Thanks to the fact that Moolahsense makes all bids to lend money transparent, some readers should be aware that I started participating in peer-to-peer lending. In fact, for folks who have been following, I was able to lend $1,000 of my own money successfully to Leap Networks at about 8-9% interest rate about a week ago. The decision to start investing in crowdfunding platform was not a financial one. There are higher yielding investments in the local stock-market like shipping trusts. Getting into crowdfunding was an academic decision. I was doing a subject called Legal Issues in E-Commerce and wanted to write something which was cutting edge and novel so I chose crowdfunding as my research topic. Doing the research paper forced me to look at legal reforms in the US ( Obama JOBS Act 2012 ) as well as different equity crowdfunding models in the UK ( Crowdcube vs ......