Why are you participating for Based LatAm?

As a Venezuelan migrant, I’ve seen how the barriers to financial inclusion hold back talented individuals across Latin America, but the problem is much greater than even I realized. Did you know that over half of the people living in Colombia aren't registered in credit bureaus?

For the past year I’ve been advising Roda, a company that has issued thousands of traditional loans for people with non-traditional backgrounds: delivery drivers, micro-entrepreneurs, migrants. People like Juan, who relied on collecting recyclables in Bogotá to make ends meet, and Liliana, a webcammer from Cúcuta trying to build a future. Both were excluded from formal financial systems, yet through Roda, Juan eventually financed a motorcycle, doubling his income, and Liliana started a small hair saloon with her family.

These experiences inspired me to participate in Based LatAm: I want to push beyond the typical “education” projects that often benefit only those who are already familiar with crypto. I aim to build something that offers real utility to people like Juan and Liliana—who have no interest in the complexities of the technology, but who need its benefits. At Roda, we are testing the hypothesis that putting our (anonymized) loanbook onchain can help us get access to capital on better terms, thus passing on better interest rates to our clients.

Base, with the expressivity of the EVM, its very low fees and supportive community, seems like the ideal public database to publish our loanbook. Throughout Based LatAm, we'll be putting a subset of our loans onchain and build the first version of a "loans explorer" for individuals or institutions who might be interested in contributing to our portfolio. This level of transparency for capital providers is unprecedented in the traditional lending industry, and should lead to more affordable credit to our clients.

What challenges are you focusing on?

Financial Inclusion

Many individuals in Latin America, like delivery drivers and migrants, are shut out of formal financial systems despite being resourceful and creditworthy. Our focus is on providing them access to capital, using uncollateralized (cash) and collateralized (e.g. motorcycles, ebikes) loans as tools for upward mobility.

Bridging the Crypto Gap

Crypto projects often target those already familiar with the technology, missing the people who could benefit most. My goal is to create an onchain solution where beneficiaries gain the benefits without needing to understand (and in this case, even use) the tech.

Access to Affordable Capital

Traditional banks view migrants and gig workers as high-risk borrowers, resulting in high-interest rates or denied credit. By putting Roda’s loanbook onchain, we aim to access better financing terms, offering more affordable loans to our clients.

Transparency in Lending

Lending systems are often opaque, especially across borders, so capital providers demand higher interest rates. The transparency of using a public ledger will build trust, making the underwriting process more open and fair.

How does your submission address this challenge?

Our submission takes a few steps towards enhancing financial inclusion, transparency, and affordability in lending in Latin America.

We crafted and deployed an source-verified smart contract on Base Sepolia that stores the loanbook onchain. The contract is a modified ERC-721 NFT that tracks loan details such as principal, outstanding balance, issuance date, term, and purpose. The loan issuer (in this case, Roda) can issue loans and record payments that clients make.

Using this contract, we mirrored an anonymized sample of our loanbook to the Base Sepolia chain, logging over 11,500 transactions that include over 1,000 loans issued and over 10,000 payments recorded.

Blockchain addresses on Base represent Roda clients. We considered it out of scope to build a user-facing application that generates private keys for these addresses and gives clients access to their NFTs. For this hackathon, we have decided to focus on crypto-native capital investors who want to invest in a publicly-available loanbook, potentially targetting individual beneficiaries (a la Watsi) or using custom rules (e.g. invest only in people with perfect repayment history), so what we built instead was the simplest possible version of a loanbook explorer.

Our web app syncs up with the RodaLoan contract on the Base Sepolia chain and displays the latest activity on Roda's loanbook in a format that's easier to understand for casual visitors than a general-purpose block explorer. Try it here!

Challenges we ran into

Technical issues

We had issues with NodeJS versions, as well as verifying the contract on Basescan using Foundry. We ended up using Hardhat, which we also had version issues with, but ultimately worked after consulting with LLM tools and between oursleves. The experience was difficult but great for Alejandro to take some rust off his coding skills!

We struggled to get enough Sepolia ETH to complete 4,000+ transactions. We overcame this by asking for help in the Discord and Telegram chats, people were very helpful and pointed out key resources to us, like sepoliaeth.com. We also asked for help from friends who are more seasoned in JavaScript and smart contract development (shoutout to our good friend Juan Andreu).

We decided to populate a Supabase database that could power a simple app, but fetching events from the contract using Hardhat also proved to be difficult, as our scripts wouldn't consistently fetch all the data. We solved this by batch process about every 500 blocks from contract creation to the present using Infura.

Non-technical issues

After mirroring our records onchain, we realized that we should make the NFTs soulbound, as we don't want clients "passing on" their loans to others. Since end users don't (yet) have access to their tokens, and the information recorded is the same for would-be investors, it's not a big priority. We will fix this with an update to the smart contract.

Additional Features

Roda, as a company, has been giving out loans since 2020 and recording them in a traditional database. Here's what we added during the challenge:

• We refined our internal system that helps us categorize the purposes of our loans (e.g. for a domestic emergency, to finance a motorcycle).
• We wrote and deployed a new smart contract on Base Sepolia to represent the loanbook
• We published over 1,000 of our loans and data from 10,000 repayments onchain, using the smart contract above
• We built the first version of a "loan explorer" where web visitors can look at the onchain loan data