It was last year that we covered the $11.2 million fundraise for Sienna Network, the “privacy decentralized startup”. The network is built on the Secret Network, which allows asset holders to switch to privacy-oriented tokens. Privacy-based financial blockchain projects are crucial if “DeFi” is to work properly, otherwise normal financial transactions — which are normally private in the traditional finance world — will struggle to take off.
Sienna is among several other blockchain startups trying to prevent “front-running”, where transactions on Ethereum can be preempted by someone else simply by them paying a higher transaction fee — just like trumping a trade on the stock market by paying a higher fee to a broker.
Sienna Network has now launched its private crypto lending platform, dubbed SiennaLend. The company claims that crypto users can use the platform to earn interest on their crypto and borrow crypto from the platform — all privately. The platform will compete in this space with Uniswap and PancakeSwap, but claims to have more features than both.
SiennaLend is (obviously) built on top of the Secret Network, which affords — claims the company — greater security and safety compared to open and non-private blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and others.
SiennaLend’s pitch to the market is that its lower gas prices will make it more attractive to small investors.
“Paying a transaction fee of $150 to make a loan of $200 makes little sense and this is another major benefit for SiennaLend. Gas fees are counted in cents rather than dollars as the scalability of the blockchains are much higher. We have spent 15 months in stealth, fine-tuning this absolute game-changer for crypto and its ascendance to the next level of mainstream finance,” Monty Munford, chief evangelist, Sienna Network, said in a statement.
Sienna Network says “Personal Identifiable Information (PII)” means users can “backtrack” and see their wallet possessions and trading history via their wallet address. It will also offer loans against collateral, as would happen with traditional lending, by allowing users to deposit into a pool and choose to earn interest or borrow based on that deposit. The idea is that traders can defend against the current market volatility more easily.
Lending protocols like this in DeFI are widely observed to be taking off, despite market volatility, because they offer more reassurances to crypto holders. Cryptocurrency-based loans have become a highly utilized aspect of DeFi.
By being built on Secret Network, Sienna Network/SiennaLand is also part of the Cosmos ecosystem, recently upgraded to be a part of IBC. Cosmos competes — after a fashion — with Polkadot, also an “internet of blockchains”.