With the rise of cryptocurrency, many people have staked out their position to belonging to one of two camps: virtual currencies or fiat. However, a bridge between these camps is emerging as ETHLend is adding crypto-to-fiat to their loan options.
On Friday, popular cryptocurrency lending platform, ETHLend, announced plans to introduce fiat financing to their lending system. This announcement came after copious amounts of requests from the ETHLend community for the addition of this branch of financing on the platform.
🚀BREAKING NEWS: ETHLend Expands to FIAT Lending: Licensing Process Has Initiated
Details about how ETHLend will provide additional compliance to cryptolending market and broadening our lending operations to FIAT lending in the link: https://t.co/k0HzscrzVk pic.twitter.com/Miq2x8ou1k— Aave Labs (@aave) April 13, 2018
However, before this happens, ETHLend will have to obtain the required licenses and support from worldwide governments. The team at ETHLend has begun the process to obtain licenses from most countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). The list is pretty extensive as the platform lender states:
ETHLend starts the licensing process to be able to provide services (crypto-to-crypto and FIAT-to-crypto) in the following European Economic Area (EEA) countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
Along with the countries in the EEA, ETHLend will also start work in the US (on a state-by-state basis) as well as certain countries in Asia in an attempt to reach a wider market who has need of the services offered by ETHLend.
This new chapter in the ETHLend legacy will help the project alter its business model, making the platform attractive for potential users. Despite this, this was not always the plan that the ETHLend developers had in mind for the project, with the ETHLend blog stating:
Our initial goal was to provide cryptocurrency lending with the use of digital assets as a collateral for the loans.
Despite this, the integration of fiat financing for cryptocurrency collateral has been celebrated by those who are in the know in the ETHLend community. Reddit user ‘butterfinguz’ commented:
This is BRILLIANT. This was my only gripe with (ETH)Lend, the world is still a year or two away from mass adoption of lending/borrowing in crypto assets, in order to compete in the current market you still need to appeal to fiat.
The team at ETHLend mentioned how their goal was to push for a more transparent and efficient system for lending in the cryptocurrency industry.
To prove this point, Stani Kulechov, the CEO of ETHLend, mentioned on Twitter that other lending smart contracts are dwarfed by the ETHLend smart contract, which outperforms the others by over forty times in terms of the smart contract code base.
https://twitter.com/StaniKulechov/status/983847597394706432
The lending platform notes that crypto-to-crypto lending has exploded in popularity, and they felt it was time to integrate fiat into their loaning process. The main focus is on creating a safe space for those seeking to engage in cryptocurrency-related lending. One such means to ensure that safety is to add Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols to the system, which will also help with data protection laws that are currently in effect.
One benefit of this new feature should be the propelling of further integration between cryptocurrency and fiat. Not to mention the increased benefits and uses of virtual currencies.
With the addition of fiat to cryptocurrency-based financing, do you think that this will help to propel ETHLend and/or the cryptocurrency space in general? Can cryptocurrency and fiat completely co-exist in an integrated financial ecosystem? Let us know in the comments below.
Images Courtesy of Pexels, ETHLend, Twitter/@StaniKulechov, and Twitter/@ethlend1.