This Crypto Project Just Funded 1,000 Student Loans Entirely On-Chain — SkimNews
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- Pencil Finance completed a $1 million student-loan funding and repayment cycle entirely on-chain, marking what it calls the first fully transparent, blockchain-recorded private-credit investment in education lending.
- ErudiFi issued student loans funded by the Pencil Finance protocol, deploying capital to more than 6,600 borrowers across 118 institutions in Indonesia, the Philippines, and other parts of Southeast Asia.
- Animoca Brands, Open Campus, and NewCampus funded the initial $1 million loan bundle in July 2025, with all transaction steps — from capital deployment to repayment tracking — recorded on EDU Chain, an Ethereum-based network using Arbitrum Orbit.
- Pencil Finance structured investor returns into senior and junior tranches, offering fixed yields and repayment priority to senior investors while assigning variable returns and first-loss risk to junior participants.
- Frank Li, co-founder of Pencil Finance, stated that on-chain recording creates an auditable, real-time public track record for emerging-market education lenders, who are often excluded from global capital due to lack of verifiable performance data.
Why it matters: The $1 million cycle establishes a replicable model for bringing global capital into underserved education markets: 93% of borrowers come from lower-income households and over half are first-time credit users, creating a new pathway for scalable, transparent financing where traditional systems have failed to verify risk.
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