So far, we have successfully tested a contract able to match up arbitrary borrowers and lenders at zero cost to either party. This framework can form the foundation for a large, complex lending center involving borrowers, lenders and collateral. After building and testing the beginning of this framework, we’ve zeroed in on a specific service we would like to provide first.
Imagine you need to borrow from a close friend to finish paying off your rent for the month. You might pull out your phone, open a popular app like Venmo, and request your friend send you the money you need. Next week when your paycheck comes in, you’ll pay them back — possibly the same way.
After doing this for a while, you hear about the ELIX app. Using ELIX, you can borrow tokens from your friend, pay them back later, and both of you get a reward for you repaying your friend. Better yet, that reward isn’t in the form of useless “points” or “stars” — instead, you receive tokens which you can trade for cash on exchanges.
You might need to borrow frequently. That’s ok — many people in the world do.
But given the choice between an app like Venmo and ELIX, which would you choose?
This proposal for the ELIX app is an edge case of the loan setup described in the whitepaper, and a framework which we have already begun building. Borrowing from your friend for an unspecified amount of time can be represented by an infinite (undetermined) loan period with one installment, zero collateral and interest, and a holding period equal to the time you take to repay your friend.
After you borrow your ELIX, you can sell them on exchanges for USD, withdraw that USD, and use them for whatever you need. When you are able to pay your friend back, you can buy ELIX and square up. Then, after a holding period, you and your friend receive a reward. Through the ELIX app, we plan to use cryptocurrency to re-imagine borrowing for people around the world. The rewards will be available for only a set number of years while the new currency is mined. We’re also simultaneously building out crowdfunding smart contracts to complement our lending platform.
We’ve included some prototype mock-ups of the application above. Please note that the rates listed within the mock-ups do not represent the final rate on release, and that the structure of the application may alter throughout development.
