The problem ARTHA solves

The problem ARTHA solves

1. Current micro-lending platforms are not lender friendly. We solve this problem by incentivizing people to pool in more money.
2. Most of the MFIs are backed by corporate banks which means high interest rates. On our platform we use loan auctions to determine the interest rate for the borrower. Loan auctioning selects the most optimal rate for a loan request, which is fair enough for the borrower, while still ensuring competition among lenders.
3. Slower loan approval rate. Our Unique Algorithm brings in competition among lenders which makes the loan approval process faster than any other platform.
4. Loan Security. Dharma’s underwriter takes care of the security part on the borrower side allowing the option of digital assets as collateral.
5. Patchy maintenance of accounts. We are using dharma protocol for building our loan engine. Blockchain ensures proper account and transaction records
6. Certain groups(women , dalits, tribals,scheduled castes/tribes) are not given microloans. On our platform anonymity on the network ensures equality to all.

Challenges we ran into

1. Implementing our own loan redistribution algorithm with Dharma proved to be tricky.Changing the Dharma source code didn't seem feasible given the time we had.Ethereum is not very math-friendly when it comes to writing logic for smart contracts. So we decided to do the calculations off-chain and use an Oracle Service to send in the results after computation.
2. We wanted to add an auction mechanism for selcting a interest rate for the borrower. We were again trying to tweak Dharma's code so that we can fit in our model on it. This made the whole architecture non-modular. So we added a solidity contract as a layer before the underwriter which performs the auction process and then sends the selected interest rate to the underwriter. This helped us keep our architecture modular