Crypto credit startup 3Jane has emerged from stealth with a clear mission: bring unsecured lending to the digital asset economy. Backed by a $5.2 million seed round led by Paradigm, the company aims to fill what it sees as a major gap in decentralized finance (DeFi)—a scalable, trustless way to extend credit without requiring traditional collateral.
At the heart of 3Jane’s model is a peer-to-pool protocol that provides real-time, algorithmically issued unsecured USDC credit lines to users like traders, yield farmers, businesses, and even AI agents. Unlike most DeFi lending systems that rely on overcollateralization, 3Jane says it can assess a borrower’s risk using verifiable financial data, including credit scores, centralized exchange (CEX) activity, DeFi positions, bank assets, and real-world cash flow.
Founder Jacob Chudnovsky acknowledges that past attempts to offer unsecured credit in crypto have largely failed. The problem, he says, comes down to the lack of robust credit evaluation tools in a space that doesn’t natively support offchain financial behavior.
“We're trying to build out the first credit-based money market,” Chudnovsky explained. “Unsecured credit has been an underdeveloped vertical in crypto.”
To navigate privacy concerns while pulling in offchain data, 3Jane has turned to zkTLS, a zero-knowledge proof protocol that allows for privacy-preserving, trustless extraction of financial information from traditional systems. This technology, now commercially viable, is key to their approach—especially in a community where anonymity is often valued.
The company also sees a future in underwriting AI-managed businesses. While early use cases will involve AI agents assisting human-led operations, Chudnovsky expects fully autonomous software businesses to emerge—and 3Jane wants to be ready to assess the creditworthiness of these agents just as it would a traditional borrower.
With eyes initially set on the U.S. market, 3Jane is targeting a space it estimates to be worth over $1 trillion, covering everything from revenue-based loans and merchant cash advances to trade credit. The startup plans to launch its mainnet in Q3 2025.
