Despite the relative silence of the crypto markets, the past two months have been quite busy for PWN. In fact, they’ve been so hectic that we’ve again decided to merge our monthly digests for July and August. On that note, let’s have a look at what PWN has been up to lately.

July highlights

In July, PWN saw several first-ever loans, such as the $60K DAI loan backed by a Noun NFT or the $7K USDC loan backed by a CloneX NFT, which belong to the blue-chip league, as well as more unusual P2P collateral types, such as the 7 ETH loan backed by Rocket Pool ETH, which demonstrates the high LTV achievable with P2P lending. Finally, there were several Cometh NFT backed loans that paved the way for more GameFi assets being used as collateral for lending.

Speaking of GameFi (and other DeFi native assets), our chieftain, Josef, had the opportunity to talk about how PWN ties into the vision of delivering the cryptonative economy during EthCC in Paris.

First things first: This is the continuation of PWN’s bear market deep dive. Read up on the first post for a backgrounder on the points discussed below!

Today, we’re here to talk about all things peer-to-peer and peer-to-pool. In this bear market, peer-to-peer presents so many new and different opportunities for people wanting to accumulate and leverage opportunities, so it’s important to understand the significance of both of these lending protocols. Let’s start things off by clarifying the differences between peer-to-peer and peer-to-pool protocols.

In a peer-to-peer lending protocol, borrowers and lenders are able to enter a loan agreement without the need for an intermediary. Self-executing smart contracts enable trustless transactions. Loan terms, including term length, APR, and the amount of collateral provided are determined by the borrower and lender.

EthLend was one of the first peer-to-peer lending protocols on the blockchain. Today, it’s known as Aave and currently has $6.1B TLV. When it launched in 2017, the overall adoption and trust in blockchain was different to what it is now. We’re in a new era in which DeFi has proven that it solves a bigger problem than we ever imagined.

Patience is a virtue when it comes to crypto. Let's summarize what's happening in today’s macro environment and most importantly the opportunities that come with this bear market and what role PWN can play in it.

Inflation

Inflation is at its peak, currently at 8.5% in the United States (and higher in a number of other countries), the highest it's been since 1981. Tough times are on the horizon, and unfortunately, the majority of people are clueless about this (except cryptonatives, of course!).

There’s so much uncertainty in the markets at the moment. Who knows what might happen? We'll need to wait and watch.

Our latest and greatest Cryptonatives installment features none other than Luis Cuende, co-founder of Aragon and founder of Nation3. 

Join us as we discuss Luis’ goals for building a community of like-minded people to create a cloud nation as well as exciting opportunities in motion between PWN and Nation3.

There’s no going back – once you start playing blockchain games, you don’t want to stop.

PWN loves what Cometh does: All of us at PWN have Cometh Spaceships (in fact, it’s a company benefit!). Josef and Steve were recently lucky enough to pick the brain of Jerome de Tychey, Cometh’s Founder and Galactic Councilor, in a Twitter Spaces session.

For those who aren’t already familiar with what Cometh does, Jerome started off the session by summing up what they’re about.

“Cometh is a software company developing infrastructure for the gaming industry,” said Jerome. “We’re currently in the rhythm of one game per year, and we’ve been doing that for two years.” 

In the first segment of a two-part series on how borrowers and lenders can make use of the PWN platform, we’ll dive into borrowing strategies and top reasons why cryptonatives and active DeFi users are using PWN to borrow funds.

Hey, you. Yes, you! Which of the following descriptions do you identify with?

• You’re an active DeFi user.
• You have a high DegenScore.
• You like to try new stuff.

Finally, you hold NFTs but find yourself sitting on them (either while waiting for a game to launch or the project to advance). You don't want to sell them, so what can you do?

At PWN, technological dogfooding is the name of the game.

The term "dogfooding" is an alternate, somewhat quirky term for using one's own products. In our case, we use it to describe our team’s practice of testing the PWN platform and working out any issues or bugs that we encounter in order to continuously improve our product. As a result, we can feel entirely confident in the end result of our work.

What are our motivations for dogfooding?

Understanding the role of users: Our users are at the core of everything we do. When building and interacting with our platform, PWN team members are actively looking to more deeply connect with them and understand their needs: What do they want? How do they interact with the platform? What are the blockers?

In our latest Twitter Spaces session, we joined forces with Evgeny of Re7 Capital. Join us as we look back on a great fireside chat that spanned a range of topics, from Evgeny’s experience using PWN to the best security practices in DeFi and the future of NFTs.

Introduction

Steve and Evgeny first met about a year ago, when Evgeny reached out to Steve after both took part in a call together with some folks from MetaCartel. They’ve stayed in touch since then, and just recently, our team has been in touch with Evgeny about a super exciting Nouns NFT loan worth $60K that’s currently backed on the PWN platform. Through this process, Evgeny had a chance to get up and personal with our platform.

