Monday, Feb. 6, 2022
Hello all! As you may know by now, the new dev team — which I am honoured to be representing today — has been working with the rest of management to accelerate the project’s development. Today I want to present to you, the community, our shared vision for the future development of our P2P lending platform, as well as the progress that has already been made up to this point.
Getting Up-and-Running
The dev team has been familiarising ourselves with the code base over the past couple of weeks. What this has meant for us is many questions being asked of each other; some documentation being expanded, through both ReadMe files and comments within the code itself; smart contracts being tweaked and recompiled several times; a dozen or so upgrades to the libraries we use; and, of course, bug fixes ranging from the merely cosmetic to the critically essential.
As of Monday, all the developers have successfully compiled the smart contracts that make up the backbone of our system, and we have also been successful in loading the frontend and connecting it to the user’s MetaMask wallet. With that being said, we encountered display errors caused by the upgrades that we made to the project’s dependencies. This leads to our current 2-week plan: while a part o f the dev team spends the next day or two tackling up grade- related bugs on the frontend , Our senior developers and the rest of the development team will begin developing new features on the backend, and then we will all collaborate together to implement the features on the frontend.
Exciting Features for the Weeks Ahead
There are 3 important P2P loan features currently under development during these next two weeks. Besides addressing more documentation and testing needs as we encounter them, we will be spending most of our time implementing 1) a credit rating system for assessing risk, 2) the ability to offer or request a loan with custom duration, and 3) the ability for lenders to set collateral requirements.
More Customisable Loan Parameters
Perhaps one does not need to explain in much detail the importance of customising a loan’s duration and collateral requirements, because it is already well known in traditional finance that these values strongly correlate to the risk and interest rate on any loan. For example, a loan with a longer duration will carry more risk of default than a short-term loan, and therefore the lender will ask for a higher interest rate as his/her reward.
Alternatively, the lender may keep the interest rate low but also lower the risk by requiring the borrower to post more collateral upfront. Because these kinds of risk calculations are crucial to debt markets including ours, we will be implementing customisation for loan duration and collateral requirements over the next 4–5 days.
A Credit Rating System
Another crucial element of debt markets is a credit rating system. Unlike the values for loan duration and collateral, the credit rating of a borrower or lender is not customisable. Instead, it is a calculation that gets made on the backend to raise or lower the reputation of a participant based on their history. While we expect the duration and collateral features to take 4–5 days to complete, the credit rating system itself will likely take another full week to devise and implement, resulting in a total of two weeks to implement all 3 features. We will keep most details of the credit rating system under wraps, as we do not want to divulge information that could help bad actors to game our system. At a fundamental level, though, the credit rating system will essentially reward users for on-time repayment while penalising them for harmful actions such as failing to repay a loan.
A Big Thank You to the Community
This is all for today. I hope you found the information valuable, and if you have any reflections or ideas of your own, please do not hesitate to contribute to the conversation. Please remember as you digest today’s Dev Diary, that the community is what makes DeFi projects like ours such a special and revolutionary force; you are an essential part of this equation! Personally, I am strongly optimistic about the pace of development going into these next two weeks, and we can’t wait to roll out these new features to you, dear community member. Stay tuned for more
and talk to you soon!
