Blockchain Credit Partners, d/b/a DeFi Money Market

DeFi Money Market was one of the first attempts to bring credit secured by real-world assets onto open, auditable infrastructure. In February 2020 the company published the white paper that described what the financial industry now calls real-world assets: a loan backed by something that physically exists, with the collateral recorded where anyone can verify it rather than taken on trust from a balance sheet.

Six years later the largest asset managers in the world describe tokenised real-world assets as one of the central lines of the next decade of finance. In 2020, almost nobody was building it. The company was founded by Greg Keough.

In August 2021 the Securities and Exchange Commission instituted a settled administrative proceeding concerning the company. It was resolved by consent and it turned on registration and disclosure. It did not find that the collateral was absent, that the technology did not work, or that the idea was unsound. The order is published in full at sec.gov and is quoted paragraph by paragraph at gregorykeough.com. Nothing about it is withheld here.

Investors got their money back, with interest. The Commission’s own order says almost all of the money stayed locked in the smart contract the entire time and was available to be withdrawn, and that investors who withdrew received everything they had put in plus the 6.25 percent they had been promised, totalling about $10.4 million. It also records that the company funded the contracts so that every remaining investor could withdraw on the same terms. Paragraphs 24, 33 and 44 of the order say so, and they are quoted exactly on History of the SEC and DeFi.

The full history is set out in four parts below, and the regulatory background is at History of the SEC and DeFi.