Engineering Real Credit Onchain: The 3Jane Bet

Introduction

Crypto has always carried an outsized ambition: to rebuild the financial system from the ground up. Between 2016 and 2020, it felt like an open sandbox of wild experimentation, constant tinkering, and novel financial primitives. Then came DeFi Summer, when the vision sharpened: we weren’t just building new forms of money but reimagining markets and access.

Since then, we’ve sprinted through eras of traditional finance at breakneck speed: DEXs, perpetuals, money markets, bonding curves, stablecoins, liquid staking, and tokenized real‑world assets. Some stuck. Most didn’t. Many were overengineered, unsustainable, or just underwhelming onchain imitations of TradFi.

However, due to all this progress, DeFi has primarily been confined to users with capital. Credit, in its proper form: the ability to borrow based on reputation, income, or network trust, remains unsolved. Attempts at undercollateralized lending have been made, from peer-to-peer vouching to delegate-based lending desks. But the space remains brittle. Protocols either lacked real enforcement, had poor borrower incentives, or couldn’t scale beyond a handful of trusted borrowers.

Credit isn’t a financial nice-to-have. It’s the engine of capitalism. When credit expands, markets boom, innovation flows, and economic activity surges. When it contracts, everything grinds to a halt. And this isn’t just a TradFi phenomenon. DeFi, if it hopes to become a self-sustaining ecosystem, must eventually embrace the messy, trust-laden world of credit.

That’s why a new generation of protocols is taking another swing. And among them, 3Jane stands out as one of the boldest attempts yet to build real onchain credit, that combines crypto-native privacy, real-world enforcement, and a thoughtful approach to underwriting.

We’ll briefly look at the protocols that tried and failed, the wreckage CeFi credit left behind, and how 3Jane is reimagining what undercollateralized lending can look like onchain, with lessons from the past and forward-looking protocol design.

What Makes Undercollateralized Lending Possible?

In traditional finance, the architecture and scaffolding for such credit are so embedded in institutions and regulations that we forget it exists. But remove it, and the entire structure collapses. 

If DeFi wants to move beyond pawnshop-style overcollateralized loans, it must reimagine credit from the ground up. Onchain, we’ve tried to rebuild credit in parts without reconstructing the load-bearing walls, but it hasn’t worked. To understand why, we must return to what makes it work. Any functioning system of undercollateralized lending needs to get three things right: trust, incentives, and enforcement. 

T-I-E Framework

Trust: Who Are You, and Can You Be Trusted?

In TradFi, lenders rely on a rich mosaic of data: credit scores, income, repayment history, employer records, even behavioral analytics. Borrowers are known entities with real-world consequences. Onchain, all of that collapses into a string of alphanumeric characters, i.e., a wallet address. Maybe some past transaction history, maybe not. Pseudonymity by design is excellent for privacy, but terrible for trust.

Without identity, there’s no basis for credit. Without a reliable assessment, lenders fly blind. Some protocols have attempted to infer onchain creditworthiness from DeFi usage or utilize off-chain attestations (Union Finance), but none have successfully cracked the code. Hence, trust in