DeFi investment opportunities are looking a little more palatable today with the news that Soil, creator of a real-world asset-backed loan marketplace, has achieved full compliance with local regulators in its home base of Estonia.

Soil is the creator of a unique debt marketplace where traditional companies can seek funding from stablecoin investors by putting up tokenized collateral such as debt. Crypto investors can search for opportunities in Soil’s marketplace to lend their assets to these companies and earn yield.

Soil believes there’s a big opportunity for this kind of marketplace among startups that have a solid business plan but cannot obtain financing through traditional means. Venture capital is difficult to obtain, and bank-based financing can be extremely inflexible, meaning there’s big demand for alternative forms of financing. Soil has built its debt marketplace protocol atop of the Polygon blockchain, and offers businesses various funding options, with highly competitive rates and loan durations. Soil’s role is to match borrowers with lenders, and takes a small fee from the connections it facilitates.

Soil said today it has received confirmation from Estonia’s local financial markets regulator that its planned operations are fully compliant with local rules and regulations. It’s a big milestone for the company, which can now claim that regulators have validated the assumptions of its business model.

According to the company, it is also positioning itself for full compliance with Europe’s new MiCA regulation, which was adopted earlier this year and sets out rules on transparency and disclosure requirements for crypto asset firms. The MiCA rules govern the authorization and supervision of crypto asset service providers and issues, the operation, organization and governance of issuers of asset-referenced tokens, consumer protections and measures to prevent market abuse.

Backed by its innovative business model and solid legal support, Soil believes it is well placed to inspire investor confidence in alternative financial markets based on DeFi. However, its CEO Jakub Bojan stressed that this is just the start, as the company will continue to work on promoting transparency and investor safety.

“We hired several teams of lawyers from different countries and waited long weeks to receive official confirmation from the local regulator that the activities planned on our Soil Platform are legal”,

Bojan said.​