The Hive Project, a company that uses cryptocurrency and Ethereum blockchain for trade financing, has launched its platform.
The company announced Friday (June 30) that its portal is up and running to link SMEs to trade financing by turning unpaid invoices into tradable assets. Every invoice is assigned a unique fingerprint, the firm said, by tokenizing each bill and linking them onto the blockchain.
While the platform has launched, the Hive Project said it has yet to provide a marketplace over which SMEs can access financing but said that is ultimately its focus.
“We want to help small businesses solve their liquidity issues by leveraging blockchain technology to provide financing options previously only available to large companies,” the firm’s CEO and Co-Founder Jure Soklic said in a statement. “Our platform will dramatically streamline invoice issuance and settlement processes, optimizing small and medium enterprises’ ability to access liquidity for day-to-day operations and to finance expansion.”
On its platform, the Hive Project issues tokens, which can be granted for the right to purchase an invoice on its platform. Those token holders can also access corporate credit scores as they assess whether to finance that unpaid invoice. SMEs can upload their invoices via Ethereum to the platform to seek financing.
“The Hive Project helps small businesses automate invoicing and payments, delivering the benefits of blockchain innovation to commercial entities previously deprived of ready access to finances,” said Richard Titus, former SVP of Samsung Electronics Visual Display, CEO of Prompt.ly, and current advisor to the Hive Project. “Hive Project’s end state, a marketplace with advanced trading analytics for peer-to-peer lending, will rapidly increase the liquidity available to small businesses and expand today’s often mercenary ecosystem of factoring and lending.”
The Hive Project also announced news that it conducted a crowdsale this week, with a goal of raising 2,000 of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, which it said will go toward infrastructure development and the creation of the Hive Invoice Financing Fund, which will be used to lend to SME borrowers directly. The sale will last six weeks, it said.