Privacy-Preserving Lending: FHE Could Unlock Uncollateralized Credit
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One of the clearest use cases for FHE in DeFi is uncollateralized lending. Traditional finance rarely overcollateralizes, but DeFi does, which limits its scope.
FHE flips the model: users can share encrypted credit or KYC data with a protocol. Smart contracts then verify conditions (“Is the credit score above 700?”) without ever decrypting the data. Borrowers get privacy and no-collateral loans; lenders can still pursue defaults offchain if needed.
This opens the door to institutional-grade lending, private collateral pools and confidential ERC-20s — essentially rebuilding DeFi’s lending stack with privacy as a core primitive.