I love the idea of a P2P lending platform here on HIVE. I was very active in the early days of Prosper with P2P lending before things got stupid with the SEC here in the US.
I have a couple of questions/suggestions:
regarding the interest rate on the loan, why not do what Prosper did early on with reverse auction style lending. For instance, the individual applying for the loan specifies amount and interest they are willing to pay. Lenders can fund a portion of the loan (or the entire loan) until it becomes fully funded. Once fully funded, lenders can bid to fund as well, but at a lower interest rate than the rate which has been fully funded. This would allow those looking for loans to allow the free market to provide them with the absolute best rate. This is what made Prosper so incredible initially.
Will all loans be secure loans, or will unsecure loans be part of the product offering?
What tools will be provided to the lenders to determine creditworthiness/assess risk of the individual?
Will a secondary market exist where loans can be sold to other individuals willing to purchase them at a discount to the face (much like Prosper and some larger institutions)?
Will the core functionality be handled by smart contracts or will this be a hybrid centralized function?
I'd love to learn more about this, as P2P lending was something I did for a number of years through Prosper. Very excited about this Klye.
Hey man. Thanks for your input and comments!
The interest rates will consist of two different pools, lenders and borrowers that will be able to post their preferred interest rate and open up a fill order of sorts.. The site will then match up those that can help each-other fulfill these orders. Free market will rule but there will be a cap on how low and high interest rates can be set at.
All loans at this time are planned to be secured and basically riskless due to the method we're implementing with the account as collateral system. Unsecured loans is something I've thought about however I don't want to facilitate people scamming lenders.
As for tools to determine how "risky" a borrower is I was thinking of having some sort of points or ranking system based off of previous loans being repayed as well as looking at the reputation reanking built in to HIVE.. Finally a use case for the reputation system on the network. Although the way it's being set up there should be zero chance of borrowers going AWOL or defaulting.
I'd not considered offering a second market up until you've mentioned it now. It could be an interesting addition to the business model for sure, will have to think about how to go about this, never used Prosper.
The site will run almost entirely auto-magically. The goal is to create an automated hub to link lenders and borrowers while mitigating the classical risk of lending. While the term smart contract generally pertains to systems programmed right into a chain itself we'll be handling it mostly with our own software, that will tie into the chain but as it sits I don't know if it's possible to do a classical smart contract on HIVE.
Like any project as we get it built up to the point where it becomes operational and we offer it up for alpha testing by the community I'm almost sure tweaks to the system will be implemented.
The biggest goal about this platform in my eyes is trying to make it trustless and riskless. Due to the service taking ownership of the borrowers account keys it should be possible, although this also means certain steps will have to be performed by borrowers to be whitelisted to receive loans.