LendingRobot – an alternative lending platform – is taking steps to move its managed assets to a blockchain.
As part of its newly launched LendingRobot Series of investment products, the platform – which has $120m worth of assets currently deployed – will begin to post detailed accounts of some of its investments to the public ethereum blockchain.
The investments themselves will still be conducted off-blockchain using the P2P lender’s existing infrastructure. But the process of hashing detailed, anonymized accounting records to a blockchain marks the beginning of a broader plan.
Currently, LendingRobot uses a machine-learning algorithm to identify lending opportunities made available to non-bank creditors by way of platforms such as Lending Club, Prosper, and Funding Circle. Then, the firm executes those loans using Amazon’s S3 cloud computing platform, reaching 6,500 clients.
With the LendingRobot Series of investments announced today, the data will be hashed on the ethereum blockchain to establish the “proof-of-state” for the entire portfolio.
LendingRobot, which has raised more than $3m in venture funding to date, plans to hash its first data on the ethereum blockchain when the first loan in the series takes place, which the company expects will occur next week.
From there, the startup will publish the anonymized data every week moving forward.
Clients will be able to download a file of the data from the Amazon platform with a record of the hash alongside each file. Investors and auditors can then take the downloaded file, run it through the same hash algorithm the company uses, and verify that the hash matches.
After testing the SHA3_512 hashing algorithms, LendingRobot selected the BLAKE2 algorithm co-developed by Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox to encode its records.
