EquiDEI

• 

  EQD

Inspiration

The SME sector is universally regarded for promoting economic growth and equitable development. It also contributes to the economy by promoting industrial development across all regions, thereby reducing regional disparities. The labor intensity of the sector provides a huge employment-generation potential in an economy with relatively low capital investments.
The inspiration came when a major blow hit the global industry during Covid, virtue of which 40%+ SMEs around the globe shut down employing 100M+ people. Despite playing an extremely important role in the development of economies, SMEs across the globe face numerous challenges in access to finance and this dearth of credit is a serious roadblock to the development of these enterprises. Close to 131 million or 41 percent of SMEs in developing countries have unmet financing needs. The outcome is a bulging finance gap of more than US$ 5 trillion. 

What it does

These SMEs have around US$ 2.7 trillion worth of assets which remain underutilized in their supply chains globally. These assets, if put into circulation, can generate an additional yield worth US$ 12.7 trillion, which presents a significant business opportunity for DeFi. We seek to tap this opportunity by effectively utilizing blockchain technology to provide low-cost credit to SMEs, and have designed a scalable consensus model to monetize these assets. This enables us to mitigate the risk using a real-world link to such credit.   Equidei is a DeFi platform that enables manufacturing SMEs to get easy access to finance based on their assets. Equidei will also act as an umbrella for the SME allied industries and organizations. Onboarding supply chain entities from allied industries will ensure efficiency and transparency in the SME sector are maintained while facilitating liquidity for all individual businesses. 

How we built it:

We carried out a survey of 500+ SME customers and a few banking professionals to try and understand the problems from both sides. The main challenges we identified were a lack of trust and transparency amongst SMEs and banks create hinderance for both parties to do business with each other. We started as an blockchain based automation company to solve this problem by digitising their operations and making available real time data for SME shopfloors and supply chains, to fetch better transparency for banks. This would enable banks to come up with flexible credit solutions as per SME requirements. Blockchain technology would enable SMEs to maintain anonymity and share data in a secure manner. We built a scalable consensus model to leverage assets which otherwise remain underutilised in their supply chains.

Challenges:

SMEs are not comfortable with digitisation of operations. They don’t have ample budget to maintain a digital solution and afford automation product like RPA, IoT, etc. 
So we pivoted to a DeFi model where we could incentivise SMEs to adopt these technologies and solve their credit gap.

Built With

• besu
• daml
• gst
• javascript
• polygon
• solidity