by Coinstrooper Crypto Articles
Quick Take
  • 8lends currently offers interest rates of up to 25%.
  • In less than a year, the platform has raised over $5M, and $814K has been repaid to 1203 investors.
  • The idea is simple: borrowers and lenders connect directly.
  • Smart contracts automate everything – issuing loans, taking repayments, and managing liquidations.

What Happened

On-chain crowdlending has become one of the most successful real-world uses for decentralized finance, bringing transparency, automation, and global accessibility to lending markets. In 2025, platforms like 8lends are establishing a new type of financial ecosystem where businesses and projects can access credit more easily, and investors can earn solid returns.

8lends currently offers interest rates of up to 25%. In less than a year, the platform has raised over $5M, and $814K has been repaid to 1203 investors.

The project was launched by a Swiss company, Maclear AG, a fintech firm founded in 2020 that has funded well over €60M so far. 8lends is the Web3 version of their P2P lending model, but with more transparency, automation, and global reach thanks to blockchain.

Lenders choose which businesses and projects they’d like to invest in, with a minimum amount of $100 – this can be for passive income, for impact-driven reasons, or both.

Market Context

How On-Chain Crowdlending Works

The idea is simple: borrowers and lenders connect directly. There’s no middleman. Smart contracts automate everything – issuing loans, taking repayments, and managing liquidations.

Why It Matters

Funds are pooled from multiple lenders, recorded on the chain, and managed without a central authority. This speeds up the whole process, cuts costs, and makes it possible for money to flow worldwide without friction.

The 8lends Approach

Details

8lends has always stood for regulated, asset-backed lending – in other words, its USDC loans are collateralized by real-world business assets, such as property or equipment. Borrowers are also subject to Know-Your-Business, AML, and KYC compliance checks and enjoy rights afforded by the GDPR. So far, it has only encountered 1 single default in its history.

The system works as follows:

Potential borrowers submit a funding application.

The 8lends platform scores their financial health and submits assets across 40 different points, using methods similar to the three major credit agencies.

8lends supports wallets from:

WalletConnect

Metamask

Coinbase

Rainbow

Trust Wallet

Rabby Wallet

1inch

Zerion

C98

Safepal

Many of the projects it is involved in are in green energy, agriculture, a variety of small businesses, and loans. The platform also issued 100,000,000 of its own $8LNDS tokens through a reward program. The token currently trades at 0.003382 USDC.