Peerfi brings a time-tested financial practice—known as Chamas in and Decentralized Investment Pools in others—into the world of cryptocurrency. These community-driven savings and investment pools have empowered millions by enabling collective savings, micro-loans, and randomized or auction-based disbursements. With Peerfi, we’re reimagining this model on Eigenlayer, a secure and cost-efficient Layer 2 solution, using a P2P framework in Web3 to democratize access to staking, restaking, and DeFi opportunities.
Our goal? To help investors—across emerging markets and beyond—choose the best financial strategies with a low barrier to entry, leveraging familiar practices and cutting-edge blockchain tech. By integrating Eigenlayer’s API and building a tokenized reputation system, we’re creating a scalable, secure, and user-friendly platform that bridges traditional finance with crypto.
Live Link: peerfi.netlify.app
Community-based financial practices like Chamas and decentralized investment pools thrive in African and South Asian regions, supporting collective savings and micro-loans while driving economic growth. However, these traditional systems face critical challenges:
- Lack of Transparency: Participants often don’t know what’s happening with their funds—where they’re held, how they’re invested, or who controls them.
- Risk of Mismanagement: Funds can be misused or unevenly distributed due to human oversight, eroding trust among members.
- Inefficient Utilization: Without clear tracking, pooled money may not be optimally invested or disbursed, limiting returns and impact.
Peerfi addresses these issues by bringing these practices on-chain with Web3 and Eigenlayer:
- Unmatched Transparency: Every transaction, pool contribution, and disbursement is recorded on the blockchain, visible to all participants in real-time.
- immutable: Built on a decentralized P2P framework with multisig wallets, funds are managed collectively—requiring group consensus, not individual control.
- Perfect DeFi Application: Combines staking, restaking, and micro-loan compatibility into a secure, scalable system, maximizing returns and trust.
This solution unlocks massive potential in emerging markets—where Eigenlayer can capitalize on high traffic and validator growth—while also offering significant opportunities in developed regions like the United States, where transparency and DeFi innovation resonate with savvy investors. Peerfi simplifies UX to help users pick the best strategies, reduces entry barriers with a wallet-based system, and tackles global issues like inflation and financial exclusion.
- Users pool funds into smart contracts running on Eigenlayer, secured by multisig wallets.
- Multisig ensures no single person controls the funds—disbursements require votes and consensus from pool participants, enhancing trust and security.
- Funds are disbursed via random selection or auctions (with auction fees subtracted), mirroring traditional practices.
- Participants earn reputation tokens upon completing a Chama round (e.g., staking or restaking cycle).
- Higher reputation unlocks access to larger, more lucrative pools—encouraging long-term engagement.
- Ties into Eigenlayer’s staking ecosystem for added value.
- Pooled funds can be staked or restaked using Eigenlayer’s infrastructure, with restaking powered by our sponsor’s P2P API for seamless, decentralized execution.
- Users can combine two pools (with full member consensus) to aggregate 32 ETH, enabling them to become validators on Eigenlayer—unlocking higher rewards and network participation.
- Leverages Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRTs) to keep assets liquid while earning rewards.
- Mitigates slashing risks with a novel insurance model (see Innovations below).
- Integrates perfectly with lending protocols, enabling seamless micro-loan functionality that empowers users to invest and grow their wealth.
- Boosts trust and market penetration across diverse regions by leveraging established DeFi lending ecosystems.
Peerfi leverages a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) framework in Web3 to align with the decentralized spirit of community savings and maximize user empowerment. Here’s why P2P is core to our project:
- Trustless Collaboration: P2P eliminates intermediaries, ensuring funds are managed transparently via smart contracts—perfect for multisig pools.
- Global Reach: P2P connectivity allows users worldwide to join and combine pools without geographic or institutional barriers.
- Restaking Innovation: Using our sponsor’s P2P API, we enable decentralized restaking and pool combination (e.g., aggregating 32 ETH for validator status), distributing control and rewards across participants.
- Resilience: A P2P network reduces single points of failure, making Peerfi robust against censorship or outages.
- Community-Driven: P2P mirrors the grassroots nature of decentralized investment pools, fostering ownership and aligning with our tokenized reputation system.
- Sponsor Synergy: Built with our sponsor’s P2P technology, we showcase its power for real-world financial use cases in Web3.
By embracing P2P, we’re scaling a proven model into a global, decentralized powerhouse.
Eigenlayer powers Peerfi with:
- Low Gas Fees: Makes micro-transactions viable compared to Ethereum Layer 1.
- Robust Security: Inherits Ethereum’s sophisticated security model.
- API Flexibility: Enables fast proof generation and seamless staking/restaking integration.
- Scalability: Supports validators and traffic growth in emerging markets and beyond, including high-potential regions like the United States.
By building on Eigenlayer, we’re driving validator adoption, increasing network traffic, and showcasing the potential for Layer 2 solutions worldwide.
- Users stake pooled Chama funds into Eigenlayer’s restaking system via the P2P API, receiving LRTs to maintain liquidity.
- Pool combination feature allows groups to aggregate 32 ETH and become validators, amplifying restaking rewards.
- Optimizes point incentives by rewarding consistent participation with reputation tokens.
- Developing a community-funded insurance pool to cover slashing risks in restaking.
- Reputation tokens can double as governance tokens to vote on insurance payouts, enhancing trust.
- Multisig consensus ensures fair and decentralized risk management.
- Integrates Eigenlayer’s API for real-time staking/restaking data visibility.
- Plans to enhance API docs with Chama-specific examples for devs building similar projects.
- For Users: A familiar, low-barrier entry to crypto investing with staking/restaking rewards, validator opportunities, and micro-loan potential.
- For Eigenlayer: Increased validator participation, higher network traffic, and a gateway to emerging markets and developed regions like the U.S.
- For Validators: Secure funds and a growing user base to support Eigenlayer’s ecosystem.
- For DeFi: Bridges traditional decentralized investment pools with Web3, unlocking massive market cap potential.
- Setup: Connect a wallet to join a Chama pool.
- Participation: Contribute funds to the pool (mocked with testnet tokens).
- Transaction: Submit a staking/restaking transaction—or combine pools to reach 32 ETH—via Eigenlayer’s API and P2P framework (shown up to submission).
- Next Steps: UI mocks display reputation token rewards, validator status, and access to larger pools post-transaction.
Note: Due to Testnet(Which is not currently active) constraints, we stop at transaction submission. Post-submission, funds would be staked/restaked, and users would receive LRTs, reputation tokens, and validator privileges, as mocked in the UI.
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Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/dennohpeter/chama.p2p.git cd chama.p2p cd frontend
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Install dependencies:
yarn
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Configure P2P API keys (see
.env.example).cp .env.example .env
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Run locally:
yarn dev
- Integrate Lending Protocols for Micro-Loan Functionality
- Integrate slashing insurance smart contracts.
- Partner with lending protocols for micro-loan functionality.
- Expand reputation system with off-chain data (e.g., KYC lite) for bigger pools.
- Optimize UI/UX for mobile-first users across global markets.