The LaaS concept isn’t limited to just traditional lending anymore. SALT, a pioneer in crypto-backed lending, announced a Lending-as-a-Service tool that will enable up to 5,000 auto dealerships the ability to offer crypto-collateralized car loans. It’s called Embedded Crypto Lending and made possible through a partnership with Cion Digital.
“We’ve been building our direct-to-consumer lending business with the embedded model in mind from the start,” said SALT’s CEO Justin English. “From crypto native wallets and exchanges to large neobanks and traditional financial institutions, market participants are increasingly intent on digitizing their platforms to accommodate the ever-growing demand for crypto, and we’re excited to help facilitate the transformation.”
Car buyers will be able to user their crypto as collateral for car loans, often at a lower cost than alternatives, while at the same time being able to pay for a car in full with crypto or at least use it to make a down payment.
“With almost half of Millennials now owning crypto, we are working together to increase dealer capabilities for this fast-growing market of buyers who want more financing and payment options at the dealership,” said Fred Brothers, President and Co-founder of Cion Digital.
In California, License no. 60 DBO77905 authorizes Digital Power Lending (DPL) to make commercial loans in the state. Offering everything from merchant cash advances to equipment financing, and more, DPL is one of many companies working to provide capital to small businesses.
But DPL stands out for two reasons. First, the company’s founder and executive chairman, Milton “Todd” Ault III, has more than 100,000 subscribers on his youtube channel. Second, DPL plans to fund up to $100 million in commercial loans secured by Bitcoin, according to a recent announcement. Planning to lend in the individual range of $1 million to $25 million, DPL says that the program “will allow the borrower to repay a loan using various methods including cash, Bitcoin, or, in the case of convertible promissory notes, common stock of the borrower.”
“The Company’s objective is to allocate a total of $250 million in capital to DP Lending, including the $100 million in Bitcoin,” the company states.
Ault explained, “From my many years of financing companies, I know all too well the challenges faced by these aspiring entrepreneurs and employers. It strikes me as a natural progression of the Company and its subsidiaries to join to provide a new unique source of capitalization and to assist in their growth while creating a new revenue stream in a very positive and mutually beneficial way.”
One of the most common criticisms of the NFT scene is the underlying technology that powers them. New users are pitched on the premise that pictures and artwork are permanently embedded into the blockchain, creating an immutable asset that can be held, traded, and publicly examined for authenticity. But that’s not entirely true. The pictures changing hands ($3.5B worth in a single month just on OpenSea alone) are not actually on the blockchains, nor are the images they represent all particularly permanent, which means you could wake up tomorrow to find that your NFTs aren’t loading, the names of them have changed, or worse yet, they’re suddenly all pictures of something else.
Everything seems to be working as it should, except both references for that NFT live on our servers, not any blockchain’s. So if I sell that one to you, control over the content of that NFT remains with ME. Having run several tests, I’ve since turned that NFT into an animated gif of Theodore Roosevelt, a video about two people discussing regulation, a random logo file, and then back to a stick figure. I then changed the name and the description. Throughout this experiment, there would be nothing that the owner of the token, assuming it wasn’t me, could do about it.
Hopefully you were already aware about these limitations if you’ve made NFT trading a hobby or business. If not, now you know.
Turning a weakness into a strength
While any seasoned crypto enthusiast will simply point out that the metadata file and image file could’ve been uploaded to a decentralized server instead of ours to limit the vulnerability stated above, millions of NFTs on the open market are set up just like mine. And if I can change what’s in your wallet whenever I want, perhaps that’s not so bad, because the ability to amend the content over time could unlock untapped potential. Candy Digital, for example, is now offering Baseball card-style NFTs of players where the stats are updated in real time. Maybe a living NFT such as that, could be more valuable than a static collectible.
Below are a few ideas:
Fixes to defects in NFT artwork could be applied
Artists could update attributes of artwork over time to give them a modern, relevant, or trendy polish, or even supply a new piece of art to the same NFT
An NFT holder could be alerted to the fact that they’ve won a prize or raffle by modifying it to something designed to get their attention
An NFT could be updated frequently with news updates, i.e. a news NFT where it switches between images and video clips with whatever the latest news is
While it’s become trendy to market NFTs as a virtual membership card that can unlock access to Discords, events, and clubs, one should consider that the NFT itself could be the club. Like the Amazon Echo, the NFT could be the conduit for content that can be updated and upgraded on the back-end without having to buy another NFT. MetaMask or OpenSea or perhaps another platform altogether could provide an enhanced interface to consume it all.
Marketers could even find a whole new market for airdrops if they can turn the mass deployed NFTs into active pieces of content that at times convert into ads or commercials throughout the day. That Bored Ape could turn into an ad for Geico for 30 seconds every hour or something. Maybe that’s not what you want to hear, but given how much NFT content already lives on centralized servers, it is only a matter of time before creators start to consider the opportunity that perceived weakness affords.
If dogecoin is the coin you live and die by, great, we’d love to have you at deCashed in New York City on May 11th. We accept it natively as payment using our normal checkout process. My quick live tutorial below assumes your Dogecoin is held somewhere outside of Coinbase (doesn’t matter where) but if you do have a coinbase account, you could always just connect your coinbase account and select Dogecoin from the dropdown. Anyways, here’s how to register for deCashed using any Dogecoin wallet.
The LaaS concept isn’t limited to just traditional lending anymore. SALT, a pioneer in crypto-backed lending, announced a Lending-as-a-Service tool that will enable up to 5,000 auto dealerships the ability to offer crypto-collateralized car loans. It’s called Embedded Crypto Lending and made possible through a partnership with Cion Digital. 
