Israeli startup bids to build a ‘DeFi credit card’

Israeli startup Kima is running a project with Mastercard’s FinSec Innovation Lab to connect decentralised finance (DeFi) applications with fiat systems, according to Finextra.

Kima, which describes itself as an asset-agnostic, peer-to-peer money transfer and payment protocol, has secured a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority to fund the plan.

The startup and the FinSec lab will focus on developing a use case linking traditional financial instruments, such as bank accounts and credit cards, to DeFi protocols, platforms, and services.

The collaboration aims to expand on Kima’s existing payment protocol — which facilitates direct money transfers via blockchain and bank accounts without using smart contracts.

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Kima is a decentralized, blockchain-based money transfer protocol. It settles interchain transactions, enabling apps to build on what they’re comfortable with, and leave financial friction in the past.

The Kima protocol defragments DeFi by providing an open infrastructure and building blocks for cross-chain apps: a robust technological infrastructure, pre-made functionality blocks, tokenomics and apps.

Blockchain protocols are siloed because of technical, financial and regulatory obstacles. As a result, DeFi is a collection of fragments: liquidity pools, options, vaults, strategies, future contracts – all of which are locked within the boundaries of the network and smart contracts. The result is poor user experience, limited functionality, insufficient liquidity and high costs.

Kima believes that to unlock value and increase adoption to reach a network effect, „DeFi must become unfragmented”. „Services should be interoperable, interconnected (both cross-chain and off-chain), user-friendly and smart.”

More about Kima’s use cases here: ecommerce, lending / borrowing, wallet, others