Lowering Cost of Lending to Lower Cost of Capital- WattWatt Crowdlending
We introduce the WattWatt Crowdfunding Portal, a platform where individuals or entities can join other strangers to fund solar generation installations and collectively profit without having to coordinate between themselves. Leveraging smart contract capability on Ethereum, we are offering lower fees than anyone else we can find offering anything similar. The funders get to keep more returns here than anywhere else.
User Experience on WattWatt
We want to empower our customers so they have eyes on what’s going on, how this all works, and what’s best for them. Our belief is that if we focus on these principals, people will want to return, get involved, and do the marketing for us. Educated funders will know what they’re getting into, make better funding decisions for themselves, and be able to educate others to help this idea grow.
A user logging onto the platform at WattWatt.io will have access to educational portals where they can read how solar PV works, why it makes sense, and where finance comes in. We hope our own passion for renewable generation comes across but we also want people to understand that solar PV generation is now a highly competitive way to generate electricity. In fact, our market in Mexico is seeing some of the lowest cost of generation anywhere in the world, including all forms of generation. Our market in Puerto Rico is saving customers on half their utility bills. Solar + battery systems are selling as a reasonable alternative to the grid. We’re excited about these benefits and want to share!
From here, customers will access a suite where they can browse projects we’ve listed from our partnered solar developers. Due diligence is conducted on these projects before listing and our back-end focus is on repayment enforcement to make sure our customers keep wanting to come back. Some methods we’re building include:
- Smart contracts that call the system’s remote shutdown API in case of default
- Default insurance taken out by the borrower
- Third parties collateralizing the project so lenders are made whole in case of delinquency
- Installing on well established companies that value their credit reputation
- State department insurance on foreign transactions
After verification to be set up with Wyre, the next step is funding! Once the user has found the projects they like, they can choose from a variety of funding options. If the user has Dai stablecoins in their Metamask or Ledger, they can transfer these through our interface to the escrow contract we’ve deployed. If not, no problem! Our interface with Wyre allows users to fund the project right from their bank account. On the back-end, Wyre is taking care of the transfer from fiat to Ether to Dai to our contract, but the user doesn’t need to be bothered by this.
Once the escrow has been sufficiently funded, users are receiving repayment tokens to their wallet address, proportional to the amount they contributed. These tokens give users access to repayment during the term of the debt. The goal is to develop a system where the user simply receives a notification of deposit in their account and can withdraw this into their bank account if they wish. We know that in order to win over our customers, we need the experience to be an order of magnitude improved over their current options. The WattWatt Portal offers this in automated, transparent transactions that the user can depend on.
Among the future benefits we are excited to offer users of the Portal is automatic liquidity (lender access to the money invested, usually by being able to sell in a market). WattWatt is hoping to offer our users the ability to collateralize their debt, based on the repayment they will receive in the future, to mint stablecoins like MakerDAO’s Dai. Once available, users will have money making more money for them through their funded projects but also have this money in the form of stablecoins they can spend, having in savings, or invest in more projects to earn even more.
Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date: https://twitter.com/wattwattenergy
Check out our landing page and click Demo to see our portal demo: https://wattwatt.io/
