Today, we are happy to introduce Qiro Finance to the world. We have been researching and building this for months with a clear vision to build global private credit infrastructure leveraging DeFi rails. Combining the best principles and practices from fintech lending and DeFi and reflecting on our experience throughout our career working in these domains, We’re excited to finally share our vision to the broader DeFi community.

RWAs are here!

Real-World Assets i.e. RWAs have become a significant topic in the web3 industry, with $8 billion already invested in on-chain protocols across various asset classes, including T-bills, private credit, real estate etc. This trend has been further propelled by the entry of financial institutions like Blackrock and Franklin Templeton, who have launched their funds on-chain.

We believe that RWAs address a fundamental issue in TradFi: illiquid assets and limited accessibility. By transitioning assets from off-chain ledgers to on-chain systems, they become modular "money legos," enabling the creation of diverse financial products. This innovation allows anyone holding stablecoins to invest in previously inaccessible assets, thereby making the illiquid assets more liquid and accessible.

Private Credit X RWA

Private credit has emerged as a leading sector within the realm of RWAs, offering stablecoin investors high-yield debt investment opportunities. However, the sector faces inherent credit risks that smart contracts alone cannot mitigate. The current on-chain private credit infrastructure presents several issues:

1-Disconnected Ledgers: Asset originators' ledgers are off-chain, meaning on-chain protocols can't directly access or connect with these ledgers.

2-Reliance on Middlemen: The current system depends on intermediaries like Pool delegates or the asset originators themselves to underwrite the risk of tokenized RWA loans. This setup is often opaque and resembles a black box.

3-Risk Pricing Limitations: DeFi lacks the capability to accurately price the risk of complex assets like RWAs. Which renders DeFi as merely a capital formation tool.

4-No Active Risk Management: There's an absence of active risk framework or infra to monitor RWA collateral value and provide early warning signals for credit defaults.

In summary, credit underwriting infra in DeFi is broken and must be improved to enable DeFi to support pricing of complex RWAs. It will require robust credit data infrastructure combined with expertise in RWA credit underwriting. Qiro aims to address this by developing a distributed credit underwriting network.

Qiro’s Credit Underwriting Network

Qiro is building a distributed credit underwriting network that gathers structured credit data from various off-chain sources and connects it with a network of underwriting compute nodes. These nodes, hosted by credit underwriting experts, operate independently, running credit models and policies. The underwriting polices are executed in a verifiable compute environment, and the aggregated results are subsequently posted on-chain along with computation proof.

This approach utilises robust infrastructure with collective intelligence to address underwriting issues in RWA protocols. Beyond underwriting the lending pools, these nodes also monitor RWA collateral and covenants post-loan, ensuring active risk management at the protocol level. By distributing the risk underwriting across multiple nodes, bias is minimised, and a transparent underwriting process is achieved.

To join the network, nodes are required to stake a specific amount and are rewarded for their contribution to underwriting RWA lending pools on the Qiro protocol. Nodes confident in the asset originators are required to put “skin in the game” to back their decision by investing in the junior tranche, thereby aligning their incentives with the success of the loan. We will be publishing more details on the underwriter’s incentive model soon.

Qiro envisions its credit underwriting network becoming the standard credit data and underwriting infrastructure for RWA credit marketplaces and protocols. We are excited about forming collaborations with several of them in the coming months.

Qiro Protocol: Under the hood

At core, Qiro is developing a decentralised private credit protocol with the capability to facilitate a wide range of RWA lending applications. This is achieved by unifying asset originators, stablecoin investors, and credit underwriters within a single framework.

Today, there are multiple liquidity pools on-chain looking to fund RWAs, but from a point of view of asset originator they should not be interacting with all of them, rather there should be a single, standardized protocol that interacts with all, standardizes data sets and underwriters for yield generation.

Qiro’s vision is to be the protocol for anyone to source/provide debt/capital without Qiro’s intervention - at this stage KYC/AML whitelisted asset originators and stablecoin investors have an incentive to participate in the network of debt markets with better data and better rates than any other market. We foresee different RWA lending applications to be built on top of Qiro protocol such as DePIN Financing, Embedded Financing in the coming time.

Qiro Private Credit Marketplace

Qiro Marketplace is the first app being built on the Qiro Protocol which connects stablecoin investors with emerging market fintech asset originators for fixed yield opportunities. Fintech loans underwriting on Qiro Marketplace will be the first use-case for Qiro’s distributed credit underwriting network.

For every lending pool, stablecoin investors can invest in the senior tranche, where the junior tranche will be fulfilled by the credit underwriters and asset originators. This provides a credit risk buffer for senior tranche investors.

We are aiming to launch Qiro Marketplace on testnet in Q3 2024, followed by mainnet later this year. If you are interested to become asset originator, stablecoin investor, or credit underwriter on Qiro, get early access here:

To learn more about Qiro please visit here. We would be soon publishing series of articles to dive deeper in the protocol design.

Who we are

We are a team of builders with hands-on experience in traditional fintech lending combined with DeFi experts who have been actively building protocols for a while. This puts us in a strong position to build a bridge to TradFi private credit leveraging DeFi.

We’ve got amazing advisors with experience of building unicorns in emerging market credit, Vasant Sridhar & Asish Mohopatra, Co-Founders at Oxyzo(OfBusiness Group). Also, joined by Mahesh Ramakrishnan, General Partner at Escape Velocity (EV3) ventures who has helped us a-lot in forming thesis around Qiro’s underwriting network since the early days.

Our Pre-Seed raise

We are thrilled to announce the $1.2 million pre-seed financing round, led by Alliance. This round saw participation from esteemed investors including Druid Ventures, Escape Velocity (EV3) Ventures, Trident Digital and CMT Digital.

In addition to this, Qiro Finance secured a 100,000 MATIC grant from Polygon under the 'Polygon’s Village Build Ideas Program'.

The funds allocated from the pre-seed round will be strategically utilized for product development and ecosystem expansion in preparation for the mainnet launch later this year.

Sign up for early access

Stablecoin investors, asset originators and credit underwriters interested in exploring Qiro, please sign up here for early access:

At Qiro, we are always on the lookout for talented individuals to join our team. If you are interested in exploring career opportunities with us, please visit our Careers page or reach out to us at @Qiro_Finance on twitter.

To stay updated with upcoming news on the product launch, please connect with us here on Twitter & Telegram. Learn more about the protocol here.