Introducing Sublime: The decentralized network to build and access credit
Sublime is a decentralized lending protocol enabling users to utilize their identities to access loans. Unlike popular lending markets like Compound and Aave, Sublime allows borrowers to access partially secured debt backed additionally by their social reputation.
Borrowers who verify themselves using one of the supported methods — such as linking their Twitter account with their wallet address — can create custom loan pools. Lenders supply capital to borrowers they trust, and can also look up their past performance, their interaction with others on Sublime, and their activities on other protocols.
Anyone can be a borrower on Sublime. Be it:
- A pseudonymous artist borrowing to kickstart their NFT career
- A trading firm looking for capital to execute trades
- A DAO looking for capital without having to dilute their token supply
- A business owner borrowing from their friends and family to expand their operations, or,
- A non-crypto native but otherwise reputable lending business or borrower in meatspace
With Sublime, one can truly leverage their identity and brand to meet their capital requirements.
The Overcollateralization Conundrum
In the absence of identities, overcollateralization has been a necessary evil. While it greatly minimizes the possibility of loss, it comes with some obvious flaws: it is extremely capital inefficient and excludes a large section of users with limited access to capital.
Attempts at undercollateralization have fallen short — most either rely on porting off-chain credit scores calculated using centralized and proprietary black-box algorithms, or on middle-men to perform risk assessment. Both of these methods are likely to suffer from scalability issues, and require reliance on third-parties, not unlike legacy traditional financial systems.
The first verification method we will support will be using Twitter. This will require users to tweet a message signed with their private keys. This verification method addresses two issues: (i) using an existing social network allows us to quickly bootstrap the social graph of users on Sublime, (ii) porting identities (as opposed to credit scores) allows Sublime to be instantly accessible to users all around the world, eliminating reliance on legacy financial systems.
Sublime will initially focus on onboarding institutional users, DAOs and creators as borrowers. Such borrowers are supposed to serve as the seeds for propagating our credit-based social graph. This marks our first step towards democratizing access to fair credit without the need for centralized scoring systems.
Combined with the ability to set up pseudonymous credit lines, tokenized lending positions to price default risk and facilitate early exits and a host of other features, we aim to help users truly be their own bank.
Start building your decentralized credit record on Sublime.
What’s next?
We begin our alpha in two weeks, starting with a select group of users. Hop on to our Discord to learn more about our alpha program!
