Creditcoin Discord Q&A

We’ve answered all your burning Discord questions from November. Simply join the Discord if you have any questions and we’ll answer them next month.

Welcome to the first monthly Discord Q&A session, where we’ll be answering all of your questions from the previous month. Join the Creditcoin Discord today to get your questions answered next month!

We’re in a hectic period at the moment, getting the new Fixed-Term Interest Account ready for launch, working on the Gateway DAO, and growing the RWA ecosystem. Please have patience with us as we get all these things ready — development can often be a bumpy process. So, without further ado, this months Q&A…

Q. When will the Flexible Interest Account be released?

We don’t have an exact launch window at the moment. Our next major release, the Fixed-Term Interest Account should be released in the next few weeks. After that our focus for Gluwa Invest will be the Flexible Account, however, we haven’t got an exact timeframe for that at the moment (though 2023 is a safe bet).

Q. What exactly is Credal? How does Credal work? What advantages does it offer?

Credal is the API service for Creditcoin which allows third parties to interact with the Creditcoin mainnet to write loans or retrieve data etc. It functions similarly to Infura for Ethereum. More specifically, our RWA partners such as Aella use Credal to interact with the Creditcoin mainnet, and it is also used by our block explorer to retrieve loan data.

The advantages of Credal is primarily simplifying interaction with Creditcoin, enabling parties to integrate their operations seamlessly with Creditcoin to leverage its auditing capabilities.

Q. In the era of low interest rates, Gluwa’s interest rate offers were obviously a great strength, but now that the financial paradigm seems to have changed and interest rates keep rising, what advantages do you offer compared to traditional finance?

Our products still offer a number of advantages. To list them out:

We still offer leading interest rates when compared to other financial services, including saving accounts or crypto staking products. By using the FTA (previously Bond Account), users can earn upwards of 10% on bonds with various fintechs, a service completely unavailable in traditional finance.
Gluwa offers users far greater transparency of funds, meaning you can check the performance of your investments on the Creditcoin blockchain. Of course, not every RWA investment partner is on Creditcoin, but the exact usage and management of funds is still more transparent than in traditional finance.
We don’t think its right that only the rich should be able to access the most lucrative financial opportunities. By democratizing market access, we’re giving you the opportunity to access a new class of investment products which are usually restricted to high-net worth individuals or otherwise accredited investors.
We offer users a chance to partake in impact investing, meaning your funds are used to invest in causes which you believe in, providing various forms of financing to small businesses and people across the world to help aid growth and build financial prosperity.

Q. Are there any legal problems with paying interest from Gluwa Invest?

Any legal issues are completely dependent on your local tax and interest regulations, and should be answered by consulting the relevant legal documents or through professional help. We are compliant with all regulations in the countries we operate, but the exact legal and tax implications for Gluwa investors will vary by country. Having said this, U.S. investors are excluded from using Gluwa Invest.

Q. What is the ultimate goal that creditcoin is trying to achieve in crypto field? Obviously crypto market will experience huge growth in upcoming years, so what role would you like to play in the sector?

There’s two way to address this question. Firstly, we want to transform the way emerging market credit is done, crypto or no crypto. Put simply, Creditcoin is about ushering in a fairer, more transparent global system of credit which allows the unbanked and underbanked to receive the credit financing they need.

In the crypto space, this means we need to solve the problem of uncollateralized lending, and bring alternative forms of credit, other than the over-collateralised crypto-native DeFi protocols. These protocols solve issues within crypto, but they don’t solve many actual real-world problems. Our goal is to create a new solution using Creditcoin, with on-chain transparency helping to improve counterparty trust and confidence. This informational base-layer can then interface with a wider ecosystem of smart contracts and other protocols to create new credit services and products.

Essentially, Creditcoin will act as the credit bureau of Web3, interacting with a wide array of different products, companies and protocols to ensure better credit provision across the world.

Q. Is the Gluwa app Wallet a custodial Wallet or non custodial? Also, can I stake GTD from MetaMask?

It is a non-custodial wallet, and currently GTD can only be staked on the Gluwa App.

Q. Are there any plans to integrate ERC20 CTC with Mainnet CTC? This means Mainnet CTC can be used like the ERC20 version (swapped, staked and trade in DEX or CEX.)

There are plans for this. ERC20 can already be swapped for mainnet CTC, although this is a one-way swap. As for other features, these will be added in future. Please refer to the road map and announcements that will come out in the future for more information on this.

Q. Could be a very basic question. How can third parties actually use the data on Creditcoin? For example, Aella customer Makena’s credit performance is recorded in the creditcoin. How can a third party use Makena’s credit history, as only Aella knows who the customer actually is?

Good question. There’s a few different answers here depending on who you are. If you need to audit Aella’s loan performance, then this obviously isn’t a problem, as their credit performance is clearly identifiable.

As you point out though, identifying the individual loan performance of their borrowers is currently much harder to do. This has to be solved through either on-chain or off-chain identity features, in which individual borrowers tie their identity to their wallet and associated credit performance. The simplest way to do this is for the wallet holder to simply sign a message using their private key, effectively tying their identity to their credit score.

These kind of identifying mechanisms can be fleshed out and improved in future, potentially even using technology like zero knowledge proofs or other on-chain self-sovereign identity mechanisms, but for now we’re focused on delivering features which focus on the audibility and transparency of fintech lender performance, as opposed to their borrowers.

Q. What kind of punishment do borrowers face if they fail to meet the maturity payment deadline of a loan?

Assuming your question is focused on Creditcoin, if a party fails to pay back the agreed interest in time, then the Creditcoin Network will simply record the non-repayment failure, essentially damaging that parties credit score. It doesn’t directly enforce repayment outside of incentivising repayment through reputational damages.

