Pocket Change

PocketChange's Main Dashboard

Inspiration

Cross-border lending today is fundamentally broken. While money itself moves digitally and globally, credit does not. Borrowers who have demonstrated years of responsible repayment in one country or platform often start from zero elsewhere. Cross-border lending today is slow, expensive and fragmented.

We were inspired to build Pocket Change to solve this mismatch - a system where loans, repayments, and credit behaviour are transparently recorded and universally verifiable, regardless of geography, making the process more convenient.

What it does

Pocket Change is a decentralised lending and credit tracking platform built on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

It allows users to:

Create loans with transparent terms
Make interest and principal repayments on-chain
Build a verifiable credit history through real repayment behaviour
Access loans and make payments instantly, across borders

By anchoring credit repayment history on XRPL, Pocket Change creates a single source of history for credit and repayment data that any lender can trust.

How we built it

Frontend: React + TypeScript for a clean, user-friendly interface
State & Logic: Context-based state management for roles, transactions, and wallet interactions
Ledger Layer: XRPL for payment settlement and immutable transaction records
Credit Modelling: Credit impact derived directly from on-chain repayment behaviour
Architecture: On-chain for financial facts, off-chain for UI and analytics

Challenges we ran into

Given that this hackathon was our first ever, and we were new to the space of fintech, we faced numerous problems, namely:

Having contextual knowledge of the industry to recognise potential sources of ideas and problems
Managing Workflows
Integrating XRPL into codebase
Integrating Web3 payment flows into a familiar Web2-style UX
Designing credit logic that is transparent yet privacy-aware
Managing TypeScript safety across complex financial data models
Handling wallet connections, transaction states, and error recovery
Deciding what data should live on-chain vs off-chain

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working end-to-end decentralised loan repayment flow
On-ledger credit signal generation based on real behaviour
Instant cross-border settlement without intermediaries
A unified system for loan tracking, payment, and credit reputation
Clean, modular architecture designed for real-world scaling

What we learned

Credit systems fail primarily due to information silos, not a lack of capital
Decentralised ledgers are most powerful when used for verification, not speculation
Decentralisation can be a more efficient and cheaper method of finance compared to traditional finance