A design concept and MVP for a De-Fi application with the intent of serving as an alternative to payday lenders, credit cards, and other predatory lenders that often target people when they're at their most vulnerable.

View the design in Framer here.

View the app on Algorand testnet here.

Esoteric and unfriendly UX patterns make DeFi’s value opaque to most users. With my design and MVP for LEPTA, I tried to use the same underlying tech, but with a focus on shared interest, generosity, and community. The app manages a pool of funds that allows small, uncollateralized loans and then uses token incentives and transparency to encourage timely, generous payback. Interest payments became voluntary tips, and anonymous wallets were shown to be members of your community who were in need of financial help.

Borrowers are free to take up to $400 (the average payday loan) permissionlessly from a shared pool of money. If they pay it back, plus a pay-what-you-can tip, they earn points that let them borrow more the next time. Points are distributed based on a convex dividend rate, which rewards long-term generosity to the pool. Points are also distributed more readily when the pool balance is getting low. Depositers share the collected tips between them, based on their time-weighted share of the pool.

The design was done in Framer. For the MVP, I wrote some simple smart contracts in PyTEAL (Algorand's contract language) using the Beaker framework and the Algokit toolchain. The bare-bones interface is Typescript with no additional frameworks or dependencies - it was intended to be more of an open building block that a community could fork and modify to suit their own needs.