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.
How to use PWN (and why)
The chief reason why we started with P2P lending is because this model is natively compatible with virtually any digital asset. PWN can therefore unlock all the previously illiquid value stored in DeFi.
The most obvious — and immediate — use case is the utilization of NFTs:
Borrowing use cases using any NFT (ERC-721 & ERC-1155) as collateral
1. A collector looking to leverage their portfolio to buy a valuable asset
2. A trader looking to exploit market opportunity in need of short-term liquidity
However, PWN isn’t just about the current hype. Contrarily, we’re future-proof. Exotic and low-cap ERC-20s (in other words, coins) are also natively supported, along with any innovative asset class that is bound to spring out of this vibrant industry in the foreseeable future. Simply replace “NFT” with “ERC-20” in the example use cases:
Borrowing use cases using any coin (ERC-20) as collateral
In addition to the aforementioned use cases for borrowing using NFTs, the following cases are relevant for those borrowing using coins:
1. DAO looking to raise funds through a convertible note
2. An investor looking to hedge an open position through put option
As you’ve probably noticed, when we leverage other assets than NFTs, two more use cases pop up: Convertible notes for DAOs, and put options for traders interested in hedging their positions.
We'll be digging deeper into each of these use cases in a future post.
Details about our go-to-market strategy
Our team is currently focused on the creation of power users, one by one. We’ll do this by providing detailed support, guidance on using our platform, and bespoke over-the-counter (OTC) deals.
Additionally, launching PWN’s market-making DAO (an initiative planned for Q1 2022) will allow us to reach the wider DeFi audience. Through our DAO, we can build upon what people know and love about lending pools and drastically reduce capital requirements for participation in our markets.
The simplicity of peer-to-peer lending must not distract us from the fact that PWN is building a completely new DeFi primitive. One such innovation built on top of our markets is the PWN deed token. This feature is an NFT representation of a loan on PWN (similar to Uniswap’s LP NFTs) and enables features such as a secondary market, indexes, and the potential base for advanced financial derivatives.
The features that we’re currently building are designed to significantly boost the liquidity of our lending markets, onboard the wider DeFi audience to PWN, and bring the ecosystem one step closer to institutional respect and recognition
Between this year’s releases of our proof of concept in May and the mainnet version in November, successfully completed two contract audits, onboarded some industry legends as advisors and raised a $1 million seed round from Dialectic along with some other industry OG angels, including Patricio Worthalter, Tim Beiko, Will Harborne, Kenneth Ng and Chris Waclawek.
What’s next at PWN?
The grand vision of PWN is to eventually unlock all the value stored in any digital asset and allow it to be deployed in the real world. Anyone will be able to mortgage their Bored Apes and buy a home. They will also be able to turn their Axies into a stream of income by renting them out to other players.
We are working every day to fulfil this grand vision one step at a time. A fully functional mainnet version is out as of November 2021 and is managed by the most enthusiastic team ever (19 people strong and growing!). We’ve written more about the PWN team and platform in another post – read up to learn more about us!
Want to know more about what we’re building? Want to get involved?