The Architecture of Trust: Our Smart Contracts in Action

As part of the 2021 public-private collaborative project call, and in partnership with our associate Eurostar, our technology centre is developing HyperLender — a project aimed at redefining the foundations of peer-to-peer lending.

Trust as Source Code
In the traditional financial system, trust is placed in intermediaries. At HyperLender, we are reimagining it from the ground up, embedding trust directly into the code. To achieve this, we use distributed ledger technology (DLT), which enables us to build an ecosystem where rules are transparent, immutable, and automatically enforced. Trust is no longer a promise — it’s a mathematical certainty that every participant can verify.

This paradigm shift is key to enabling a fair and efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) lending system. By eliminating the need for a central authority to validate each transaction, we return control to the users and significantly reduce friction, costs, and waiting times. Every agreement, every payment, every condition is recorded in “smart contracts”, which serve as impartial digital enforcers, ensuring that everything happens exactly as agreed.

The Operational Core: An Ecosystem of Interconnected Contracts
The engine of our platform is a suite of smart contracts that orchestrate the entire lifecycle of a loan. The main loan contract manages operations from start to finish: from the moment a user publishes a funding request, through to receiving offers, selecting one, formalising the agreement, and managing periodic repayments automatically. This contract ensures that the terms are strictly upheld without the need for manual intervention.

To keep the process secure, it’s vital to know who is behind each transaction. This is where a dedicated identity management contract comes into play. It links a user’s verified digital identity with their unique network address, creating a responsibly pseudonymous environment. We know that each participant is a real, verified person — without exposing their private data on the public network. In turn, a third contract is exclusively responsible for fund traceability, recording every capital movement in an immutable ledger. This delivers full transparency and unprecedented auditability, allowing any party to securely verify the flow of funds.

This modular architecture, with each contract having a distinct role, is not only robust but also highly flexible. It allows us to update or improve specific components without impacting the rest of the system. In addition, we have integrated advanced security mechanisms, such as the ability to pause contract activity in the event of an external threat. This “emergency switch” functionality is essential for safeguarding user funds and provides us with a crucial control tool as we operate in such a demanding test environment as the regulatory Sandbox.