Points announces $8 Million in Seed Funding for Blockchain Data Collaboration Protocol, Delivering Credit Ratings for the Unbanked

Backed by prominent Venture Capital, Points integrates AI with blockchain technology to introduce a radically new way to build accurate credit scores for the 1.7 billion unbanked population

Points (PTS), the first truly scalable blockchain data collaboration protocol for better credit scoring and inclusive finance, has announced $8 million in funding from traditional and blockchain venture capital including DHVC, Cherubic Ventures, Ce Yuan, Ontology Foundation, Nest.Bio Ventures, and Zhong Cheng Xin Credit Technology.

Inspired by the vision to make credit accessible to the world’s unbanked population of 1.7 billion people, Points uses blockchain technology and AI to develop a groundbreaking, secure and configurable protocol that encourages trustless entities, including banks, institutions, tech companies and consumers to participate in sharing their proprietary data.

The first use case of Points’ infrastructure will be as a credit collaboration network, which enables the world’s most accurate credit scores and opens the doors to a fairer financial services market that makes credit more readily accessible.

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As a result of minimizing the risk to banks or other credit institutions that otherwise may not offer l**** for high-risk clients, the unbanked or underserved population can gain access to credit or more favorable interest rates on l**** or other financial products.

“With the support of our VCs and partners, we’re excited to be able to launch the first and most accurate market-ready blockchain-based credit network,” said Sarah Zhang, Founder of Points. “Our vision is to serve the underrepresented community, and with blockchain as a core technology for Points, we’re able to incentivize partners to participate in r******** data sharing, which combined with AI, means truly accurate credit scores.”

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To achieve this is the result of a combination of a set of advantages unique to Points:

Data – For any AI to achieve a high-degree of accuracy, it must be fed with prodigious amounts of data. Points is announcing its data sharing partnership with one of China’s largest credit rating agencies, Zhong Cheng Xin Credit Technology Ltd., and Teleinfo, owned by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). These partnerships will provide Points with a fire hose of 500 million credit profiles and one billion identity profiles, which will be used to train and refine the world’s most accurate credit scores.

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Security – Points’ blockchain-based data collaboration protocol uniquely encourages partners to participate in r********, zero-knowledge-proof based computation, without exchanging original data. In other words, any participating data owner can contribute their data to be shared and analyzed by the network through Points’ secure and anonymized digital dropbox. The dropbox enables safe file transfers which are authenticated through the use of smart contracts. This mitigates many risks such as single point of failure and DDOS that hackers use to get access to data. Ultimately this encourages a wide range of participants, whether traditional institutions, technology firms, or even individual people, to participate their data in Points’ protocol.

Economic Incentive – Participating partners that contribute their data receive a financial reward in the form of Points’ token, PTS, which can be traded, sold or exchanged. Such system empowers contributors and shareholders within Points’ token-based economy.

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Market-Ready Technology – Backed by world-class engineers, Points has developed the only market-ready blockchain-based network that can fulfill the most demanding technological requirements for the world’s largest banks and credit institutions. Points is capable of analyzing and serving credit scores within one second and at 10,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS).

Artificial Intelligence – Backed by a world-class team hailing from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Tsinghua, and Peking University, Points presents a solution that can unlock the potential to embed data into artificial intelligence, which can be used to fill in the gaps on missing credit data on customers, or clean up redundant data – a central problem to today’s data collection methods. This also mitigates any incentive for institutions to purchase personal data from the black market in developing nations.

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“Among the few practical use cases for blockchain technology, Points has demonstrated a groundbreaking solution with its data collaboration protocol that can contribute to a solution for the world’s credit problems for the unbanked, but this is just the beginning,” said Bin Zhang, CEO and Chairman of the Board at Zhong Cheng Xin Credit Technology Ltd. and advisor of Points. “We’re excited to be partnered with and invested in this cause.”

Besides Bin Zhang, Points’ advisors include Shoucheng Zhang, who is professor of applied physics and electrical at Stanford University and the founder of DHVC, a leading investor in the blockchain industry and early investor in Dfinity, Symbiont, Brave/BAT, Kyber Network; and Jason Lu, who was the former VP/CRO of Ant Financial and Yu’e Bao, the world’s largest money-market fund, and previously Senior Director of Global Risks at Paypal.