El Dorado Savings Accounts

Inspiration

Several factors motivated us into starting this project:

Even though DeFi has exceptional interest rates, UX hasn't reached maturity yet, almost all users we talked to found it almost impossible to understand, especially in regions like Latin America.
Rates Traditional banking are on-pair or even lower than inflation rates.
USD denominated financial products are hard to access in LATAM.
We are looking forward to providing easy access to savings opportunities, directly integrated with our p2p market.

What it does

We built the first Celo blockchain savings product specifically designed for the Latin American region. We allow any user with a cUSD or cEUR account to start earning interest paid weekly with the flick of a switch. We utilize Celo's DeFi ecosystem to generate it on behalf of the users.

How we built it

For this Hackathon we built a P.O.C. that's using a simple web3 script. We plan to migrate this to a series of smart contracts that can integrate several strategies according to users settings. We focused mostly on UX and research this time.

Challenges we ran into

There were some UX/UI decisions that we were able to make but still will reiterate in the up-coming months. We want to keep our interface very clean and lean, and introducing new features is always a challenge. Yields in Moola Market were lower than expected, we are looking forward to integrating other strategies with higher interest rates, mitigating the risks of losses and volatility. (whitouth the risks of impermanent loss, or high volatility)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After many iterations, we simplified the UI/UX. A new team member helped us make the interface much more neat! We worked hard to re-enable push notifications on our app. Notifying users when interest payments are settled. We made it possible to automate compounding interest strategies in order to boost the yields provided by the Defi protocols used.

What we learned

After some research, calls, and interactions with some of our users, we found that there is still a huge gap between DeFi savvy and regular “TradFi” users. We still need to make more interactions on our UX/UI based on feedback from beta testers.

What's next for El Dorado Saving Accounts

We plan to release a beta version of the Savings Accounts in Q1 of 2022. We’ll implement better strategies keeping in mind that we don’t want users to engage in high risk activities without explicit consent.

We plan to start a user education program that will cover from DeFi protocols to best security practices. We think that this is key to get the Latin American community motivated. We’ll keep improving our UX/UI to further ease down the complexities of DeFi.