Peer-to-Peer lending
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending is a DeFi protocol where borrowers and lenders look for good agreements, discussing together the parameters of each loan.
On FluidTokens, anyone can be a borrower, a lender or both.
Loan Requests
Borrowers can request any amount of ADA or stablecoins, locking their NFTs and fungible tokens as form of collateral when creating loans. Lenders are then free to look for good loans and lend to the best ones depending on their personal strategy and preferences.
When a loan has been granted, the borrower will be able to repay the full amount (loan + interest) in any moment. If the borrower hasn't yet repaid at expiration date, the lender will be able to claim the collateral and the loan will be considered defaulted.
A P2P loan stays active until the agreed expiration date, indipendently from the value of the collateral.
This means that there is not a liquidation mechanism and that the lender will have to wait the end to the loan period to claim the collateral.
All the loan actions and involved assets are secured and guaranteed by our official and heavily-tested Smart Contract deployed on the Cardano blockchain. FluidTokens cannot control any of your assets, in total alignment with the blockchain philosophy.
Any NFT/token can be used as collateral for a loan, but the community maintains a verified collections list to protect from fakes.
The platform supports bundles of NFTs/tokens as collateral: using several NFTs together, borrowers can ask for higher amounts of ADA and better loan conditions. A notable use case for our bundles support are the metaverse NFTs: when you own large plots of land made of several NFTs, you can lock all of them at once when creating your loan request on FluidTokens.
Borrowers are incentivized in behaving correctly repaying their loans in time thanks to the Borrower Karma: each loan request shows how many loans have been repaid and defaulted by that specific borrower. Borrowers with a great score will be able to ask more or with better parameters as they can be considered trustworthy by lenders.
Loan Request creation
Any user with a proper wallet can become a borrower. A borrower can create one or more loans locking his/her NFTs as collateral and setting the requested parameters, such as:
- Loan amount and currency: how much ADA/stablecoins he needs from a lender
- Interest amount and currency: how much ADA/stablecoins he will repay as interest to the lender
- Time duration: number of hours (or days) before the loan will have been expired
Once confirmed by the blockchain, this loan will become available and it will be visible by any possible lender to be accepted.
Following the Peer-to-Peer approach, the borrower must create a loan with rational parameters so it will be more probable to find a proper lender.
When a loan request is created, a bond NFT represeting the borrower position is created and sent to the borrower wallet.
Anyone with this bond is the actual borrower, so you can [transfer and sell it](/loan/bonds).
Lending a loan
Any user with a proper wallet can become a lender. A lender can view all the available loan requests on the FluidTokens platform, examine the NFTs/tokens used as collateral, the borrower address and karma and the proposed loan parameters.
If the lender likes an available loan request, he can lend the required amount of ADA/stablecoins to the borrower through the platform. Once confirmed by the blockchain, this loan will become active and the expiration date will be set.
When a loan is lent, a bond NFT represeting the lender position is created and sent to the lender wallet.
Anyone with this bond is the actual lender, so you can [transfer and sell it](/loan/bonds).
Repayment of a loan
Since a loan becomes active to its expiration time (determined by its Duration), the borrower is able to repay the lender with the original amount plus the promised interests.
The repayment must be fully executed in a single transaction through the FluidTokens platform. At the moment you cannot repay in installments but this feature is going to be released in the next weeks.
The borrower also pays a small platform fee of 2.5% of the original lent amount to FluidTokens.
Once repaid and confirmed by the blockchain, the loan will appear as repaid in the loans history.
Claiming the collateral
If an active loan expires without the borrower having repaid the promised amount, the lender is able to claim the locked NFTs/tokens without any additional fee.
Once claimed and confirmed by the blockchain, the loan will appear as claimed in the loans history.
The borrower will also receive a negative score in his borrower karma.
Cancelling a loan
If a loan is available but not yet active (ie. nobody has yet lent to it), the borrower can decide to cancel the loan request, getting back the NFTs/tokens used as collateral.
Once confirmed by the blockchain, this loan will disappear from the available loans page.
Relisting a loan
If a loan is available but not yet active (ie. nobody has yet lent to it), the borrower can decide to relist the loan request, changing one or multiple parameters. This action only takes 1 transaction.
Withdrawing a repayment
Lenders that received repayments must withdraw them, they are not automatically sent to their wallets.
Bonds
Getting and providing liquidity is a great aspect of FluidTokens P2P platform, but you can do even more: both borrowers and lenders receive a NFT representing their respective position in each existing loan: we call them bonds.
Anyone who owns the correct bond is considered the lender or the borrower of that particular loan, so you can transfer it to another wallet (for example if your wallet has been compromised or to fix eventual bugs) or even sell it to someone else.
The bonds marketplace is under construction, it will be available in the near future.
On Cardano, bonds are created for all the loans made on the V2 version of FluidTokens (after December 2022). If you have a V1 loan, there won't be bonds to manage and the borrower and lender addresses are hardcoded into the loan itself.
If you lose your bond you won't be able to interact with the loan anymore, eventually losing the collateral or the repayments.
Take care of your bonds!
Lender risks and mitigations
As in traditional finance, lenders look for earning opportunities accepting the risk that the loan could not be repaid in time.
Therefore it's important to understand that the lender could lose the lent amount of ADA if the borrower doesn't pay back. If that happens, as compensation the lender is able to claim the NFTs used as collateral.
The FluidTokens platform incentivizes users to lend as they don't pay any fee to the platform itself: lenders already take the risk so only the borrowers pay the small platform fee when they repay the loan.
That said, please remember that a small amount of ADA is needed to accomplish any Smart Contract action on the Cardano blockchain.
Before accepting any loan, lenders must check every policyid of each NFT locked as collateral. Even if FluidTokens provides much information about each NFT, it's mandatory to do your own research on the NFTs.
The DeFi approach guarantees that the platform cannot interviene at all, therefore the respnosibilities are on the users.
Another important factor to consider is the expiration time of the proposed loan: if the NFTs used as collateral drop in value, lenders will have to wait the end of the loan to claim them and eventually sell them on a marketplace.
Finally, lenders shall know the instrinsic risks of DeFi.
Borrower risks and mitigations
Borrowers request ADA from lenders to use it in any way they prefer (investing, trading, staking, arbitrage and more) and promise to repay the debt with an additional interest. To give some guarantees to the lender, the borrower locks one or more NFTs in the FluidTokens smart contract as collateral for the loan.
The borrower doesn't risk anything, except eventually losing the locked NFTs if he doesn't repay the debt + interests before the expiration date.
When the borrower repays the loan, he also has to pay a small platform fee: the current amount is 2.5% of the originally required ADA amount. If this value is lower than 1ADA then the platform fee is set to be 1 ADA.
Finally, borrowers shall know the instrinsic risks of DeFi.