Pencil Finance completes $1M onchain lending cycle for 6.6K students in Southeast Asia

Student loan real-world asset (RWA) protocol Pencil Finance completed a $1 million onchain student loan cycle, offering financing to thousands of students in Southeast Asia who were underserved by traditional lenders.

Pencil said it completed its first fully onchain student loan cycle on the blockchain, where the platform deployed $1 million in capital as a lender that was repaid by borrowers to the bundle’s funders with yield, the company revealed in a Thursday announcement shared with Cointelegraph.

The bundle was funded in July 2025 by Animoca Brands, Open Campus and New Campus, structured as a senior tranche with fixed returns and a junior tranche with variable returns and first-loss risk.

The $1 million onchain loan cycle offered financing to about 6,600 students across 118 schools and universities in Southeast Asia. Pencil Finance claims this is the first-ever fully onchain lending cycle financing student loans transparently recorded on the blockchain network.

Of the 6,600 students, about 1,050 received direct funding. Pencil said the loans were designed for students underserved by traditional lenders, with 50% female borrowers and 93% stemming from lower-income households.

Tokenized RWAs are increasingly being used to issue or collateralize loans.

In July, Brazil’s B3 stock exchange issued a 100,000 Brazilian reais ($19,600) loan secured by 10 tokenized cows as collateral, where each cow received a unique digital token linked to an encrypted digital identity, while AI-powered smart collars from agriculture tech company Cowmed monitored each animal’s health.