Credit Rating Firm Backs $8 Million Fundraise for Crypto Alternative

A startup looking to build a credit scoring protocol on top of the recently-launched Ontology blockchain has raised $8 million in seed funding.

Other participants in the seed round include the Ontology Foundation as well as Zhong Cheng Xin Credit Technology, China's first nationwide credit rating agency.

The new capital will be used to expand the company's engineering team in an effort to speed up its development of blockchain-based know-your-customer and credit scoring applications.

"Currently, whether it's for banking or registering at a crypto exchange, users need to repetitively upload their profiles. Meanwhile, institutions also need to repetitively conduct the KYC process manually, which is time-consuming and leads to a huge data storage on their ends."

In a similar way, POINTS is also charting the development of another blockchain-based application on top of its protocol for credit scoring in a move aimed to "Serve the unbanked."

By partnering with its investor Zhong Cheng Xin, Zhang said the company also gains access to 500 million existing credit profiles provided by the rating agency.

With banks running as nodes on the blockchain, the database can extract credit data of a user from different institutions as well as from user's own submission, in order to compute a credit score, which is subsequently stored on the blockchain.

"The end goal is to give a user a credit profile as complete as possible so that they can access to financial products that otherwise may not be available," she added.

Zhang image courtesy to POINTS. The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.

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