Loanr (pronounced "Loaner") is a microfinancing mobile app built on top of the Celo blockchain. The app enables communities to pool money which can be used to make loans to its members. Members can request to take out a loan in the app, withdraw and repay the loan all within the app. Community leaders also have the ability to add members by wallet address/linked phone contact and approve loans within the app.
Loanr is built using React Native, powered by smart contracts written in Solidity.
Uncollateralized lending protocol built on Celo. While collateralized lending has seen dramatic growth and use on the Ethereum blockchain, it is not capital efficient nor lending in the sense that a line of credit is extended to the borrower. It is impractical in use cases for loans such as covering a sudden medical emergency or capital to start your own business, where it unreasonable to expect overcollaterization for a loan.
At the core of extending credit is credit scores that assess the trustworthiness of a borrower to repay the loan. Many impoverised and vulnerable communities lack the credit history and credit score to take out a loan where the only source of creditworthiness is based on the trust from other members of the community. In the absence of protocols on chain to verify and compute credit scores, our solution is to delegate the credit assessment offchain to community managers, local banks or microfinancing institutions.
The high interest rates of micro credit and mico financing is often attributed to the small size of the loans in comparison to the large overhead in operating expenses. By working with organisations such as the Grameen Foundation with its partnerships with local business and microfinancing institutions, the automated nature of these smart contracts can aim to reduce operating expense and thus give better lending rates to entrepreneurs or to meet basic critical needs such as food or medicine during times of crisis.
The project is currently separated into two packages. smart-contracts contains all the Solidity code and smart contract logic. mobile contains the react native mobile app built with expo.
The core smart contracts and their functionality is listed below:
This contract allows the creation of community and community pools, but only from the admin key.
This contract contains the core logic for community managers, such as adding members to the community, approving loans.
This contains logic for the community fund and allows any to join or withdraw from the pool. Loans are also funded from this pool, as well as depositing and withdrawing idle funds to and from moola markets.
A new loan token is created when a community member creates a loan, and the address can be submitted to the community for approval. This loan token cannot be transferred and represents the present value of the loan.
To run and deploy the smart contracts on alfajores, create an .env file in the smart-contracts folder with the following addresses:
STAGING_WALLET_ADDRESS=0x... # Your wallet address
STAGING_PRIVATE_KEY=0x... # Your wallet private
MOOLA_ADDRESS=0x6EAE47ccEFF3c3Ac94971704ccd25C7820121483 # moola market address on alfajores
CUSD_ALFAJORES_ADDRESS=0x874069Fa1Eb16D44d622F2e0Ca25eeA172369bC1 # cusd address on alfajores
to deploy to alfajores, you will need to install the smart contract testing framework, Truffle and the yarn package manager.
cd smart-contracts
yarn # install dependencies
truffle compile # compile Solidity contracts
truffle migrate --network alfajores # deploy on alfajores network
the migration script will allow you to be an admin that can create community and community fund pools. Using the admin keys, you can create and add managers to communities. The managers will be the ones who can add, approve and manage funds in the community. To create a community, add the address you wish to be the manager for the community and add an .env variable like so:
MANAGER_WALLET_ADDRESS=0x...
then you will need to run community and funds creation script. Make sure you have node installed and run index.js to create a new community and community pool.
node index.js
This will output the addresses of the community and community pool that was created.
To run the tests
yarn test
Install the yarn package manager to install the dependencies for the mobile package and run the expo app. Further instructions on running applications on Expo can be found (here)[https://docs.expo.io/] It currently can not be run on iOS as it requires native modules.
cd mobile
yarn
expo startMake sure you put the community, community pool and loan factory addresses inside the config.ts file in order to use the addresses you deployed on alfajores.
We're a bunch of recently/about-to-be graduated software engineers from Sydney, Australia. We met each other during our university studies, united over a shared interest in blockchain, smart contracts and a hunger to democratise technology for all.
The idea of Loanr was born out of the revelation that 1.6 billion people around the world remain unbanked. That means no access to financial products like loans and investments, or even basic protections for one's hard-earned funds. We made Loanr with the hope that it will offer a viable alternative to traditional financial products in the form of microfinancing.
We asked ourselves individually how we felt as we built Loanr:
- Wrote smart contracts and contract calls to Celo wallet from React Native
- Interesting to think about token economics and designing a smart contract protocol as currently writing my thesis on smart contracts
I assisted with frontend development and created UI components.
This hackathon was my first working with a blockchain product that interacts with smart contracts. I really enjoyed working on a product which I truly believe could help the world, and learning more about DeFi and the Microfinance industry.
Worked on the Moola function calls and screen.
My first time developing on the blockchain and I found smart contracts to be pretty cool; essentially any type of logic can be embedded in them. Also interesting to consider how we can write logic to incentivize users to repay loans. The very concept of uncollaterized lending seems to encourage theft, so it becomes a matter of making the incentive for repayment stronger than the incentive to default.
- Created the UI/UX design, and part of the frontend development for this hackathon.
- Assisted with debugging and testing the contract calls that avalonche wrote.
Blockchain development on mobile is still in its early stages and I found Celo's mobile-first approach to be a refreshing step towards making decentralised finance accessible to all. One point of feedback: more documentation containing more detail, design patterns and examples would be nice.
Built for the Celo Defi Hackathon.