Hashstack Launches Open Protocol’s First Under-Collateralized Loans

Decentralized Finance is still in its infancy, with a broader adoption yet to happen. The faith that individuals have in centralized systems is difficult to break, and restoring it in decentralized options is equally harder given the hacks and exploits. 

Hashstack continues to develop this space by bringing ingenious products to cater to the people’s confidence in getting more than they give.

Open Protocol launches public testnet

As part of its DeFi offerings, Hashstack launched the Open Protocol this week, which boasts a range of unique features, including the first-ever non-custodial, secure under collateralized loan globally.

Although they operate similarly to collateralized loans, undercollateralized loans do have a significant difference. Instead of providing collateral equal to or exceeding the total loan amount, Open Protocol allows loan applicants to provide collateral worth a third of the loan amount.

However, the remaining loan amount can be used as in-platform trading capital. Thus, to facilitate the same, Hashstack has developed a novel mechanism to enable the eternal scalability of storage and logic of smart contracts. 

Moreover, Hashstack is also planning to submit an Ethereum Improvement Protocol soon to facilitate the development of secure and upgradeable smart contracts. This will enable the Open Protocol to integrate with as many Dapps as needed without changing the smart contract addresses.

Adding to the same, the founder of Hashstack Venture, Vinay Kumar, stated,

“Our public testnet has attracted over US$5 million in total value locked (TVL) immediately after going live. The public testnet release marks a significant accomplishment in Hashstack’s roadmap as we prepare to launch the Open Protocol mainnent later in the second quarter of 2022.”

In addition to the launch of the public testnet, Hashstack has also announced that the protocol’s mainnet is also scheduled to arrive before the end of the second quarter of this year. 

Furthermore, by integrating with DeFi chains such as PancakeSwap, the Open Protocol facilitates in-app market swaps and improves loan utilization.

This way, the borrowers can swap the borrowed tokens into other primary coins or secondary coins without the need to switch the dApp.

Although, at the moment, the protocol only supports major liquid coins like Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), Binance Coin (BNB), and Hashstack’s native governance token HASH. 

But is BSC the best option there is?

The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) was the second biggest DeFi chain to exist in the market after Ethereum until December last year when it was overtaken by the budding chain Terra. 

Despite being home to over 375 protocols, Terra surpassed BSC with just 28 protocols, led by the lending protocol Anchor, whose TVL of $16 billion alone is higher than BSC’s $12.6 billion.

But its only competition isn’t Terra, as there are others in line waiting to grab the third spot in this race. 

Budding DeFi chains such as Avalanche and Solana are looking to topple BSC, albeit they currently hold $9.8 billion and $6.4 billion, respectively, which gives BSC some time to recover and rake in much more investment from investors.