Xend Finance: Powering DeFi Credit Union with higher returns for African savers.
XendFinance a decentralized finance application backed by Binance Lab and Google Launchpad is on course to bring DeFi Credit Union to Africa with higher returns for savers. Xend Finance is a product of Xend, a Nigerian FinTech Company with a network of over 55,000 individuals, pushing the adoption of Xend Finance in Africa. Founded by Aronu Ugochukwu, Xend Finance aims to pioneer the adoption of DeFi in Africa with its DeFi application that supports the Ethereum blockchain, using smart contracts as an algorithm to reward users and a governance token, $XEND for its Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governance via Xend smart contracts, governor smart contracts and time lock smart contracts. These smart contracts would allow the Xend Finance community to propose features, vote and execute approved proposals like Adjusting Group Reward (Gcr), Early Withdrawal Charge (Ewc), Defaulters Charge (Dc) and $Xend Depreciation Factor (Df)
A common problem faced by traditional credit unions, savers and cooperatives in African societies is the constant devaluation of local currencies mostly due to unstable economies in most African countries. This has resulted to constant loss to savers and credit unions. According to Nairametrics, inflation in Nigeria rose to 13.22% in August, 2020 while the naira (Nigerian local currency) dropped over -30% against the US dollar. In Uganda, africanmarketsreports that inflation rate as at May, 2020 was 2.8% while the shilling
(Ugandan local currency) dropped 2.6% against the US dollar. This goes to show the level of unstableness of the economy in most African countries. Other problems include unfavorable government policies and lack of detailed financial data on credit union activities.
Xend Finance aims to overcome these problems via financial inclusion in developing countries by creating a platform for converting local currency deposits (offline and online) into crypto and harvesting yields on DeFi platforms like Compound, Maker and Aave. With a decentralized insurance in place, Xend Finance would use its location agonistic protocol to allow savers save and also create their own credit union from any location, while getting returns as much as 15% APY in a flexible loan system. With Xend Finance, you can easily invest on schedule, automatically stake your savings on DeFi networks like Compound, Maker or Aave or even save in a stable currency such as $BUSD or $DAI and earn interest as much as 15% APY.
Xend Finance currently supports the Ethereum blockchain and would soon support the Binance smart chain for interoperability, heterogeneous sharing for quick transactions, high security via POS relay chain and onchain governance. In the words of CEO Aronu Ugochukwu, “Once we launch the first version of Xend Finance, we will immediately start working on a software development kit (SDK) for both web and mobile applications. This SDK will be integrated into the Xend and Geena and any other web2.0 or web3.0 applications……we are aware that our target industry (cooperative and credit union) are not very crypto savvy, hence the need to create a system that makes it easy for them to use”. With backing from Binance Labs, Google Launchpad, AU21 Capital, TRG Capital, Sandeep Nailwal and others, XendFinance looks ready to power DeFi Credit Union adoption in Africa.
By Ini Abasi Ekanem