In this article, I’ll first give you a brief rundown of what PWN was up to during May. Then, we’ll have a look at how that ties into what we’ve been up to in June (spoiler alert: It was a huge month).

First things first: You may have noticed that there’s no May monthly digest. That’s because I kept postponing it until suddenly it was the end of June. Given the breakneck speed of our development team’s work, half of the stuff that I was prepared to write for May’s digest is no longer fully up to date (a happy problem to have!). 

No more POAP access keys will be dropped (but if you have one, don’t get rid of it!)

One of the first things I wanted to mention in May’s digest is to talk about how we dropped more POAP keys to individuals on our waitlist and how that brings the total number of people with access to the alpha platform to new all-time highs. However, our developments have changed how this process works – I’ll explain this more in a bit.

Earlier this month at ETHPrague, PWN had the pleasure of speaking with Makoto Inoue, one of the core developers at Ethereum Naming Service (ENS) which provides NFT compliant naming service to various blockchain addresses and decentralized file systems.

At the conference, Makoto also led an ENS integration workshop in which he covered the basics of ENS smart contracts and various ways to make use of the rich features within ENS.

In our latest segment of Cryptonatives, Makoto looks back on his career and personal growth in the DeFi space while also explaining what has led up to ENS’ recent milestone of reaching 1 million name registrations.

At last week’s ETHPrague, we caught up on what our team has been up to in a Twitter Spaces session, and we also revealed our biggest piece of product news to date!

PWN was a proud sponsor of this marvelous inaugural event. We came to the event with a few goals in mind, but one that stood out among them is to simply let people know who we are and what we’re about. As Steve put it, “The more people know about us, the larger the protocol will grow.”

In case you weren’t able to attend ETHPrague in person, there’s a great livestream of the event available for leisurely viewing.

For our second installment of Cryptonatives, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Stefan George, CTO and Co-Founder of Gnosis.

In a nutshell, Gnosis builds new market mechanisms for decentralized finance. It’s the creator of three interoperable product lines that allow users to create, trade, and hold digital assets.

Read on as we take a deeper look at Gnosis’ current activities, Stefan’s advice for bolstering security practices in DeFi, and his hopes for the future of blockchain technology.

When’s the last time that a conversation truly blew your mind? For us, it was the recent chat that we had with Jarrad Hope, Co-Founder and CEO of Status.

Status is self-described as a tool that “brings the power of Ethereum into your pocket by combining a messenger, crypto-wallet, and Web3 browser”. Not only is there so much packed into its functionality, but there’s also a deeper purpose behind why Status was founded — it’s on a mission to protect individuals’ privacy, combat mass surveillance and violations of trust, and bring a new sense of accessibility to decentralized communication systems.

Kicking off our team’s Cryptonatives interview series, Jarrad provided a fantastic overview of his personal take on some of the real-world use cases mentioned above — and much more. Let’s dive in.

The month of April was entirely in the spirit of gearing up for opening up our platform to the public with our upcoming contracts upgrade, and what’s more, we held our long-awaited PWN team meetup in Prague!

Product news

First off, more people than ever have access to the alpha platform. The total number of people who gained access to the PWN platform through the waitlist hit 100 around mid-April.

We’re picking up the pace of dropping new POAP access keys to people who join the waitlist, so if you’re keen to get a last minute peek at the platform, make sure to join!

We recently held a Twitter Spaces session with Federico Ast and Guangmian Kung of Kleros in which we covered an array of spicy topics.

There’s an important reason that we wanted to put this session together: At PWN, we’re putting together a think tank around the topic of solving undercollateralized loans within DeFi. Together with Kleros, we’re inviting a number of players within the space to participate in this initiative. (Stay tuned for more info during the coming weeks on this!)

What does Kleros do?

Kleros is self-described as a decentralised arbitration service for the disputes of the new economy.

The requirement for pre-existing capital is the biggest bottleneck in DeFi adoption today. Here’s how DeFi can benefit from undercollateralised and no-collateral loans.

Imagine this: you’re fresh out of college, you’ve landed your first job, and you’re looking to get a mortgage to buy a house. You walk in to your local bank and are asked to provide two existing houses as collateral before the bank is able to issue the loan that you initially came for.

This sounds a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, that’s DeFi today. Let’s break this down.

Since the PWN team has now grown to nearly 20 members, we recently made the decision to get together and meet each other in person! Many of us had already met before, but for some of us, this was the first time that we were able to see each other off-screen!

