Since our ICO closed in October 2017, the Airfox team has been hard at work building our Airfox wallet Android app that provides financial services for unbanked and underbanked users in Latin America, beginning with Brazil. Since our launch in early February, we have continued to release key features and make the app easier to use. Additionally, we released the AirToken dApp which allows recharging pre-paid mobile phones using AIR.
Now, we are focusing on our microloan system. Credit cards charge extremely high interest rates in Brazil, sometimes exceeding 400% APR. Even with these extreme rates, many consumers still do not qualify as they lack formal employment and banking history. The informal economy is very large in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, and the potential market size for lending to these consumers throughout LatAm is trillions of dollars. This is a key component of the Airfox ecosystem, and is how we plan to disrupt the traditional financial networks while providing cheaper access to capital for hundreds of millions of people.
Many of our Airfox wallet users have already expressed interest in receiving loans, and our engineering and product teams are working hard to design and build these features. We won’t be issuing loans to just anyone who installs our app — users will have to provide personal information, and when combined with thousands of data points collected from their smartphone, they will receive a proprietary credit score via our machine learning algorithms. Users beneath a threshold credit score will not be eligible for loans, and users that do qualify will be provided with an interest rate commensurate with their risk profile.
Once a user qualifies, their debt will be issued in a tokenized smart contract using Dharma’s smart contract technology for tokenized debt issuance. Airfox will be one of the first companies working with Dharma’s technology to provide ERC721 tradable debt instruments for peer-to-peer consumer loans. Global lenders will be able to fund these loans to earn attractive interest rates.
We are very excited about the lending platform we are building, and will be releasing detailed technical explanations in the coming months that fully explain the system. More announcements are coming soon!
Airfox Wallet Updates
During April, we released 2 new versions of the Airfox Wallet app. In addition to many bug fixes and stability improvements, users can now use the app to pay utility bills and boletos using their Airfox balance. Also, users can now top up phones internationally, adding balance to prepaid phones on over 500 carriers.
Currently, we are integrating with more ways to spend Airfox balance, such as metro card top-up. We are also making significant progress on the loan system, which will be explained in detail in coming updates.
