Welcome to #WeAreLendroid, a blog series that chronicles who we are and are not, what we do and with who, why this should interest you, and how you can be part of it.

Lendroid as we know it today is a Non-Rent-Seeking, Trust-Independent Open Protocol for Decentralized Lending. It Enables Holding Leveraged Trade Positions and Short Positions of ERC20 Tokens.

The germ of the idea that is Lendroid was born ten months ago. It was originally envisioned as a decentralized lending protocol. We nurtured the idea among ourselves, refining it over time, even composing an early draft of a white paper, which was generously reviewed and gently critiqued by the community. Then some amazing possibilities began to emerge.

Vision

Imagine a truly trust-independent protocol, where lenders and borrowers can discover each other and speak a common language. Where the interests of a Lender — the primary source of liquidity — are protected. Where the terms of the loan are inviolable, ‘on-chain’. A range of interesting applications and financial instruments based on lending can take root, take shape. And facilitating all of these exciting financial models would be, we hope, Lendroid.

Lendroid is itself non-rent-seeking. It is non-partisan. For one, it makes us feel good about what we’re doing. But the larger implication here is that there is no drag on those who choose to build on this protocol, or integrate with it in any manner. If you need a de-facto lending protocol for digital assets, we’re here.

The revolutionary bit about all this is the gradual creation of a shared, global lending pool. For lending to be effective, it is imperative that liquidity is pooled in one place.

Lendroid would enable a universally accessible liquidity pool, not a centrally-controlled one. The difference between the two is the key to true trust-independence.

Strategy

One of the best use cases for lending today is Margin Trading. It’s a rapidly growing market. On widely used exchanges such as Bitfinex or Poloniex, digital assets are lent, and borrowed by margin traders. On Bitfinex alone, USD funding increased from $14.8 million to $168.5 million (Oct 2016 to Oct 2017). BTC loans in USD have gone from $6.12 million to $183 million (Oct 2016 to Sep 2017) and ETH loans have risen from $834,192 to $88.29 million (Oct 2016 to Sep 2017).

The already established market, and the growth of decentralized exchanges — think 0x (they’ve been an inspiration. More later) — we imagined decentralized margin trading was a missing building block to a powerful solution. 0x brings in atomic swaps of ERC-20 tokens, Lendroid brings in lending and margin trading, and the trio together completes the move towards wholly decentralized exchanges.

Using Lendroid, one could –

Put digital assets to work to earn interest with low-friction. Hold leveraged positions on digital assets in a trust-independent manner, on chain. Can hold a short position of a digital asset.

A solution that can achieve all three. Once established and a lending pool is created, endless complex financial applications are possible.

We hope this would be a fertile playing field for the developer community to create digital asset derivatives, financial derivatives and the like.

Lendroid will be extensible into other complex financial models, but the beginning to all this — a holistic, comprehensive beginning to enable all this — is decentralized margin trading, we believe.

Progress

In ten months, from when the lights went on, based on some inspired conversations we had with other forerunners in these fields of work, we’ve made some headway in defining and expressing our identity through online and offline channels.

We’ve had the opportunity to present at a spectacular M-0 Conference, among a canny group of asset managers. Despite indulging ourselves in the technical aspects of the protocol, the reception was warm and very encouraging. You can find the slides right here.

Also at M-0, we released a second whitepaper that more comprehensively conveys the Lendroid idea.

We find that fund management is slowly but surely progressing towards the blockchain space and so we have joined the Multichain Asset Managers Association (MAMA) as a founding member, in order to keep pace with the industry and tune in to regulatory vogues.

Meanwhile, to oversee the development of the protocol, we’ve set up Lendroid foundation. This is based in Singapore.

We’re now engaged in building the Lendroid community. To socialize this idea of ours and find out if it excites others in the blockchain ecosystem as much as it does us.

You can find us on Riot, on Telegram, or join our mailing list. We’d love to stay in touch with you, keep you abreast of what we’re up to, and we would be glad for your suggestions.

Next up — The Future of Fund Management: We had some amazing conversations at M-0, which reaffirmed our own ideas about where fund management is headed, and gave us an eyeful of what’s in store. Hit us up in a couple of days.