Unicorn Lending

Inspiration

Credit score, or the idea of using one’s financial history to determine one’s credibility, matters a lot to the private lending industry. We aim to establish a platform that is perfectly fair for any participant in private lending, so it would be really helpful if that database of a private lending platform is publicly and securely accessible by everyone and you don’t have to rely on any third-party service-provider for your data. Moreover, a private lending platform that supports bidding and auction for the lowest interest rate for a particular loan request will also make the private lending market more efficient and maximize the benefit of both lenders and borrowers.

What it does

Unicorn Lending is a decentralized private lending platform, which lets you leverage on blockchain technology to secure loans in the form of a cryptocurrency. It allows a user to request a loan to which all users on the blockchain network can respond.

Highlights

Every user must verify his or her identity with state ID in order to register. Any contract violations occurred on Unicorn Lending will be filed to the credit report of the corresponding user. In the case where a borrower fails to repay his loan, a message will be broadcasted to the entire blockchain network that you broke your contract and your credit score will plummet. The incident will be permanently recorded on the blockchain.
Competitive Interest Rate System: When a user files a loan request, every user on the blockchain network can respond to it and specify his/her interest rate. Before a loan period begins, borrowers may select their lists of lenders based on a min-heap of interest rate. This mechanism keeps the interest rate low and thus makes Unicorn Lending more attractive than bank loans.

How we built it

We used Solidity language to program our smart-contract-based backend that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. The frontend is written in HTML/JavaScript that dynamically interacts with the backend as a web-app.

Challenges we ran into

Solidity has a lot of subtleties that are distinct from typical programming languages like C, Java, and Python, mainly because of the unique storage and memory system inherited in the blockchain technology.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We studied the mechanism of blockchain and learned a new language, solidity, with no prior experience at all.

What we learned

Through this project, we understand better about how blockchain works and we learned to use solidity to create a blockchain project.

What's next for Unicorn Lending

The concept and practice of private lending should be further studied. What are exactly the advantages using blockchain and to what extent will it impact the current market should be answered. Technologically, we can extend the current platform beyond the private lending. One idea would be using Blockchain to establish a trading platform with a perfectly fair decentralized matching engine for competitive traders.