Our Investment in ShuttleOne
By: Meltem Demirors
Tags: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Payments, Fintech

Our Investment in ShuttleOne

Building a Digital Finance Ecosystem in South East Asia

We are thrilled to announce that CoinShares Ventures has invested in ShuttleOne (S1). Focusing on South East Asia, S1 is an infrastructure company that builds digital finance systems to support governments, institutions, and B2B platforms. The company provides services in the South East Asia market in trade financing, remittances, and micro-lending, and is building a novel approach to financing working capital using blockchain-based risk management tools and liquidity pools.

I met Zhuang in 2018 at an event in Singapore, and was struck by his passion, drive, and vision for what crypto could do for people. Zhuang started his career running a small-scale farming business in Malaysia, and is keenly aware of the challenges facing small business owners and consumers in the region. With a presence in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore, S1 is focused on building a regional financial services platform.

S1 is a purpose-driven company, and the founder, Zhuang, was inspired by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDG’s. The company is focused on increasing access to financial services for small-scale businesses in developing countries, including affordable credit and the integration of these small businesses into value chains and financial markets and flows.

As I wrote last month, leverage is a helluva drug. But to get leverage, you need collateral. This is where S1 has built an interesting approach in issuing loans to previously unserved or underserved segments and enabling the use various types of collateral to back those loans.

Over the last six months, S1 has rapidly expanded its ecosystem to enable the tokenization of various types of collateral, whether it’s a letter of credit or a payable, to enable credit scoring and risk management, and to facilitate lending and borrowing on and off ramps in stablecoins like Dai and USDC via their own mobile wallet.

We began speaking with Zhuang at the start of the year, and in March, got a chance to see his vision come to life. COVID19 heightened the need for medical supplies across the world, but the high level of demand meant that suppliers required payment in advance to secure these inventories. S1 was able to help vendors finance the working capital needed to buy these supplies. Vendors provided trade documentation and the S1 systems disbursed a loan in digital currency. This all happened in under one hour, with compliance and risk assessment conducted digitally via the S1 platform.

ShuttleOne Trade Finance Flows

Over the last six months, S1's network of partners has expanded and volume on the platform has grown materially. As former commodities traders, we’ve experience first-hand the pains of the fragmented trade finance ecosystem, which has historically been monopolized by banks, trading firms, and now, a slew of FinTech companies trying to put a nice onboarding experience on top of the legacy banking system. By leveraging crypto networks S1 has build a credit ecosystem that is entirely on-chain.

Today, institutional partners facilitate lending and debt collection to enable collateral management and credit disbursement to crucial trade corridors. Going forward, the company has plans to integrate these instruments into a virtual bank account, where users can transfer money, borrow money, and even invest money into different interest-bearing instruments that are compliant with Sharia law. S1 also draws on the strengths of other projects including Maker‘s ability to mint Dai, and Centrifuge’s asset-backed lending protocol, Tinlake.

We are excited to work with Zhuang and the S1 team to build a suite of financial products and services accessible to a wide audience of borrowers, lenders, and governments in South East Asia, a region of the world poised for tremendous economic growth.