Web2-Backed On-Chain Credit - Mehdi Rhouzlane - zkTLS Day @ Devconnect 2025

Transcript

Hi everyone. Um I'm Medi the co-founder of Stormbit and I'm going to present you our protocol and how we using uh ZKTLS to to bring the missing um hook to unlock trillions in in DeFi. So uh let's put into context where uh lending stands in defi. So it's a it's a very uh important one. So it's the second largest category in defi with uh 83.7 billion in TVL. It's almost as large uh as liquid staking and it's

larger than dexes and rwa as combined. So it's a it's a huge um application sector in D5. So there are more than 550 protocols and most of these protocols are based on uh perpetual model which involve uh liquidations. So Storm bit is different. It's a fixedterm lending with no uh liquidations. So uh more akin to be used by institutions. So the the the current landing uh uh state is that uh it's we think that it's uh structurally uh outdated.

Where does lending stand uh in finance? So there is uh we know that credit markets are the engine of global finance. uh they they are represented by loans, bonds, mortgages and exceed uh 100 trillion dollars lending power governments, companies and households and defy lending is uh today 83 billion as I stated before which is a very small amount less than 0.1% of global uh credit. So what is missing to bring uh all this offchain money is a fixedterm lending uh primitive for defile uh to scale.

So why did we build uh storm bit? So the problem that we faced is me as a founder coming from emerging country uh my co-founder also we get paid in crypto and uh banks uh don't understand crypto I think in other countries also so to get a loan is very hard to justify uh through your uh uh payroll in crypto and P2P lending failed by the past so [clears throat] there was no trust between anons uh we have seen also the Celsius uh where um it's collapsed. They wanted to to copy banks but this model uh doesn't work. So why does every loan require uh either massive collateral

over collateralized loan with a morpho or blind trust? Uh we came through ZKTLS uh that we discovered through many um uh third parties reclaim uh Primus uh ZK pass and others opacity where borrower can prove credit worthiness without uh revealing their identity. This is our tis with ZKTLS. So trust become verifiable not uh assumed. So we want to bring ZKTLS credit worthiness without uh identity. here as you can see in traditional finance uh you can show your pay leaves credit uh full KYC in defi you have to be rich because you need over collateralized

loans there's no unsecured uh lending so you get for example uh 70% LTV so you need some BTC up front right with storm bit we want to enable uh people to keep their privacy prove their income and be able to access capital so use cases can involve um um proving your having a stripe account for example that will enable you to get this data uh from stripe and through zkls proofs it's cryptographic proofs and uh that are um uh proven by the by by the borrowers uh credentials or bank balance exchange

holdings that enables you to get uh a loan and this works because in storm bit the architecture work um enables to have modules as type of loans. So at stationation is a module uh where you can have this uh where you can have ZK TLS integrated. Uh we want for example to prove that the user has uh 50K monthly revenue. So proven without revealing his identity. Uh you can see here the explanation of attistation module in action. Uh so what we do is that we use uh an attistation uh provider uh zk pass primus or uh reclaim and the process is the the following. So in storm bit um uh a

lender will create his terms he managed the risk. So he will specify that he needs that the the criteria is an income for example superior to $20 per month or um 10 plus loans repaid or 6 months uh profitable in Airbnb as a tenant or in stripe as a as a seller for example. Uh then there is a connection uh to borrowers. So, so borrowers uh on the other side generate the proofs uh through uh these third parties uh in these third party integrations. Um we in our demo it's through primus. So he

connects to his tribe or bank account and get this zkls at the station under one minute which is uh very fast and [clears throat] we have uh in storm it also some uh security. So usage limits um for example is to prevent this proof uh that he will generate through stripe to be used many times. So we can uh limit this. So many people can access uh now credit uh example with ZKTLS content creators with YouTube businesses with stripe traders with exchange anyone who can prove that they are good uh for it. So now I'm going to present you uh the

demo. So in storm bit uh when you go to the match you can uh a borrower can create a request with no collateral. So he can um specify the amount he's borrowing and select a verification tab which is here Binance KYC and uh through the provider Primus. So he verifies uh this and he can post this uh loan request and this uh loan request is which is

posted uh can be matched uh by lenders. So the lender uh on the other side uh will fund this uh loan request also because the APR is uh very high and he accepts uh this uh this kind of collateral. So this verification um so in storm bit we bring in a new credit layer uh using zkls we enable these YouTubers to get uh capital startups that prove emer uh emmer to fund growth traders

uh to prove balance and get leverage and freelancers to prove income and access credit. What we believe is that now uh we get rid of paperwork through Zikls and proofs are more valuable in the future than credit scores through Zikls. Capability and merit of yourself if you manage to prove it through Zikls is better uh than collateral for us and uh privacy preserving also and it's a credit for everyone. So we're not fixing lending, we're making it uh accessible to everyone who deserves it. Uh how is this a paradigm shift is because uh we believe that in the future you will be

able to u not ask the question how much can you lock but can you prove that you will be able uh to repay? Uh currently you can access uh um our beta in uh Stormbit. So you can reach out to me if you would like to access our beta and uh try with our uh providers. Thank you. [applause]