Grant Proposal: Nomis — open source credit score

Project Title

Nomis

Description

Nomis is an on-chain open source credit score protocol that helps developers build better DeFi products.

Manifesto/Vision

We are passionate about crushing the entry- and adoption-barriers to DeFi loans by making them as attractive as today banks’ loans BUT for everyone.

Our mission is to help next million people go bankless by enabling fair crypto users borrow crypto with a fair collateral and APR determined on a case-by-case basis.

The long-term vision for Nomis goes far beyond credit scoring for DeFi: other dApps will be able to use existing Nomis Scores as well as building their own custom scores for any need (e.g. wallet qualifier for jobs applications, whitelists, special offerings for products, or just for inviting to a private party, etc.). In other words, our big-picture vision includes building the credential and identity infrastructure layer and empowering developers to build on top of it.

Problem

One of the most significant barriers to entry and adoption of DeFi are the over-collateralized loans. Today mainstream borrowers are either not using DeFi loans due to their unattractiveness as a financial tool comparing to banks’ ones or taking over-collateralized loans with unattractive collateral (>125%) and APR.

Banks, in their turn, overcomes this problem by hiring credit scores. Such tool may also be implemented in DeFi making crypto loans more accessible for fair users, cultivating trust and reputation culture. Moreover, credit score negatively impact the number of crypto fraud cases by disincentivizing actors to play dirty.

The problem that Nomis is going to solve is the over-collateralization in DeFi borrowing which is an entry- and adoption barrier for mainstream borrowers.

Solution

Nomis is an open-source protocol that helps DeFi developers both to build better on-chain solutions and use cases, and to balance already existing high-TVL protocols. Every lending/borrowing platform will be able to create extremely customized loan terms for borrowers by using Nomis API.

To predict the crypto borrower’s reliability on the basis of wallet’s data and transactions history, it’s proposed to hire a model of trained AI built on the hierarchy analysis and pairwise comparisons methods. This approach, from our point of view, is a balanced way of solving a quite difficult problem: credit decision forecasting with insufficient statistical data.

Nomis will help Ethereum to grow its TVL, # of active users (as a result of acquisition of mainstream borrowers), as well as # of active on-chain developers, and # of on-chain use cases (as a result of opportunity provided to develop new DeFi solutions on-top of the Nomis open-source protocol).

Product Features

  • Fair credit score;
  • Creating customized scores and users’ ID graphs;
  • Open source;
  • Protocol and algorithm are governed by Nomis DAO.

Validation

The DeFi credit score idea is validated as our competitors, RociFi and TrueFi, successfully develop their own main products—credit protocols, on top of their own credit scoring algorithms. For example, according to Defillama, TrueFi had an over $0.5B TVL (incl. borrowed) in the pre-crisis period and ranked the 36th amongst DeFI protocols as of today.

Progress

We started developing Nomis in April’22. Now we are at the working MVP stage — you can get Nomis Score of your ETH wallet. Our main success metrics at this stage is the credit score accuracy.

Differentiation from Other Projects

Nomis’ competitors are other on-chain credit scores such as Chainscore (NEAR), RociFi (Polygon), Spectral Finance (Ethereum), Project Galaxy, Cred Protocol, and TrueFi (Multichain), etc.

Nomis brings two crucial competitive advantages to the table:

  1. Nomis protocol is a decentralized and open-source which helps developers to build their own DeFi solutions on top of Nomis.
  2. Nomis offers the most robust financial snapshot of a potential borrower by hiring hierarchy analysis as a scoring method. We believe that hierarchy analysis is the most reasonable method for solving such multi-criteria problems in complex environments with both tangible and intangible factors.

Team

Every cofounder has a track record in IT- and blockchain-related products such as Kickcity (web3 event/ticketing platform on Ethereum), GoRecruit (employee scoring SaaS for HR), and L1 blockchain development. Moreover, our spike is 15+ year experience in neural networks.

The team also has solid technical capability: 9 experienced mathematicians and blockchain devs who are ready-to-go full-time as fast as sufficient grant funding will be received. Moreover, the team is passionate about making DeFi under-collateralized and have successful commercial IT- and blockchain-related products in portfolio.

Grant Request $

$150,000

What the Funds Are For

We want to improve our MVP by redesigning the mathematical model. More particularly, we want to expand the number of initial parameters to increase borrower’s credit score accuracy. Moreover, we will develop Nomis API and a credit score NFT minting (a non-transferable NFT with a credit score metadata minted by the wallet owner). We also plan to get the grant funding for community building.

Milestone 1: Additional on-chain and transaction history data extraction from Ethereum; Basic score calculation; 1 month — $30,000

  • Code for attribute extraction.
  • Web-page with calculated attributes.

Milestone 2: Upgrade of the mathematical model; Web3 login connection to boost UX; 1 month — $30,000

  • Open-sourced code for credit score calculation.
  • Web-wallet integration.

Milestone 3: API & documentation development; 1 month — $30,000

  • API for credit score calculation.
  • Documentation for using API.

Milestone 4: DST (Decentralized Score Token, non-transferable dynamic NFT which contains wallet’s current credit score) implementation; 2 months — $30,000

  • Contracts for DST.
  • User interface.

Milestone 5: Community building (Twitter, Discord, Telegram) — 20K total followers; 3 months — $30,000

  • Twitter Account with ≥ 5,000 followers.
  • Discord Account with ≥ 5,000 followers.
  • Telegram Account with ≥ 10,000 followers.

Help Requested

Additionally, we would be glad to receive help with the following:

  • Full cycle acceleration / incubation;
  • Advisory: technical expertise, legal advice, business planning, tokenomics design;
  • Business model / GTM;
  • Fundraising;
  • Community building.

Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio

Whitepaper / MVP / Pitchdeck

this type of application layer project doesn’t seem like a public good in need of funding that Moloch set out to fund

Hey trent, thanks for the feedback! Could you please clarify your criteria for a public good? According to the call for proposals, I believe the project is eligible to participate: it addresses some of the challenges of Ethereum infrastructure (lack of an on-chain reputation tool to crush the entry- and adoption-barriers of the DeFi lending for mainstram borrowers) and relates to the ‘Identity’ and ‘DAO tooling and infrastructure’ buckets.