. A Funding Account is made available to the lenders to deposit funds into and offer loans from.
Each loan offer is a data packet called the ‘offer object’, containing the terms of the loan, offer parameters, and an associated ECDSA signature.
Jargon alert: The loan terms and parameters are concatenated and hashed to produce a 32 byte-long Keccak SHA3 signature called the offer-hash. The lender signs this offer-hash with their private key to produce the ECDSA signature.
As discussed earlier, it is important that the interests of the Lender — who contributes to the shared liquidity pool — are protected. This is enabled by empowering the Lender to define key parameters within the offer object.
https://blog.lendroid.com/a-lender-in-decentralized-wonderland-239f9ec1aef6