MARMARA CHAIN: A Peer-to-Peer Credit Based Money Creation System

B. Gültekin Çetiner
4 min readJan 15, 2019

How could masses of people create credits as banks do?

Credit Loop

MARMARA CHAIN PROJECT
Credit Creation is the most essential function of banks. When someone gets a loan, a bank automatically creates both credit and deposit. Credit circulation happens only between the borrower and that bank. The deposit keeps circulating and at the end of repayment process, both credit and deposit are destroyed. This is the simplest explanation for banking system on how money is created by banks.

How could people create money?

Many people think that money creation through credits belongs only to banks. This is not real. In some countries, people do create money with some innovative instruments such as post-dated cheques and promissory notes. Turkey is a unique example among them with tradition going back to use of promissory notes and post-dated cheques starting more than 30 years ago.

Marmara Chain project started with the inspiration from a culture of post-dated cheques and promissory notes being used based on certain rules and conditions in Turkey.

Marmara Chain project started with the inspiration from a culture of post-dated cheques and promissory notes being used based on certain rules and conditions in Turkey. They are currently holding a market size of one third of GDP with more than 200 Billion USD face value alone. What makes them unique is their circulation many times until the post-date. Although they are originally printed by banks, the real credit issuers are the cheque issuers who can write any number on slip without having the required deposit in their bank accounts. The cheque amount is just needed to be ready on the date written on cheque. In some sectors, the post-date period is 2 years. No bank can redeem a post-dated cheque before the due-date. Until the due date, these cheques keep circulating as money by just signing and passing to other endorsers in so called credit loops. It is a peer-to-peer trust based credit creation and circulation system. Promissory notes and similar financial instruments work the same way as post-dated cheques with the difference that they are fully decentralized existing on papers only. Therefore, their market size is not known as in Post-dated cheques for which detailed statistics are held by institutions on nation-level.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

  • They exist on papers and easy to counterfeit the whole cheque or most usually signatures on cheque. Since each time during circulation only a pair knows details of each other, the counterfeiters embed some trustable names inside credit loop among endorsers.
    • Cheque books are delivered only by banks based on subjective decisions. Therefore, the real potential is much higher. Small business owners or ordinary people are not allowed to use them.
    • Indivisibility due to high blockage fee per cheque slip for most of credit issuers. Difficult to circulate huge amounts due to this.
    • Redemption cannot be made automatic. Difficult to trace endorsers in case of defaulting.
    • Endorsers in credit loops cannot be traced since they are existing only on papers.

BLOCKCHAIN CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

  • For the first time in Blockchain History, a peer-to-peer Credit creation existing already as a real use-case.
    • A zero-non-redemption can be achieved based on collective mining by credit-issuers and endorsers.
    • It needs to attract real business people with simple tools who are already involved with credit creation on papers. They are completely illeterate to blockchain.
    • The success of redemption relies on people who are using mining and staking. The system must attract them with low cost investment.
    • Staking should be with so-called active coins which are “locked” coins.
    • It needs continuous systematic use of timelocks supported during mining, i.e. half blocks are “locked” .
    • The system may be used as normal payment method similar to credit cards with post-date periods of as short as 1 day and for only fraction of USD.
  • Difficulty to Process and deliver locked coins in pools to miners.
  • The system may be adopted by communities at different countries.
  • Due to universal mining process behind project, blockchain communities can create a kind of economy beyond the boundaries.

TECHNOLOGY CHOSEN

We made a Workshop on 31th October 2018 and discussed a variety of different platforms and decided to start with Komodo Technologies and Crypto Conditions, a new independent way of smart contracts. We are now sure that the choice of Komodo is the right and fastest path towards the success.

Currently, most of challenges are handled very well with Komodo Technologies. We are thankful to James Lee (#JL77), the Leader of Komodo Platform who has been tackling with the hardest challenges so far.

We hope to talk about the achievements that was made so far and some of the roadmap on how we can tackle with challenges mentioned above.

Prof. Dr. B. Gültekin Çetiner
Discord Address: https://discord.gg/Nptj6ZT

--

--