ZeroLender: Trustless Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin Lending Platform

Since its inception a decade ago, Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology have been garnering interest from a large spectrum of financial institutions. Although it encompasses a currency, a payment method, and a ledger, Bitcoin as it currently stands does not support bitcoins lending. In this paper, we present a platform called ZeroLender for peer-to-peer lending in Bitcoin. Our protocol utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to achieve unlinkability between lenders and borrowers while securing payments in both directions against potential malicious behaviour of the ZeroLender as well as the lenders, and prove by simulation that our protocol is privacy-preserving. Based on our experiments, we show that the runtime and transcript size of our protocol scale linearly with respect to the number of lenders and repayments.