Financial Freedom through Altair and KILT Protocol
Paving the way to an equitable internet through Polkaverse Interoperability
At Centrifuge, we are creating ways to bridge real-world assets and decentralized finance (DeFi), without the need for banks or other intermediaries. KILT Protocol provides ways to issue self-sovereign, anonymous, verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers. Together, we are exploring collaboration opportunities to further the Web3 vision of a more equitable internet, where users have control of their data and financial instruments are available for all.
Centrifuge and KILT
Centrifuge enables users to tokenize their assets in the real world and finance them on-chain, plugging into DeFi liquidity in platforms like Maker and — coming soon — Aave. Centrifuge is currently a standalone Substrate blockchain (bidding for a parachain slot on Polkadot soon!), and our real-world-asset financing Dapp, Tinlake, is live on Ethereum, with over $40M in total value locked (TVL).
We are already enabling access to financing for all sorts of business owners who would not be able to access capital through the traditional financial system. For example, we already have Spotify artists, Amazon sellers, and even TikTok content creators that are able to access financing thanks to Centrifuge.
The next big project we are working on is the design of our underwriter token. This would better align incentives and create a system that can more accurately (and cost effectively) gauge price risk. This is one area where we can collaborate with KILT, by integrating their mechanisms for effective verification of real-world assets. Due to the many inefficiencies in today’s legacy financial system, it is just too costly for banks to consider lending to most businesses (not to mention gig workers). When they do, the interest rates are extremely high. An effective price-risk mechanism could allow us to provide a better interest rate for borrowers.
Long term, we are also interested in using SocialKYC on KILT to replace our current KYC methods. SocialKYC is a decentralized identity verification service that gives users control over their own data. We could then verify users’ SocialKYC identity using KILT, without having to store data on users who want to invest in Tinlake pools on Altair and Centrifuge.
Altair and KILT
Altair is the experimental, boundary-pushing little brother to Centrifuge — focused on fringe use cases like financing experimental assets. Using Altair, you will be able to tokenize assets and finance them on the Kusama network.
Let me give you a concrete example. Say you want to get liquidity from your cryptopunk. Altair will be flexible enough to enable asset financing for a wide range of experimental assets like CryptoPunks, and maybe even Kusama Punks on RMRK, and other new art NFTs. Imagine a CryptoPunk DAO, where owners pool their NFTs into one pool on Altair. Investors can finance this pool (maybe even in Karura USD!) to give the stakeholders in the CryptoPunk DAO liquidity on their assets. We anticipate that we could use the KILT identity infrastructure for the DAO and its assets on-chain.
Moving Forward
We are super excited about the future of the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems — especially about the breakthroughs we can make by collaborating with others. Using KILT’s mechanisms for KYC and real-world verification of our assets will help us reach our goal of providing access to financing for any asset, advancing the Web3 vision and providing financial services for all, including those who were previously locked out of the traditional banking system.
Written in collaboration with KILT Protocol and special thanks to Christine Mohan
