85% of folks have bank accounts, but only about 20% of them actually use the bank (for borrowing). They rely on other forums to meet their financing needs. These guys don't have access to credit.

As a startup, when we launched back in 2018, the lending market in Sri Lanka was $5 billion - and what we understood this from this 5 billion requirement, almost 40% relied on loan sharks and individuals who have very dubious practices of charging excessive interest rates, as well as very unpleasant collection methods.

And coming from a tech and a finance background, we realised there might be a potential for us to provide credit underwriting through a blockchain solution.

I had to borrow a lot of money from my peers to be able to pay my rent. Which, as you can imagine, was not a very pleasant experience. Because you have to ask, 'can you lend me a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there' and have to remember who you borrow money from.

And I was dreaming of having an application that could solve these kinds of issues for me. And back then Tinder was already popular among kids, if it can say so. But there was no Tinder-like application to just match with people for the sake of borrowing money from them. I ended up building it myself after not finding it available.

It's been four years since I started building Lendwill, and it is extremely difficult to build a good peer-to-peer lending platform that would allow individuals to borrow money from each other. So I can understand why there had not been any product that I wanted back in the day because it's really hard!

So we had a different business model, we said, 'look, this is what we do. These are all the systems we do'. Now, you might be an individual at home, and you might have an apartment, and you're renting it out via Airbnb, or some other platform. So you want to do a check on your new tenant, to make sure that this person is of good standing, what system will you use? Because you're not going to be paying for 25,000 checks a month, it doesn't make sense.

So we went with a pay per use system where you can come in first verify that you are an individual, which we can work with. But once that is okay, then you can use our platform to do your individual checks yourself. For your own business purposes, let's say a customised KYC roadmap. So you can come in the system and you say, 'the checks I want to do are: an individual or first name, last name, date of birth, blah, blah, blah. So these are the compulsory ones, because without it, we can't give you a good result, and over and above I would also like a selfie with a handwritten note so that I know that it is relevant, and a video saying, "I would like to use your product", for example. So you select those, it creates a customised KYC journey for you, you can white label it, put on your logo, or your name or your product. So a person knows that he's doing this KYC for you. And then he will also get access to a portal where he can come in and see the data that he submitted in retrospect.

So in terms of our platform, we're only listing coins that we think are going to be around in 10-20 years time. And at the moment there's only three assets there. Bitcoin, Ethereum, what's called US dollar stable coins - which for 99% of crypto investors, that's enough. Bitcoin most people have heard about. Ethereum is a fascinating coin, all of the innovation, all of this decentralised financial products that you're seeing, that are appearing in the market, they're all being built on Ethereum, pretty much. All of the volume, all of the kind of innovation, all of the development that's going into building this crypto investing ecosystem is within the Ethereum blockchain.

Which is why a lot of analysts in the space are calling this year to be its breakout year where it's going to start really outperforming Bitcoin. But who knows, every time someone seems to say that Bitcoin seems to go up incredibly, but there's some solid use cases. And you can see in terms of the fees that miners are earning, they are 10 times the fees on the Ethereum blockchain this year than they did on the Bitcoin Blockchain. Ethereum is is the internet of money. This is all part of has it got valued over and above just being a speculative asset.