Success Story #5: Impact-investing platform ReFi Hub upgraded to Web3 via Apillon

True to its mission to bring transparency and accessibility to impact investing, ReFi Hub opted for a decentralized way of file storing and…

Apillon

Apr 23, 2024 • 5 min read

True to its mission to bring transparency and accessibility to impact investing, ReFi Hub opted for a decentralized way of file storing and website hosting.

The bigger picture
Problem: Central storage and hosting
Solution: End-to-end Web3 core
Better tomorrow one node at a time

👉 Project: ReFi Hub, a crowd-lending platform for sustainable businesses
👉 Niche: Decentralized finance (DeFi)
👉 Apillon services and features used: Decentralized Storage, Decentralized Hosting

The bigger picture

The ReFi Hub team lives and breathes sustainability. Their goal of improving the world’s future living conditions through crowd investing is also reflected in how the project is getting there — employing sustainable practices and Web3 technologies.

With ReFi Hub, anyone can put their money where their mouth is. Not only institutional investors with the big bucks, but ordinary Joes can, too, engage in safe investing with as little as $1 and back their favorite sustainability-driven businesses while yielding returns.

And the aims are high. ReFi Hub seeks to bring the $1.2 trillion impact investing market on-chain and drive over $1 billion into environmental projects by 2030. How? By tokenizing real-world assets and creating on-chain debt agreements.

The team members are no novices to Web3. Their previous project, Coral Tribe, utilized NFT art to improve the environment — from planting thousands of corals to educating people — while incentivizing holders with shared revenue.

Measurable impact

With ReFi Hub, investors can see their money make a difference — literally. The platform enables users to track their impact; displaying CO2, renewnebales energy and waste metrics. More so, they are leveraging in the power of art to translate this into engaging data visualizations.

The project embodies the principles of regenerative finance (ReFi), a financial paradigm that combines a capital-raising DeFi backbone with social and environmental impact.

The Web3 technologies powering ReFi’s transactional part instill greater transparency, immutability, decentralization, and trustless automation into the process. Besides, they also reshape capital flows in bringing investment opportunities to small retail investors, enabling global coordination, and giving everyone the means to co-build our collective future.

Cross-chain DeFi inside, sustainability outside

ReFi Hub’s lending protocol tokenizes real-world environmental assets. Its marketplace for climate investing is thoughtfully curated to list only truly sustainable and regenerative businesses, such as renewable energy plants, waste-reducing consumer technologies, and bio-based consumer products.

The ReFi Hub team opted for the Moonbeam Network to sustain the protocol, thanks to its high throughput, Ethereum compatibility and cross-chain integration. Besides, it supports Polygon and even networks that sustain Moonbeam as the hub of cross-chain communications enabled by Wormhole. This makes the ReFi Hub app easily scalable while lowering the threshold for investors across different networks.

The crowd-lending system is end-to-end decentralized and relies on smart contracts, allowing fast transactions, clear tracking of user impact, and full transparency on the flow of funds.

UX-wise, however, ReFi Hub doesn’t go too heavy on the Web3 jargon. By integrating credit card on- and off-ramps and non-custodial email-based wallets, it delivers seamless interaction for everyone, including Web2 users with little to no experience in decentralized technologies.

Learn more about ReFi Hub 👉 Website, X, GitBook

Problem: Central storage and hosting

Previously, the whole backbone of ReFi Hub has relied on AWS, a popular yet centralized cloud storage provider, for storage and hosting of their online sites.

AWS did the job, but the ReFi Hub team wanted to push their endeavors a step further by bringing the platform to the Web3 masses while ensuring high transparency in the investing process.

Solution: End-to-end Web3 core

Aligned with its values and mission of world improvement, ReFi Hub views decentralized infrastructure as a core component. Hence, the team decided to switch to a decentralized ecosystem to improve both back-end and front-end processes.

And Apillon delivered.

Web3 Storage

With Apillon, ReFi Hub managed to transit from Web2 to Web3 in a matter of minutes.

The website and dapp are written in Nuxt.js, and their contents have been stored decentrally on IPFS via Apillon Web3 Storage service. This setup ensures the team can permanently access the project’s files without having to worry about blackouts or hacks.

Besides, ReFi Hub also employed Apillon’s Web3 Storage service to store KYC NFTs minted on Moonbeam, a crucial element of onboarding new investors to the platform.

Web3 Hosting

The website and dapp’s front end also needed a decentralized hosting option, so the ReFi Hub team employed the Web3 Hosting service on the Apillon dashboard.

A close-up inspection of the website shows that its IPFS-based URL is hosted on Apillon’s IPFS nectarnode.io. 👇

Crowd-lending and backing of the most promising future-improving businesses are now end-to-end decentralized, true to the nature of ReFi to democratize impact investing and bring it to everyone in the most transparent and accessible way possible.

Building a better tomorrow one node at a time

With Apillon’s turnkey Web3 solutions, ReFi Hub made an overnight transition to a fully decentralized level with little technical planning and effort.

Check out ReFi Hub’s opportunities, join the initiative, and nurture your karma by investing in the world’s future. 🌍

Or, follow their lead, create a new project or bring your existing app to a Web3 level with Apillon by the end of the day. 👇

⧓ About Apillon

The Apillon platform serves as a unified gateway to the Web3 services provided by linked Polkadot parachains. Following the multi-chain vision, Apillon powers the transition of developers to Web3, simplifying its adoption in the real economy, and expanding its versatility as the ecosystem grows. With Apillon, Web3 services are within reach for every developer, regardless of their background and experience with blockchain technology.