May 8, 2025
Today, real-world asset (RWA) lending platforms face the challenge of navigating licensing and compliance requirements across all jurisdictions, even those that don’t have comprehensive rules in place yet. With a clear need for identity solutions to ensure compliance with OFAC sanctions, age requirements, and more, builders are in search of tools that maintain compliance while protecting the privacy of their users. This is why Leo Franklin built PawnStars, his RWA lending project, with Self at EthGlobal Taipei.
Leo, a serial hacker from Chennai, India, who previously worked at Karma, and has attended 35+ hackathons as a two-time EthGlobal Finalist, participated in EthGlobal Taipei, familiar with the challenge of quickly building scalable infrastructure.
Leveraging Self as the identity layer, he built PawnStars to enable loans with RWAs as collateral, AI-driven pricing, and KYC compliance. The strength of his submission earned him a third-place bounty for “Best Self Onchain Integration,” and with the hackathon completed, Leo is now working to build and scale the project for users worldwide.
Leo reflected on his recent experience at EthGlobal Taipei and what’s next for PawnStars below:
What inspired you to develop PawnStars?
In the era of RWAs, I saw a huge need for simple, user-friendly yet effective compliance solutions. Integrating Self provides PawnStars with a strong compliance layer on top of contracts.
When did you decide identity verification was a core pillar necessary to solve for?
In countries such as India, there is not yet a standard crypto or RWA compliance method.
Why did you choose Self for the identity layer?
I chose Self because the Quickstart documentation makes it easy to integrate, and Self’s use of ZK proofs protects the privacy of the end user, which will drive more adoption of PawnStars.
What's your vision for the future of PawnStars?
The next step for PawnStars is expanding across chains and scaling to onboard.
Learn more about Self
Start with our Quickstart docs here.
Let's talk
Self is a privacy-first identity verification platform designed for Web3 and universal apps.
Securely onboard Web3 users with private, trustless identity verification.
Enable Sybil-resistant polling for fair and transparent governance.
Check sanction lists to ensure compliance without exposing user data.
Facilitate wallet recovery with secure identity proofs.
