Company Name: January
Organizers: Mauricio Di Bartolomeo and Adam Reeds
Date of creation: September 2018
Headquarters location: N/A (Totally Remote)
Number of employees: 51
Website: https://ledn.io/
Public or private? Personal
“Lending is a type of relationship that values income of Your assets are greater than your income on your assets”.
That was Di Bartolomeo’s response when I asked him what happened Januarya bitcoin and crypto borrowing and lending platform, in addition to its competitors, including now-defunct companies offering similar services BlockFi, Celsius and the Voyager.
“There is no company in this space that has a better track record of getting your assets back than Ledn,” Di Bartolomeo told Bitcoin Magazine.
Since its inception, Ledn has prioritized security and reliability. Di Bartolomeo and co-founder Adam Reeds wanted to gain the trust of not only the traditional financial institutions that interfaced with Ledn, but also the trust of Ledn’s global user base, some of whom were accessing financial services for the first time. company.
And Di Bartolomeo’s work is very personal to him, in part because he understands the importance of Bitcoin because of his experience in his native Venezuela.
Di Bartolomeo’s Bitcoin Journey
“My family discovered bitcoin and started mining it in Venezuela in late 2014/early 2015 in the midst of hyperinflation, where it was illegal for them to buy or hold US dollars or anything that could hold value,” Di Bartolomeo recounted.
“When I saw how they and other Venezuelans were using Bitcoin to get out of their broken system, I thought to myself, ‘How many people in the world are living like this and how many people in the world are going to need this?'” is she.
Di Bartolomeo soon decided to start working in the Bitcoin space. He moved to Canada, where he and Reeds began helping miners develop their operations. Di Bartolomeo recalled that these miners wanted to expand, but did not want to sell their bitcoins to do so.
“They had bitcoin income and fiat expenses, and there was no real place for them to get any kind of financing,” Di Bartolomeo said.
“We looked for financing, but no one gave us a loan. Therefore, we decided to solve our own problem,” he added.
“That was the genesis of Ledn.”
How Ledn distinguished himself
When Ledn was founded in 2018, there were only a few services like it. However, there was a significant difference between Ledn and his competitors.
“There were other bitcoin-backed lenders in the market, but they wanted tokens,” Di Bartolomeo said.
“It’s been around There was an ICO and we saw Nexus and come to space with Celsius tokens. From my point of view, they only used them to generate cash without selling equity,” he added.
Di Bartolomeo and Reeds didn’t want to issue tokens because they saw it as a dubious practice from a regulatory perspective.
“When you look at finance at scale, you immediately think about compliance and regulation,” Di Bartolomeo said. “We wanted to build a company that could sit in front of BlackRock or Goldman Sachs, highly regulated banks, and say, ‘Hey, I want to talk to you.'”
Furthermore, Ledne prioritized transparency. In 2021, it became one of the first major Bitcoin companies to issue proof of reservesa system that allows anyone to verify Ledn bitcoin holdings.
“We are still the only lender operating in the US or other highly regulated markets where our customers can come and check every six months,” said Di Bartolomeo. “We’ve been doing this since before it was cool.”
Ledn is also issued monthly Open book report it breaks the Ledn lending strategies.
From the beginning, Di Bartolomeo believed that using a step-by-step and transparent approach would build trust among Bitcoin enthusiasts.don’t believe it, check it out” mantra and its thesis fulfilled.
Risk reduction
Of the Many products offer LednOne is to generate returns on bitcoins – a type of product that makes BlockFi disappear.
However, Ledn sees this version of the product differently than its predecessor.
“We generate Bitcoin income from Bitcoin primarily by lending BlockRock IBIT ETF and Coinbase spot units to market makers who arbitrage,” said Di Bartolomeo.
“These groups are price neutral. They have no directional effect. They are simply closing the price gap and profiting from the volatility,” he added.
The BlockFi method was much more risky.
“With BlockFi, the duration is inconsistent,” explained Di Bartolomeo.
“They took time deposits and placed them in mining infrastructure with a five-year repayment period. What do you think will happen if someone comes along before the five years are up? he added, hinting at the notion that what happened to BlockFi seemed inevitable.
Additionally, Ledn only deals in highly liquid assets such as bitcoin (and ether, which will be added in 2023), which helps reduce the risk of asset-liability mismatches.
“With Bitcoin, you always have people on both sides of the house with demand,” said Di Bartolomeo.
“When you start backing things like Shiba Inu or Dogecoin and people want to earn interest on those, you have to convert that Dogecoin into something else and you create an asset liability mismatch in the process,” he added.
Di Bartolomeo also noted that all of Ledn’s products are ring-locked.
“When you’re paying for a secured loan, you’re not exposed to the credit risk of our other products,” he said. “It’s very similar to how traditional finance works, and it’s what we do very differently compared to our now defunct peers.”
Growing competition
As more and more people begin to look at bitcoins as “clear pledge,” more bitcoin borrowing and lending platforms are set to pop up. Many already exist.
such as centralized bitcoin lending and lending services salt and institutional bitcoin financing services such as Nexo, while Ledn remain competitors Newmarket Capital’s Battery Finance They are ready to get involved in the work of the leader. And services that allow users to borrow their bitcoins with no jailbreak, including Debbie and the Lavacan also increase their market share.
Di Bartolomeo is aware of the competition but seems unfazed. In fact, he believes the biggest winner in such a market will be the consumer, and he has no plans to change Ledn’s strategy. Instead, he’s aiming to double down on what Ledne does best.
“Our sweet spot will be individuals or individuals who prioritize transparency, asset security and compliance,” Di Bartolomeo said.
“Safety, trust and transparency make Ledn unique. There is no other operator in this space with an equivalent track record in terms of loans, years in business and cycle survival,” he added.
“This network is unstable. You have to have the right experience and the right set of values to empower your team, and I think other companies have a hard time showing what we have. Can you find something cheaper? Oh yes. Could it be more dangerous? Undoubtedly.”
Supporting financial inclusion
One of the main ways Ledn differs from traditional borrowing and lending platforms is that its rates do not vary based on the jurisdiction in which the lender or borrower is located.
“These people feel very empowered because they know they have the same performance whether they are in Madrid or Medellin,” said Di Bartolomeo.
And Di Bartolomeo smiled from ear to ear as he discussed the matter, as he seemed to remember why he got involved with Bitcoin in the first place.
“That’s one of the things that makes me proud of this business,” he said.
“We have people in Latin America who told us that this is the first time we have a loan agreement. Because all we look at is “Have you completed KYC?”; ‘Are you an eligible citizen?’; “Do you have Bitcoin?” he added.
“It’s ‘Where do you live?’ are not; ‘Who are your parents?’; What color is your skin?’ I like this aspect of Bitcoin and what we do.”
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