Welcome to Florence Finance!
![Florence Finance Defi Real World Lending](https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/florence-cdn/blog/2022/07/1-XZzZUrJYZhqwpkTD_60GnA.png)
The cryptocurrency and DeFi space are growing at an impressive rate. Solutions like MakerDAO, Compound, or AAVE have proven that lending can be facilitated without the need for a trusted middleman. One thing the major DeFi lending platforms have in common is that they require their loans to be at least fully collateralized by cryptocurrency. While this is necessary in order to provide lenders with the security of being paid back, it is not suited for anyone who needs to borrow more capital than they already have as cryptocurrency or wishes to borrow against real-world assets.
This is not a small restriction. Out there, in the non cryptocurrency world, there are more than 100 trillion USD worth of potential non-crypto assets (collateral) to be borrowed against and there is an ever-growing amount of value/liquidity accruing to crypto assets looking for yield.
Our mission at Florence Finance is to close this gap. We want to enable people to borrow digital assets against their real-world collateral. This of course is no easy task. There are plenty of regulatory and user-acceptance barriers that have to be overcome. However, after carefully monitoring the situation for years, we believe now is the time to make our move and prove that DeFi can be bridged into real-world lending.
In order to kick off what we believe will become an exciting journey, we have identified a specific opportunity that will allow our protocol users to fund real-world small business loans with their cryptocurrency.
We will share how exactly that works and how you can participate in our alpha launch in the coming blog posts.
Until then feel free to read our whitepaper and join us in pushing the frontiers of decentralized finance: