What's been happening recently?
I've seen in the news recently multiple centralized lending platforms going bust for various reasons, it's an unfortunate reality that their users face either a long drawn out repayments process or a complete loss of value.
It appears that some of these lending platforms offered unrealistic rates drawing in huge amounts of client funds, but these funds ended up in highly leveraged positions or squandered by bad actors.
You shouldn't have to put up with such risks with earning interest on your crypto; thankfully you can use the credit offer mechanism on the Bitshares DEX as a secure alternative to these centralized lending platforms!
What's Bitshares?
Bitshares is a DPOS blockchain based decentralized exchange, check out the project page for more info.
How can Bitshares' credit offer tech help me?
Rather than having to rely on centralized exchanges and lending platforms to lend/borrow crypto funds, you can easily use the Bitshares credit offer mechanism to significantly reduce counterparty risks.
All participants can see the terms of credit offers, including the backing collateral required for accepting terms of lenders credit offers.
So say a borrower's plans for paying back their credit offer fall through, the lender is immediately made the owner of the accepted credit offer's offered backing collateral.
Compare this to some of the centralized lending platforms, lenders were making a large % APR without knowledge of the underlying risky bets and the divvying up of collateral to creditors is slow or non-existent.
So with more transparency and an immediate decentralized resolution to non-resolved credit offers, Bitshares sounds amazing.
Lending crypto
You set all the rules in your proposed credit offer, even if they're unlikely to be accepted.
Info you'll need to configure:
- A quantity of assets which creditors can borrow (1 type per credit offer)
- Accepted collateral asset
- Repayment rate & repayment duration
- Minimum borrowable amount
- An expiration date for the credit offer
- Optional: Limit participants
Creating a credit offer is cheap, currently costing 0.4826 BTS (less than half an USD cent).
Borrowing crypto
If you have collateral you wish to borrow crypto assets against in a decentralized manner, the Bitshares DEX's credit offer mechanism is for you!
Check out the credit offer page:
https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/credit-offer
This page lists all current credit offers available to accept, if a credit offer you were expecting is missing you'll need to reach out to others in the Bitshares community to make this credit offer.
So if one of the credit offers interests you, once you click on the loan button you'll see a prompt like the following:
Within the prompt you specify how much you want to borrow, and it'll inform you of the required collateral which will be forfeit if you fail to repay the loan with the additional fee by the end of the repayment period.
So perhaps you should be cautious of using centralized lending platforms, and instead should use the Bitshares DEX for its credit offer mechanism!
https://bitshares.github.io/
https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/credit-offer
https://github.com/bitshares/awesome-bitshares