ING plans to test its own DeFi loan project by leveraging the ‘Authority of the Financial Market (AFM) Sandbox’, a regulatory gateway for innovative financial products.
Testing proprietary DeFi protocol
During a panel discussion at the Fintech Festival in Singapore, Annerie Vreugdenhil, chief innovation at ING, discussed the upcoming DeFi initiative in the Netherlands. She has announced that the office is working on a pilot-to-peer (p2p) DeFi project in collaboration with the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets.
Reportedly, ING plans to test its own DeFi project under the AFM Sandbox protocol. This protocol will provide a loophole, allowing new companies to innovate in the space without too much regulatory oversight. The company says the following about this:
“In other places we work with sandboxes that regulators have. We now actually have an initiative in Amsterdam about DeFi on P2P lending in which we will work together with the regulator.”
Peer-to-peer lending without Bitcoin
Remarkably enough, Vreugdenhil emphasized that ING’s solution to offer peer-to-peer loans without Bitcoin (BTC) will happen. Also, several other cryptocurrencies will not be chosen, allegedly due to their still volatile background. Vreugdenhil said the following about this:
“We are currently investigating peer-to-peer lending in a DeFi-like format. But not on Bitcoins. What is interesting to us is how you can likely create peer-to-peer loans or open lending opportunities with different types of collateral. So with different ways to do this instead of a volatile Bitcoin.”
It is not yet certain whether ING will change its mind on this matter in the future. ING’s concerns about using more volatile cryptocurrencies could be allayed by using stablecoins. However, this may still be under investigation.