This was also the case with me, as prior to our meetup, I had only met a few folks face to face. I, like each of the team members who came to Prague, were definitely looking forward to seeing and spending time with everyone else on the team.

As PWN’s PsyOps Ninja, an important part of my role is to organise our various team activities and event – this meetup in Prague was no exception! Working together with our team’s HR and operations lead, Marina, we coordinated the dates and began to arrange all the necessary odds and ends.

In the third installment of our monthly digest, we’re diving into what our team has accomplished during March 2022.

Our community

Over 1,000 people on our waitlist & 1,000+ Twitter followers

We see a steady growth in terms of our brand awareness and follower count. Our Discord community is now home to over 750 people, and we recently passed the 1K mark on Twitter!

Here comes the second volume of our monthly digest! This time, let’s look back at what we’ve been up to in February 2022.

Our largest deal to date

We’ve successfully closed a deal that put us on the radar of the lending world: A 90-day loan of $126k at 17.9% APR backed by Bored Apes Yacht Club #1614. If you have the platform access key you can view the loan here: https://app.pwn.finance/#/deed/10. Even though blue chip NFTs are not the end goal for us, this is a huge milestone and a proof that we can service this space too. Big big kudos to everyone who worked on this deal - I’m a big fan of the fast execution that the PWN team has demonstrated.

PS: If you don’t have the platform access key, make sure you join the waitlist here: https://pwn.finance/waitlist - I promise, it’s the best thing you’ll do this year.

GM PWN Community!

We kicked off 2022 in the best way imaginable. The dust is still settling after we’ve launched the PWN platform on Ethereum mainnet last November, but I’m already seeing strong synergies within the PWN team as well as the amazing energy of our community and that is making me confident that we are headed towards building a true killer DeFi product. Here are some of the key highlights of the past month.

Latest UI upgrades

• The homepage is now much more useful when it comes to discovering new investment and borrowing opportunities
• We’ve introduced an overhauled notification system to help users stay on top what’s going on with their lending / borrowing positions
• We’ve also made many more smaller changes based on the insights we gathered from our users, all designed to make the lending / borrowing experience the smoothest in all of DeFi
• Our waitlist has grown to nearly 400 people with upwards of $2.5 million of assets ready to get deployed on the PWN lending markets

Today, we’re here to tell you what open source means to our team.

From the very beginning, PWN’s guiding principles have closely correlated with the goals of open source.

We play a long term game but don't pass up clear opportunities. We won't stop until we reach the holy grail and turn the project into a major player in the DeFi and blockchain ecosystem.

What’s more, we prove our worth pro bono, we pay it forward to the community, and once we succeed we make sure we don't leave scorched earth behind - instead, we’ll reward the people who got us there, so they can do the same in the future.

PWN is — and always will be — open and trustless. Borrow and lend using ANY asset.

DeFi needs a new primitive to service the rapidly growing category of illiquid assets. By “illiquid assets”, we’re talking NFTs, exotic and low-cap ERC-20s, and whatever else the “next big thing” is going to be.

PWN is building exactly that.

Funnily enough, building a revolutionary new primitive means that you have to iterate on top of something simple that already exists. The simpler your foundation, the bigger the innovation potential. In PWN’s case, the cornerstone at hand is peer-to-peer (P2P) lending.

Introducing PWN, a platform that allows users to make use of any digital asset as collateral for a loan.

The DeFi and NFT ecosystems have captured outstanding value. They’ve made previously theoretical tools, like permissionless and on-chain swaps over-collateralized loans, stable coin generation, and the wide acceptance of digital assets that accrue value, into a reality.

If this is where we’re at today, what might tomorrow look like?

Picture a future in which most assets of value are digitized in the form of an on-chain token. Soon, the digital asset class will be the go-to solution for the creation of new financial instruments. Moreover, the ownership of an increasing number of real-world assets can be tokenized and transferred on-chain. We can already see the first cases of that happening today.

I stocked up on NFTs! Now what?

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are undisputedly a major milestone in the widespread adoption of both web3 mechanics and cryptocurrencies themselves.

The emergence of NFTs isn’t so much about their underlying tech, since that has already been around for several years now. Instead, the significance lies in the way that the NFT wave has received mainstream attention — making the current NFT craze even more amusing.

GM 👋 fellow defi degens, apes, crypto-natives, bankless nation or simply people who are building the foundation of the metaverse. We are thrilled to join you in-arms as we build a borderless and premissionless world together.

PWN is for all crypto-natives

We are PWN, and our mission isn’t anything smaller than to pwn banks and tradfi: we're going to pry open access to financial services for everyone, regardless of their identity, ethnicity or social status.

Let’s face it: if you are a crypto-native, your access to regular financial services is limited. Your net worth is in digital assets, and you work for... uhm what?... a DAO?