PuddleBorrowing money from friends and / or relatives can undoubtedly lead to complicated and not very pleasant situations - however, many believe that this may be better than dealing with banks or moneylenders.
They are addressed to them Puddle: a new application / service, which enables the user to borrow money from his / her social environment - his / her social network instead of through 'traditional' (banks, credit cards, etc.).
As indicated in a related article by Wired, the basic principle is simple: the user puts money into a digital "cup" and gets the ability to draw from it five times (for example, if he puts in $10, he has a "credit line" of up to $50, which he can draw whenever wants). The frompayment of loans is made in monthly installments, lasting three or six months, without interest beyond a standard amount for each month (depending on the size of the loan).
This kind of creation of a 'fund'/'reserve' by a community is nothing new: in fact these systems have existed almost since money was created, and operate as 'interpersonal' banks, where credit is based on trust between community members. As one of its creators, Skylar Woodward, explains to Wired (the other two are Matt Flannery and Jean-Claude Rodríguez Ferreira Masons), the challenge was to adapt this "offline" system to modern online data. Using the Internet for this purpose involves much faster speeds, and there is always the hesitation as to whether one can trust someone one knows only through a digital profile. That's why social networking elements were integrated into the application, according to its standards Facebook and Reddit, with "good behavior" reward systems.
Puddle is self-regulating - and based on its designers, the principle on which it is based seems to work, as the service (which has been undergoing testing for two years) has a repayment ratio of 98%.
