After an exhausting nine months in the works, we finally launched our ICO on September 15th! We knew it was going to take a lot of work to get Inlock to this stage, but it was only a few months into the project that we fully realised what we were up against.
The amount of noise is extreme when it comes to ICOs even in this bear market. Projects claiming to be the next Bitcoin, or the most revolutionary AI Machine Learning data processing gizmo that packs all the buzzwords into one sentence but doesn’t actually do anything. Piercing through this immense cloud of false promises and half truths would be plenty hard enough in a bullish market, let alone now when crypto prices are plummeting daily. It seems to us that some investors are stuck in the old days of the ICO when being great meant more highly visual graphics on your landing page, and more exuberant promises than the next best thing. Where what you plan on doing 3–5 years down the road didn’t matter, you just had to make sure you slam the word “blockchain” behind, maybe sprinkle some AI and a tad of revolution on it and you are ready to bake the perfect ICO pie. But who’s going to eat it? The market seems to be rapidly maturing, giving way to real innovators in the space who think of ICOs not as a get rich quick scheme, but rather a means of getting the word out about their project while attracting true believers who are in it for the long run. Thanks to our strong following we built during the past nine months, we raised $700,000 on the first day of the ICO.
Is Inlock revolutionary? I believe the answer should come from our future users, who will form opinions based on first hand experience of using our services. Did Bitcoin completely disrupt the banking sector by offering an entirely new way to transact without a third party, to trust without trusting each other? Yes, absolutely it did! Though still in its early days, in my opinion the cryptocurrency market will mature into a giant amongst markets. Thanks to this new asset class with appreciating value and money-like liquidity, crypto collateral backed lending could seriously shake the credit industry. We didn’t invent crypto collateral backed fiat lending, we just realised there’s a much better way of doing it and poured our hearts and souls into making Inlock come true.
To understand the value Inlock adds to lending using crypto as collateral, let’s take a look at how we’re planning to build a truly Global lending solution. There are three main challenges one must overcome to lay the foundation of such an endeavour; holding sufficient liquidity, keeping interest rates low, and providing service in all corners of the World.
Our solution to all three of these bottlenecks is essentially the same; institutional lenders. Instead of having a centralised pool of liquidity that can easily drain when Inlock picks up momentum, we decided to outsource this role entirely to institutional lending partners. These institutions already hold the necessary licenses needed to operate in their given region, so we don’t need to deal with that aspect of the legal minutia, which dramatically speeds up our rate of expansion. We need not only one, but a multitude of lending providers in every region we operate in to take care of the low interest rates. How? Simple. Like in all industries, market competition drives prices down here too, and the price you pay for a loan is the interest. When a borrower submits a lending request, lenders can offer loans with slightly different terms for the borrower to choose the one that best suits their needs. Borrowers can specify the type of cryptocurrency they want to use as collateral, the duration of the loan, and the level of overcollateralization.
The reason why this might seem simple is because it is. There’s a lot more to it of course, hundreds of hours were put into designing a platform where everyone is incentivised for honest behaviour, one where a mathematically proven token model ensures a steady flow of income for all parties involved. There’s absolutely no need to overcomplicate simple concepts. We could claim that what we created is so incredibly sophisticated, that to even begin to understand one must read pages and pages of dry information, but no, the truth is nothing is that complicated. A lot of ICOs today either believe we are clueless and can’t comprehend the magic their super invention does, or more likely it’s just that they don’t quite know what they’re selling either. Oren Klaff illustrates this very well in his book Pitch Anything: “ The presentation in which molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick introduced the world to the double-helix DNA structure in 1953 — the so-called meaning of life — takes just five minutes to read aloud.” That’s it, five minutes. I really don’t understand why so many projects fail to convey their idea simply if probably the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century takes only five minutes to explain.
Is there more to Inlock than what I included in the paragraph above? Absolutely there is! Should I go on and on talking about details that might not interest all readers? No, I don’t think I should. If you are interested in how we’re going to overcome all obstacles to become the №1 crypto collateral backed lending provider, you can read our full whitepaper here.
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Originally published at loan.inlock.io on September 18, 2018.
