A social-capital based approach to blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer lending

There are many peer-to-peer lending platforms that offer users to obtain a loan by committing a collateral or by calculating a “credit score”, which is based on factors such as the users’ credit history. However, the requirements of collateral and credit history are quite burdensome for some users. Nowadays, with more than 55% of the global population using social media [6], there is a lot of public personal data. This data could be used as an alternative risk mitigator for lending. There are many inferences that can be drawn from the users’ social media accounts about their professional behavior and reliability, allowing us to derive the users’ social trustworthiness. We propose to calculate a “social score” based on the social media data of a user. Our contribution is to develop an Ethereum blockchain-enabled fully decentralized lending platform that relies on this score. This platform could give users a chance for a loan even if they do not have a collateral or a sufficient credit score.