Lending

Depositing capital assets

Lenders deposit whitelisted capital assets to the Primary Capital Pools and receive fTokens in return to reflect their deposit. The Primary Capital Pools are composed of separate markets of each whitelisted capital asset.

Unlike an exchange or peer-to-peer platform, where a lender’s assets are matched and lent to a borrower, the Fringe Finance protocol aggregates the supply of lenders’ assets for each capital asset; when a lender supplies an asset, it becomes a fungible resource within the pool for that asset. This approach offers significantly more liquidity than direct lending. Unless every asset in a market is borrowed, lenders can withdraw their assets at any time, without waiting for a specific loan to mature.

Receiving interest

Assets supplied to a market are represented by an ERC-20 token balance (“fTokens”) which reflects the deposited underlying asset. Holding fTokens entitles the owner to an increasing quantity of the underlying collateral asset. As the money market accrues interest, which is a function of borrowing demand, fTokens become convertible into an increasing amount of the underlying asset. In this way, earning interest is as simple as holding an ERC-20 fToken.

Indeed, a holder of fTokens does not need to redeem them on the Fringe Finance platform to regain their deposited capital assets — they can instead sell the fTokens on the open market for whatever asset they wish, as long as an external market exists.

Withdrawing capital assets

Lenders redeem their fTokens to withdraw the underlying capital asset from the relevant Primary Capital Pool. Their fTokens reflect the interest they have earned by an increase in the redemption rate of fTokens since they received them.

Multi-asset lender tokens

In v1 of Fringe Finance, $USDC featured as the sole capital asset available for borrowers to loan out. With Fringe’s v2 upgrade, lenders can lend out (and borrowers can borrow) assets beyond $USDC.

Multi-asset lender tokens will allow users to access a broader range of assets, such as different stablecoins and most of our listed collateral assets. This includes top-tier assets like $wBTC and $ETH. The feature expands the Fringe Finance Platform in terms of diversification and risk management, also reducing reliance on any one asset.