LoanMarket
Verify once, compare lending offers. Our Web3NZ 2025 hackathon prototype won Best Overall Web3 Solution.
LoanMarket explored a familiar frustration: handing over the same identity documents every time you approach another lender. Our Web3NZ hackathon prototype turned a single verification into reusable credential claims, then used them to gather and compare loan offers.
I worked on the application journey, offers, routing, and frontend integration as part of a five-person team. We built the demo in roughly 18 hours and won Best Overall Web3 Solution in March 2025. The project was a hackathon experiment with demonstration offers.
Highlights
- Reusable identity credential claims
- Application and offer comparison flow
- Best Overall Web3 Solution at Web3NZ 2025
In action
Verify once
Shopping around for a loan can mean repeating the same identity checks for several providers. Our hackathon pitch was to separate that verification from each individual application. A trusted party would check the documents, then issue a credential containing useful claims that a borrower could reuse with other lenders.
That made the idea understandable even to our team of Web3 first-timers. We began the weekend thinking about identity and governance, then pivoted to lending with roughly 18 hours left. Reusing a verification gave the demo a clear journey: submit information, receive claims, compare offers, and carry the chosen result into a transaction.
Connecting an application to an offer
The React and TypeScript frontend handled the application and offer comparison. Behind it, a Fastify service connected credential verification to configured provider services, with PostgreSQL supporting the backend. Solidity contracts supplied the verification and transaction side of the demonstration on a test network. Those pieces had to form one coherent flow for the presentation.
I worked on submitting applications, displaying offers, routing between screens, and integrating results into the frontend. The source preserves that work in a substantial March 2025 change. Some provider names, rates, and amounts shown in the interface were demonstration overlays, so the project is best understood as an explanation of the flow rather than a marketplace of actual bank offers.
A short build with a longer afterlife
The deadline forced the team to make decisions quickly. None of us had deployed a smart contract before the event, and the idea arrived late. We brought the interface, services, and contracts together well enough to show a working demo, then presented it after a weekend with very little sleep.
LoanMarket won Best Overall Web3 Solution at the New Zealand Web3 hackathon. Along with the award came flights and accommodation for an ETHGlobal event, which took the same group to New York later that year. The code and demo remain as a record of that experiment, and the follow-up project became HouseHodl.
Related writing
LoanMarket - Web3 Hackathon 2025
How a team of Web3 first-timers built LoanMarket in 18 hours, sharing one KYC verification across lenders with verifiable credentials, and won best overall.
ETHGlobal NYC: HouseHodl
Flying to ETHGlobal NYC after winning Web3NZ: building HouseHodl, a trustless shared-expenses app, why cross-chain broke, and napping on the venue floor.