Hello David!
Thank you for your feedback on our proposal.
First, to answer your questions:
The mid-term goal is to build a full end-to-end automated lending experience: buy something with your card, and FlexiFi handles payment by taking a loan for you and protecting that loan using its risk management strategies. (See illustration below)
That said, building this vision will take more time, especially as we start without pre-existing integrations on Gnosis. For the initial phase that would run over the first few months (with support from a first grant), we plan to focus on integrating with Ajna. This will allow early adopters to manually access credit on our platform while benefiting from FlexiFi’s loan protection features.
Right now we’re integrated with Morpho on Base and running tests with a handful of users. Since FlexiFi operates fully on-chain, unlike other platforms like DeFi Saver and Summer.fi, this testing phase is crucial for refining our product and iterating on features. In terms of UI, we’ve already built an interface that allows a user to list credit lines they have already opened, and guides them through setting-up a protection strategy consisting of the partial liquidation strategy.
Moving forward, we plan to evolve this UI into a simpler “borrow X against Y” form that automatically sets-up mitigation strategies using a pre-defined risk profile that the user chooses. Fortunately, our experience in building Web 2 applications allows us to rapidly iterate and deploy a production-ready UI.
I’d like to address your concerns regarding Ajna’s current challenges and priorities, and highlight how FlexiFi could contribute to Ajna’s growth.
Regarding resource prioritisation
I appreciate that Ajna’s current priorities are lenders, and not borrowers. It was my understanding that ARK was being worked on, but I would like to highlight that implementation of FlexiFi would further benefit lenders in the following ways:
- By reducing the frequency and severity of liquidations of borrowers borrowing through it, FlexiFi creates a more stable environment, making Ajna more attractive to potential lenders.
- Automated risk management decreases the likelihood of bad debt, directly protecting lenders’ liquidity.
- FlexiFi’s self-liquidation mechanism would directly decrease the number of auctions Ajna has to kick off, thus freeing up lender liquidity more efficiently.
We see FlexiFi as complementary to ARK and other lender tools, focusing on making borrowers non-adversarial, making Ajna safer and more efficient, while ARK addresses lender needs. This parallel development could create a more robust and appealing ecosystem for all users.
Regarding Gnosis Chain Strategy
The emergence of services like Gnosis Pay and Holyheld indicates growing interest in DeFi-based payment solutions. While it’s largely speculative at this point, if we look at traditional finance, retail credit eventually followed suit and captured most of the value from everyday payments.
At prgm we believe this shift will happen here, but in the composable Web3 fashion.
We’ve held this belief for some time, and many companies have since announced payment products — Metamask, Mastercard and 1Inch being notable examples. Now, even lending protocols like Exactly are rolling out their very own credit card, signalling a growing trend that Ajna could lead with the right tools in place.