From the Gluwa Invest perspective, our debt-financing deals have strong legal provisions to ensure repayment, protect investors and recovery of funds in the case of a third-party default or non-repayment. You can read more about this process here.

Q. When will the CTC token burning be done and what is the estimated amount of tokens that will be burned?

The CTC token is being burned everyday through its use in mainnet transactions. Whenever Aella records a loan, they are burning CTC to do so. We’ll display detailed burn metrics in the Creditcoin Explorer in future: https://explorer.creditcoin.org/Blocks

Q. Could you please tell us about your 2023 roadmap.

We haven’t announced the 2023 roadmap just yet, however our plans for the rest of 2022 include delivering another mainnet integration, updating the block explorer and securing more partnership to improve interoperability.

Q. What progress has been made in regards to integrating Creditcoin with TradFi?

As you can see, the RWA ecosystem has grown rapidly over the past few months, with various technology and fintech partners joining the ecosystem. You can read more about our ecosystem partnership strategy here.

In particular, we already have a number of active debt financing deals with the likes of Aella, Jenfi and Untapped, which are opening up debt investment markets to everyday investors. Creditcoin has also already integrated with one of these fintech partners, Aella, but we have more integrations in the pipeline for the near future.

Q. How is the planning and development of an ecosystem such as Gateway DAO related to the mainnet development?

By and large these are separate development projects. Improvements and features for the Creditcoin mainnet are not contingent on Gateway DAO developments and vice versa.

Q. Recently there was a partnership between Tron and Polygon. How will Creditcoin be involved in this partnership in shaping the DAO ecosystem?

For a detailed description of each partnerships planned deliverables and outcomes, please consult the relevant announcement documents:

Polygon: https://link.medium.com/Og5Ogto2nub

Tron: https://link.medium.com/pR4Vobn2nub

In summary, for Polygon, we plan to support a Creditcoin mainnet integration, facilitating Polygon-native loans on Creditcoin. Whilst for both Polygon and Tron, we plan to support USDC stablecoins, certain other tokens, and a Gateway DAO bridge.

Q. Gluwa has a variety of partnerships so far, do you have more information on the kind of work that is going on with each partner? In particular, I wonder if the trade information made in the Lekki Free Zone will be recorded on the Creditcoin Network?

There’s too many partnerships to describe them all in detail here. Either head to our medium to view each partnership announcement separately here for more information each. Or for an overview of our RWA partnership strategy you can head here.

As for the Lekki Free Zone, credit extension was only one part of the agreed partnership proposal. Our aim is to build this component with Creditcoin. Having said this, the majority of the proposal focuses on the digitisation of trade goods. By bringing these goods on-chain, it is possible we can create new kinds of asset-backed lending products, potentially also on Creditcoin.

Q. Gluwa and Creditcoin is spreading all over the world, continuing to form partnerships with global projects. However, there is currently no visible user other than Aella in Nigeria. Now that there have also been partnerships in South America, on which continent do you expect the next user of the same size as Aella to emerge?

Obviously Creditcoin is location agnostic, but our focus has always been on emerging markets, that means, Africa, South America, South East Asia and everywhere else where the credit system is failing.

We can’t know when our next major integration will take place, as Aella are now one of the biggest financing service providers in Nigeria, but we do have Creditcoin integrations planned with other companies all over the world.

Q. When will we see the Gluwa app cross-chain interoperability features you promised in your partnerships? For example, converting CTC into USDC investing and then converting the USDC received as interest into TRX or MATIC for withdrawal.

There are no plans to let users receive interest in TRX or MATIC if I understand your question correctly. Swapping CTC for USDC must be done via the non-custodial exchange. It will be possible however to use USDC on different chains, i.e. USDC on Tron etc.

These interoperability features will take time, there’s no public timescale at the moment. But you should refer to the roadmap and any upcoming updates and announcements for more information.

Q. Recently you’ve been giving NFT as a reward for community participation, when will the benefits of these NFTs be announced?

It has been preriodically delayed due to various other product priorities, such as the FTA launch. Please be patient, NFT benefits will be announced when they are confirmed.

Q. Recently, you haven’t responded to the questions of the Korean chat room. Has communication policy changed? If so, please let me know why and how it has changed.

Yes, our communication policy has changed. Please see the relevant discord announcement: https://discord.com/channels/762302877518528522/839859496113537054/1029353117130694747

Q. Do you have any plans to list on additional exchanges?

We are always trying to get listed on new exchanges.

Q. When will we be able to deposit USDC directly into the gluwa wallet? The swap fee for BTC to sUSDC-G is too expensive in my opinion.

USDC products and support will be launched in November.

Q. It seems that credit-coin teams are working hard for a long time, i just wonder Gluwa give them a vaction when they finish the project! 😶😶

There is too much work to do to go on vacation! 👨‍💻

That’s it for this Q&A folks! We’ll be doing these every month moving forwards, so if we didn’t have time to answer your question this time we’ll try our best to reply in next month’s edition. Till next month everyone!

About Creditcoin

Creditcoin is a foundational L1 blockchain designed to match and record credit transactions, creating a public ledger of credit history and loan performance and paving the way for a new generation of interoperable cross-chain credit markets.

By working with technology partners, fintech lenders such as Aella, and other financial institutions across global emerging markets, Creditcoin is securing capital financing, building credit history and facilitating trust for millions of underserved financial customers and businesses based on the principles of RWA.

About Gluwa

Gluwa is an RWA platform, connecting capital from developed markets to emerging market lending opportunities using blockchain technology. By providing the decentralized infrastructure rails to raise and disburse capital anywhere in the world, investors can use the Gluwa Invest platform to partake in debt-financing deals with emerging market fintech lenders, earning up to 15% APY.