As 2025 begins, we take a moment to celebrate Zeru’s incredible first year of pioneering the future of onchain credit. In 2024, we recognized the transformative potential of DeFI and AI, leading us to create a behavior-based wallet primitive for credit—a foundational step toward redefining how credit works in the decentralized economy.
Here’s a detailed recap of everything we accomplished in 2024, a year that laid the groundwork for an inclusive and thriving onchain credit economy.
Key Milestones: Redefining Credit
Zeru made substantial progress in building the foundation for decentralized credit systems, achieving several critical milestones that established its leadership in the onchain credit economy.
zScore: The Credit Primitive
In 2024, we launched zScore, a first-of-its-kind, decentralized, AI-powered credit infrastructure. It’s accessible through myzscore.ai and was built as an EigenLayer AVS to ensure decentralization and security.
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zScore uses a behavior-centric neural network that analyzes user activity across DeFi categories like lending/borrowing, DEXs, perpetuals, and liquid staking tokens/liquid restaked tokens (LSTs/LRTs). This modular approach provides a more accurate, adaptable, and inclusive credit assessment system.
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With zkTLS technology, future users will be able to bring their real-world credit scores onchain, further enhancing their zScore. This bridges traditional and decentralized finance, empowering more people to access DeFi.
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By utilizing onchain data, zScore eliminates biases inherent in traditional credit systems, fostering trust and inclusivity.
Testnet Deployment for Money Markets
Zeru’s credit-backed money markets went live on Berachain and Base testnets, setting the foundation for advanced lending protocols focused on capital efficiency. These deployments introduced a comprehensive platform that includes liquidity providing on Kodiak, native Berachain tokens such as $HONEY, $BERA, $iBGT, $NECT and $USDC, which users can use to loop through borrowing and repaying through the app.
Community Engagement and Growth
Zeru surpassed 100,000 unique users, driven by campaigns like Zubbles and the incentivized testnet. We’re sure this number will continue to grow in 2025.
Protocol Integration and Partnerships
Zeru forged collaborations with leading protocols, which facilitated growth of the Zeru’s ecosystem, including:
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API3: For secure and accurate data delivery
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Kodiak: Enabling leveraged liquidity strategies on the Zeru super app Othentic: Strengthening verification for credit assessments
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EigenLayer: Providing decentralized infrastructure for zScore
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LayerZero: Facilitating omnichain interoperability
… and others.
We’re very thankful for the support we received from each of our partners, and cannot wait to continue building together in 2025!
Major Campaigns in 2024
Through creative and engaging campaigns, Zeru introduced its innovations to a broader audience, fostering user participation and refining its systems.
Incentivized Berachain Testnet Campaign
Zeru launched an incentivized testnet for its money markets on Berachain, offering exclusive rewards to early testers. This campaign marked a significant step in demonstrating the capabilities of its decentralized lending solutions. Participants explored lending, borrowing, and zero-collateral loans while earning rewards.
Zubbles Campaign
A community-driven, gamified campaign designed to familiarize users with the zScore ecosystem. Participants earned rewards for completing tasks such as interacting with the testnet and exploring dynamic LTV features.
Accompanying this campaign, Zeru introduced unique comic strips to creatively explain challenges in DeFi and how zScore addresses these issues, engaging both newcomers and seasoned DeFi.
Octobera Revolution
The most ambitious campaign of the year, highlighting the deployment of a universal zScore model that integrates seamlessly with DeFi protocols like Aave, Uniswap, and Compound. Octobera Revolution showcased zScore’s cross-chain interoperability and its role in driving innovation in onchain credit systems.
Incentivized Base Sepolia Testnet Campaign
Zeru launched an incentivized testnet for its money markets on Base Sepolia, offering rewards to early testers similar to those available on Berachain testnet. This showed how Zeru’s DeFi super app can accommodate different protocols on different blockchains, while incorporating all of it back into zScore. Participants can earn extra Zubbles on Base Sepolia by lending, borrowing, and depositing funds into various protocols while earning rewards.
Events & Panel Discussions
Zeru participated in some of the most significant industry events, engaging with the DeFi community, strengthening partnerships, and showcasing its vision for the future of decentralized credit systems.
ETHMilan (Q3 2024)
Zeru participated alongside key contributors to the Bera ecosystem in the "Building a Sustainable DeFi Ecosystem in the Berachain" panel, discussing how zScore and Zeru’s money markets could drive capital efficiency and ecosystem growth.
The team also held discussions with the Reclaim team about implementing zkTLS technology to enhance security and scalability in DeFi applications.
Token2049 Singapore (Q4 2024)
Zeru joined the DeFi panel on "Scaling Decentralized Credit Systems”alongside industry leaders like Coinbase, Uniswap, and Aave. The team emphasized zScore’s ability to enable seamless under-collateralized lending across ecosystems.
In the meantime, Zeru team members connected with influential figures such as Stani Kulechov (Aave), Nader Dabit (EigenLayer), and Jesse Pollak (Base), fostering collaboration opportunities and strengthening the ties.
DevCon (Q4 2024)
Zeru joined forces with prominent projects like MegaETH and Taiko, emphasizing the integration of zScore with L2 scaling solutions and its potential to enhance DeFi adoption globally. Together with Ashutosh, the projects above spoke together on a panel called "AI and On-Chain Credit: The Next Frontier."
As we enter 2025, Zeru is just getting started. With the progress made in 2024 as a foundation, Zeru is well-positioned to lead the charge in redefining credit and DeFi. The path forward is clear: to keep innovating, collaborating, and creating a more inclusive financial ecosystem.
Here’s to another year of success and transformation!