Nour Haridy

Nour Haridy is an Egyptian blockchain engineer and the founder of Inverse Finance — a decentralised autonomous organisation on Ethereum that builds fixed-rate lending infrastructure, decentralised stablecoins, and innovative borrowing mechanisms. Founded in December 2020, Inverse Finance began as an unnamed protocol with no token, no formal DAO structure, and no marketing — just smart contracts, a frontend, and a Telegram group of around 200 people. Haridy crowdsourced even the name from the community, settling on 'Inverse' to represent values and approaches that are 'the inverse of the status quo.'

Before Inverse Finance, Haridy had already established himself as one of the most technically ambitious developers in the Egyptian blockchain ecosystem. He graduated from United World College-USA (UWC-USA) in 2017 and immediately co-founded Lamarkaz — Cairo's first Ethereum dApp development studio — alongside building gasless DAI smart wallets such as Metacash and later Mosendo, a decentralised money transfer app. His professional background spans smart contract development at Tykn B.V. (a digital identity platform), Web3 engineering at Bountyhive, and blockchain architecture at Mosendo.

The centrepiece of Inverse Finance is FiRM — a fixed-rate lending protocol whose design philosophy is fundamentally different from the variable-rate markets that dominate DeFi lending. In protocols like Aave and Compound, interest rates fluctuate in real time based on utilisation, making it impossible for borrowers to predict their cost of capital over time. FiRM solves this by introducing the DOLA Borrowing Right (DBR) — an ERC-20 token that represents a user's pre-purchased entitlement to borrow one DOLA for up to one year at a fixed cost.

The DBR mechanism decouples borrowing capacity from real-time rate volatility. Users purchase DBRs on the open market or earn them through INV staking, then deposit collateral assets (including stETH, WBTC, and others) into FiRM's isolated lending markets to borrow DOLA at the rate locked in at the time of their DBR acquisition. This gives borrowers the predictability of a fixed-term loan without the counterparty risk of a traditional financial institution — and enables Inverse Finance to offer what it describes as 'personal collateral escrow' for each borrower, where each position is isolated to prevent cross-collateral contagion.

FiRM also integrates the Accelerated Leverage Engine (ALE), allowing users to multiply their borrowing exposure up to eight times through looped DOLA borrowing against single collateral — a leverage facility built on predictable fixed-rate mechanics rather than the uncertain variable-rate compounding found on other DeFi leverage platforms.

DOLA is Inverse Finance's flagship stablecoin — a debt-backed, over-collateralised digital dollar pegged to the US dollar. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins that rely on seigniorage mechanics (and are vulnerable to the death spiral dynamics that destroyed Terra's UST), DOLA is fully backed by collateral assets held within FiRM's lending markets. Its supply expands and contracts as borrowers take and repay DOLA loans, with the protocol able to deploy DOLA into third-party lending markets like Fraxlend and Llamalend to accelerate supply growth and manage the peg.

The stablecoin ecosystem extends to sDOLA — a yield-bearing version of DOLA that captures interest revenue from FiRM borrowers and distributes it to users who stake their DOLA in exchange for sDOLA. This creates a DeFi-native savings instrument — a stablecoin that appreciates in DOLA terms over time as the protocol accumulates borrowing fees, offering yield without exposing holders to the liquidation risk or smart contract complexity of active yield strategies.

Haridy has emphasised the structural distinction between debt-backed stablecoins like DOLA and their algorithmic predecessors: 'Debt-backed is not algorithmic. There is real collateral behind every DOLA, managed by a protocol that has no central team, no legal entity, and no single point of failure.'

In April and June 2022, Inverse Finance's original Anchor lending market was struck by two separate oracle price manipulation exploits that resulted in combined losses of over $24 million. The attacks exploited thin liquidity in the on-chain oracle feeds used by Anchor to price collateral, allowing the attacker to manipulate the apparent value of deposited assets and borrow far beyond what the actual collateral justified. The incidents were among the most damaging suffered by any DeFi protocol that year and raised serious questions about Inverse Finance's survival.

Haridy's response became a defining characteristic of his reputation in the DeFi community. Rather than abandoning affected users or restructuring the protocol to eliminate legacy obligations, Inverse Finance committed publicly to a repayment plan — gradually reimbursing exploit victims through protocol revenue over an extended period. 'This is our way of sending a message to everyone that Inverse DAO never abandons its users and always repays its debts,' Haridy stated in the aftermath. The commitment was eventually honoured, and FiRM — designed from the ground up with isolated lending markets and more robust oracle configurations — was launched as the post-exploit successor to Anchor.

By 2024, FiRM had surpassed $100 million in cumulative loans, and Inverse Finance's TVL had recovered to approximately $80 million — a remarkable rehabilitation given the scale of the 2022 losses and the scepticism the protocol faced in their immediate aftermath.

Haridy has been consistently outspoken about the value of unconventional approaches in DeFi — both technically and organisationally. Inverse Finance operates without a central team structure or registered legal entity, relying on a series of working groups and committees that govern specific protocol functions under INV token holder oversight. This model is unusual even by DeFi standards and reflects Haridy's conviction that credible decentralisation requires eliminating the corporate bottlenecks that most 'decentralised' protocols quietly preserve.

The INV token itself reflects this philosophy. INV was initially launched as a non-transferable governance token — an explicit attempt to prevent speculative accumulation from diluting governance participation — before evolving into a transferable token with staking mechanics. INV stakers earn DBR streaming rewards and xINV anti-dilution protection, while retaining full voting rights proportional to their staked balance. The total supply is capped at 555,000 INV, with allocations divided between community airdrops, team, and protocol operations.

Beyond Inverse Finance, Haridy co-created Decentube.com (a decentralised video sharing application), contributed to the Dcourt whitepaper proposing a decentralised smart contract dispute arbitration layer, and established the Cairo Blockchain Meetup — helping seed an Egyptian blockchain developer community that has since grown substantially. His trajectory from Cairo's first Ethereum lab to the founder of one of DeFi's most distinctive lending protocols makes him one of the most accomplished builders to emerge from outside the traditional US/European DeFi development centres.