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!
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?