DeFi to the rescue
The founders of Consol Freight, Ernesto Vila and Alejandro Gutierrez, have worked in logistics and shipping for over two decades and during that time they have been exploring ways to digitise the freight forwarding industry. One of the key issues they have found that has prevented digitisation is the lack of liquidity available to not only freight forwarders, but their customers as well.
The team realised that they could bring together finance and freight forwarding by collateralising the goods being transported and provide trade finance to both their customers and the end clients of their customers.
After contacting lenders in the traditional finance space, they found that the route to unlocking lending in that space was long and arduous.
In steps DeFi (or decentralised finance)
By working with giants of DeFi such as Maker and Centrifuge the team realised that they could unlock the liquidity available in DeFi lending pools and offer it to their customers.
As demand grew the team started hitting issues with scaling, many of the tasks they performed were manual and they needed to digitise themselves in order lend at scale.
The Birth of Defactor
Ernesto and Alejandro quickly realised that the problems they were facing would be the same for any asset originator looking to access DeFi liquidity and thus Defactor was born.
Partnering with Atom CTO, the team is building a new decentralised platform that will bridge the gap between TradFi and DeFi.
The Defactor platform will on-board real world asset originators and provide them the ability to upload assets, mint NFTs and obtain funding for those NFTs via decentralised liquidity pools.
The platform will automatically assess the credit risk of the assets on the platform and will be open to numerous asset classes i.e. invoices, property, loans.
Defactor serves two main purposes: removing the technical and operational barriers to entry for asset originators into the DeFi lending space and providing investors real world assets to invest in along with clarity over the details of the deals they are investing in, along with their corresponding risks.