Here is my conversation with Mike Sall and Blake West, the founders of Goldfinch, a decentralized protocol facilitating uncollateralized credit.
“One of the borrowers is a company based in Uganda. They provide rent-to-own loans for motorcycle taxis to thousands of customers. They've borrowed $5m to expand their operations."
Thousands of people in countries like Uganda, India, and Brazil have been financed by Goldfinch loans through local lenders, largely without realizing crypto is the source of funds.
These local lenders are largely innovative fintechs in the global south, and have historically fallen into an uncanny valley — they need too much capital for what is available in their local financial markets, and too little capital to navigate foreign institutional markets.
I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Timestamps:
0:00 intro
3:07 the 'lightbulb moment’
8:20 the financing gap for emerging-market borrowers
13:04 borrower profiles; Tugende, DiviBank, and Greenway
20:37 crypto-native KYC and how UID works
23:18 bottlenecks for the global adoption of crypto
34:40 compliance requirements for Goldfinch
52:43 incentive alignment and fraud-prevention
1:03:50 learnings from shipping a production smart contract system
1:15:01 launching GFI token and governance of the protocol
1:26:04 the macro point of view
Into the Bytecode: https://intothebytecode.xyz/
Newsletter for updates: https://bytecode.substack.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sinahab
Mentioned in the show:
Tugende - [https://gotugende.com/]
Greenway - [https://www.greenwayappliances.com/]
Divibank - [https://divibank.co/]
