Privacy considerations for a decentralized finance (DeFi) loans platform

There are many Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending platforms that offer users to obtain a loan by committing a collateral or by calculating a “credit score”, which is based on factors such as the users’ credit history. However, the requirements of collateral and credit history are quite burdensome for some users. Nowadays, with more than 55% of the global population using social media, there is a lot of publicly available personal data (Global Social Media Stats. https://datareportal.com/social-media-users. Accessed 27 March 2022). This data could be used as an alternative risk mitigator for lending. There are many inferences that can be drawn from the users’ social media accounts about their professional behavior and reliability, allowing us to derive the users’ social trustworthiness. We propose to calculate a “social score” based on the social media data of a user. Our contribution is to develop an Ethereum blockchain-enabled fully decentralized lending platform that relies on this score. This platform could give users a chance for a loan even if they do not have a collateral or a sufficient credit score. Furthermore, we discuss privacy considerations for our platform and present an enhanced version that protects the borrower’s privacy.