Community Update #4
Dear Community,
First of all, we want to wish you all the best for the new year. I know it's been a bit quiet from the front as markets have been puking and the breaking of the "number go-up" tech that we usually depend on to tickle our dopamine receptors has forced us to focus on the thing that really makes us tick: BUILD.
....and we have good progress to show for it. We have updated & deployed the new and improved Loan Vaults (smart contract architecture based on ERC4626 standard) and updated the front-end UI, so you should be able to see a whole new look and feel if you venture to our website and read about the improved inner workings of the Loan Vault in de Docs. Meanwhile, we have also continued to cautiously build the TVL and the borrowing base and now have a handful of performing SME loans fully funded with institutional funding support from NewForm Capital, 3CC, and our launching customers and partners Caple & SwishFund.
Caple's SME working capital product
Together with Caple we have launched a novel, ESG-compliant, SME working capital funding product that we believe is very befitting of the Florence Finance ethos and will play an important part in addressing the credit needs of SMEs in these volatile and inflationary times whilst providing attractive yield to our funding base. Together we have funded three loans in the past months:
- The first €500k loan was granted to Co-Med, a fast-growing consolidator in the Dutch medical practitioner sector.
- The second €500k loan went to Sandstep, a private hospital group that specializes in relatively straightforward medical operations and provides operating theatres as a service to large hospitals.
- The third €1m loan to Noordijk, a regional construction company that is vertically integrating with a thriving building materials wholesaler
Besides the above-mentioned loans, Florence Finance Europe has funded two loans totaling €1,5m to our other launching partner SwishFund and there is a healthy pipeline of borrowing requests for both the Junior and the Caple lending pool that we are actively seeking funding for.
The new Protocol architecture
The decision to change the architecture of the lending pools to an ERC4626 Loan Vault standard was a big one and has taken a sizeable development to implement. That said we believe this will lay the groundwork for future scalability and robustness as well as easing auditability. the legacy Loan Pool tokens have all been successfully migrated to the new Loan Vaults. We have funded the first loan in the new architecture on mainnet, be it in a "closed" setting (i.e. only whitelisted parties can interact with the protocol).
We are now ready to add whitelisted funders to grow the lending operations and we will be testing and working towards enabling secondary trading of FLR (allowing 3rd party participation) in the coming months.
Marketing
Given the protocol is still somewhat closed for non-whitelisted parties we will not be ramping up our marketing activities just yet but we will be communicating proactively with users that are willing/able to be whitelisted, that have the knowledge and interest in DeFi and real-world lending in order to get feedback on our v3.0 launch. Make sure to follow our channels for further details on this and everything else: