The problem Poruka solves

When we talk about public goods in web3, the intentions are good but often abstracted from irl, on-the-ground use-cases. Ukraine has the third highest adoption rate of crypto in the world and they are fighting to end the war with Russia. Something learned from hacking in Ukraine during Kyiv Tech Summit last week was that the best way to support Ukraine is economically. Economic support means direct aid, community prosperity, and business growth. What if there was a tool that could scale to all those solutions?

Poruka can.

Poruka is a credit coordination layer that enables users to set their own interest terms.

Contact list: sign up and select contacts from your off-chain social network via phone number, Twitter, or email address.

Currency: DAI for store of value against debasement of Ukrainian Hrivna, and values displayed in USD for a more trad user experience.

Select what you accept: users select which credit lines and rates they are comfortable withdrawing from.

Direct aid: 0% interest borderless support lines from friends and relatives outside Ukraine to internally displaced persons and refugees turn into a pot of money that can be tapped into whenever necessary.

Business growth: support Ukrainian start-ups by crowd-lending at a rate competitive to centralized banks in Ukraine, which on average offer an extractive 30% interest on business loans.

Global solution to interest: turn self-interest into shared interest. Half of the interest goes to the lender, and half goes into the community savings account of the borrower’s choice.

Challenges we ran into

Twitter Rate Limits: Twitter's API for retrieving followers/followings has a rate limit of 15 requests per 15 mins. This was quickly hit while testing. We hard-coded a sample result and created a rotation Twitter API client system, which switches to a new api key after every request (linear increase of requests by the number of api keys added).

Setting constraints of the application: The nitial brainstorming session turned out too eventful. While there are a ton of additional features we would like to add to Poruka, the scope of this project needed to be limited. To figure out what a working MVP could look like, we required quite a few mentor's opinions.

Treasury: We debated over having a big treasury that collects all interest paymets vs. using smaller sub-graph-like treasuries capturing addresses in a lending relationship vs. community treasuries with the borrower's choice of contribution flow. We ended up doing a whitboarding session to come up with a suitable design.

Time: just more time.