I recently heard about Arcade who apparently raised $15M in 2021 to offer NFT-backed loans. Their peer-to-peer platform, somewhat similar to Teller, allows anyone to borrow or lend against an NFT.
So I went on and became a lender, which didn’t include anything other than signing a transaction with Arcade that allows me to lend up to a certain amount of weth from my wallet. The upside of doing it this way, versus how Teller is designed, is that it cost nothing to make a loan offer. If my loan terms are accepted, Arcade can auto-approve the transfer of my funds to the borrower. That’s my understanding anyway.
At present, there’s no twitter bot that announces to the world that a loan offer has been made, so it’s not a public spectacle for everyone to see. Of the potential borrowers on the platform, there is a tab with “approved terms” in which a lender can just accept them and the deal will go through instantly. All of the ones I saw had wildly inflated LTVs so i passed on that. Instead, I looked at the NFTs listed for which the borrowers are open to offers. All of them were image-based NFTs which I do not like very much at all but for the sake of learning how the technological process works, I went ahead and made some loan offers.
It’s been over an hour since I placed them and so far nobody has accepted one. Arcade informed me that borrowers would only know if an offer has been made if they signed up to get email notifications OR by logging into the platform itself to look. So I guess we’ll see what happens. These loan offers are against things that I would normally consider worthless. I would prefer something with utility like a domain name or web3 name or something. Unfortunately I did not see any ENS names on Arcade. Too bad.