Inspiration
My inspiration arises from a glaring flaw in the current financial system – its limited accessibility. Millions are sidelined from obtaining loans due to stringent requirements and inequality. At the same time, it is estimated that over 15% of people own cryptocurrencies and this number is projected to continue growing. What if crypto holders could easily earn interest on their crypto while others are able to borrow money without any restrictions?
Our solution breaks barriers by allowing borrowers to leverage digital assets as collateral. This democratizes lending, granting access to those previously excluded. Moreover, it fosters accountability as borrowers are vested in maintaining collateral value, cultivating responsible financial behavior.
Lenders also benefit from reduced risk, fostering renewed confidence. This cycle of trust is fortified by the XRP ledger’s transparency, ensuring each transaction is immutable and auditable.
XRPLendr is driven by the conviction that financial empowerment is universal. My goal is to rewrite the current lending norms, helping to reshape a more inclusive and trustworthy financial landscape.
What it does
XRPLendr removes banks as an lending intermediary, allowing users to lend and borrow directly from each other. It starts when lenders makes an offer to lend their assets and a borrower selects a lend offer to borrow from. The borrower puts XRP down as collateral, and then has the duration of the loan to pay it off. If they do not pay off the loan in time or the price of their collateral decreases too much, the lender gets their collateral. If they pay off the loan and interest in time, then they get their collateral back.
XRPLendr acts as a platform for these lenders and borrowers to find each other. Since the trust remains in the users instead of the platform, XRPLendr’s job is to allow these users to interact with each other.
How we built it
XRPLendr is built with a React and NextJS frontend and a ExpressJS backend on Node.js. The app uses features unique to the XRP blockchain such as checks, escrow, cross currency payments, and its extremely fast transaction time.
Challenges we ran into
The first challenge I ran into was having a 24/7 stream of XRP’s ledger in order to listen for each borrow’s finish and cancel time. Since I was using a public node, I was facing a errors related to rate limitations. This led me to the solution of hosting my own XRP validator node. From this node, I could directly read & write XRP ledger transactions and also contribute to the security of the blockchain.
Another challenge I ran into was with the user experience – I had to make sure that the design simplified complex topics like overcollateralization and the user always had full transparency on the loan’s status. To combat this challenge, I made sure that at every step of the design and development process, the users would have as much information as possible in an easy-to-digest manner.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I’m proud of the 24/7 uptime that I was able to achieve for XRPLendr’s backend. This is crucial to the protocol because users must be able to repay their loan under a time constraint and if the server is down, it could cause them to lose significant amounts of money unnecessarily.
Another accomplishment that I’m proud of was the home screen, which changes based on your loans and borrows. It prioritizes your most important borrows/lends and allows you to repay or claim checks directly from there. It was challenging creating a mechanism to shift elements of the dashboard based on time, interest rate, health factor, and more information, but it adds to the user experience.
What we learned
The biggest thing I learned was how to run rippled as a validator. It was very interesting getting to host a copy of the ledger and interact directly with it instead of going through a third party.
I also learned a lot about the XRP ledger’s capabilities and how the XRP ledger can empower decentralized finance applications through its features.
What's next for XRPLendr
The next step for XRPLendr is integrating the XRP Ledger's DEX into it. I plan on adding another screen where users can swap between the stablecoins that are available on the platform. This will improve usability for users who want to provide more of their stablecoin or provide more collateral. With a swap tab on XRPLendr, they can do it all in one place.
Afterwards, I would like to add support for more currencies, namely JPY, GBP, CAD, AUD, NZD and CHF. This will give XRPLendr support for all main currency pairs and will allow users from all over the world to lend and borrow on the platform.
Another thing I want to look into is automatically matching lenders and borrowers based on specifications that they both provide. Borrowers can specify an amount that they want to borrow, and they will automatically be matched with a lend offer, instead of trying to find an available lend offer.
Finally, I’d like to improve the UI and make it more usable for people who have little experience with crypto and the XRP blockchain. If users are more educated on how their lends and borrows are taking place, they would see how useful the XRP blockchain is and would also have a better experience on XRPLendr.
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