December is over and 2019 is gone! During Q4 the project’s focus was set on revamping the Credit Marketplace’s UX/UI and giving the final adjustments to the Collateral-backed Loans and Installment Loans features. Here are the latest news!
RCN Credit Marketplace’s UX/UI Revamping
During the final months of 2019 a year-long vital milestone for RCN’s re-launch was completed: its Credit Marketplace’s UX/UI revamping. From purely esthetic changes to enhance the platform’s look and feel to comprehensive modifications in the information shown to the users and the messages guiding their experience, each one of these improvements was designed to provide you with a more comfortable and transparent user journey when accessing and using all of RCN’s features.
The main visual and functional changes include a newer and sleeker dark theme for the platform, along with adjusted typographies and load time performance enhancements.
Among the most important improvements regarding transparency, each of the Marketplace’s loans — except for Collateral-backed Loans — now includes a section with detailed information about its Originator as well as Etherscan links for each of its related hashes and addresses, easily accessible by clicking on them. Additionally, the platform now allows you to see your current balances at the top right of the screen, including your wallet’s internal RCN balance and all the loan repayment funds already available for withdrawing.
The UX/UI revamping was completed with the addition of a brand new set of screens, dialogs, tooltips and other visual and textual elements designed to guide the users across the platform and all of its features, including logging in, withdrawing funds, lending, paying, transferring and — in the future — borrowing loans.
Multi-wallet Login
Another brand new feature completed this quarter was the Multi-Wallet Marketplace Login, which will allow you to connect to the platform choosing from a variety of Ethereum wallet providers, including MetaMask, WalletConnect and Coinbase Wallet.
The improvement, which originated from a frequent suggestion made by some members of RCN’s community, will be available during Q1 2020.
In the meantime, you can learn more about it on the piece below.
Collateral-backed Loans
During Q4 the last adjustments were given to Collateral-backed Loans, a feature that will enable any borrower to request a loan directly on the RCN Marketplace by offering stablecoins and other ERC 20 tokens as collateral, and without needing to complete any KYC or scoring assessments.
While the vast majority of this feature’s development had already been completed before Q4, this quarter saw the incorporation of one of the system’s key pieces: dutch auction collateral liquidations. Unlike regular auctions, in dutch auctions the price of an asset is lowered until it gets a bid, which results in a sale.
Applied to liquidations in Collateral-backed loans, this means that in the event of default — or if the ratio between the collateral’s value and the borrowed amount falls below a certain level — the smart-contract which holds the collateral will set a public offer for it at the highest price possible.
Then, any buyer will have the chance to make a bid for the amount he or she wants. If no bids are presented or if the total requested amount is insufficient, the system will keep lowering the price until all the offered collateral gets sold. This approach increases the liquidation process’ efficiency and generates arbitrage opportunities for both RCN users and professional arbitrageurs.
Collateral-backed Loans’ smart-contracts — including the dutch auction liquidation system — have already been integrated to the Credit Marketplace and will be available soon. In the meantime, you can learn more about them on RCN’s Q2 Recap.
Installment Loans
Alongside Collateral-backed Loans Q4 also saw the final developments of Installment Loans, which will enable debtors to return a loan’s interest and principal in multiple fixed payments instead of having to pay the total owed amount at the final Due Date.
Installment Loans will be initially introduced applying the Fixed Installments capital amortization method, according to which loans will be repaid in a number of equal-amount bi-weekly installments, each of them consisting of a higher proportion of amortized principal and a lower proportion of repaid interest than the previous one. You will be able to see all the relevant information about the installment schedule — including number of payments, owed amounts, interest rates and due dates — on each loan.
In the future Installment Loans will be available with more capital amortization methods, such as the Fixed Principal — with declining interest payments — and the Bullet — with fixed interest-only payments and a single principal payment at the Due Date — methods. This will increase the level of customization of the lending and borrowing processes, improving the Credit Marketplace’s user experience.
Installment Loans’ smart-contracts have already been integrated to the Credit Marketplace and will be available soon. In the meantime, you can learn more about them on RCN’s Q2 Recap.
Next in 2020
2020 will be full of exciting news and reached milestones for RCN, including the Credit Marketplace’s re-launch during Q1 and the release of several new features — such as Collateral-backed Loans, Installment Loans and Multi-user Lending Pools — during the following months. Stay tuned!
Never miss one of RCN’s updates!
- Visit its Official Website & check the Credit Marketplace.
- Follow it on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.
- Join its community on Telegram.
- Check its code on Github.
- Reach it at contact@rcn.finance & helpdesk@rcn.finance.
