Cardano Launches Lending Platform Test in Africa, Aims for Full Rollout in Near Term

Cardano developers are testing an enterprise lending program in Africa and aim to have a working product ready for rollout soon.

Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK) African Operations director John O’Connor says the first loans on Cardano’s “RealFi” system were issued over the weekend.

“First loans to Kenyan [small and medium-sized enterprises] went out over the weekend.

Looking forward to turning this into a product soon so any Cardano holder can generate yield that’s uncorrelated to crypto whilst making an impact.”

According to an IOHK blog post, RealFi is Cardano’s mission to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) to the mainstream. IOHK says it’s looking to create an ecosystem of financial products that remove friction between crypto liquidity and economic activity while giving yield to crypto holders and more accessible credit to everyday people.

In a recent podcast, John Connor, IOHK’s African operations director discusses the regulatory challenges of lending in Kenya.

“You’ve got a whole bunch of regulatory challenges which are inhibiting these kinds of [financial lending] flows. Let’s say I want to lend into this Kenya and [small and medium-sized enterprises fund]. Well, the Kenyan regulator needs to know the [know-your-customer] information of every single investor that’s putting money into this opportunity.

That makes sense in a [traditional finance] world where I have these complicated [know-your-customer] forms and all of the rest, but what if I’m just lending from a wallet? It’s a slightly different scenario.

We’re well-placed to either ameliorate these blockers with technology or to work proactively with governments on doing the regulatory changes – we’ve sort of hit that size and scope.”

Cardano is trading for $0.93 at time of writing, up nearly 6% on the day.

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