Lodestar doesn't underwrite borrowers. It underwrites collateral and time. There is no credit score because there is no unsecured credit: every loan is overcollateralized at roughly 2x when it opens (50% LTV on 7-day terms, 45% on 30-day terms). A borrower who walks away forfeits the half of their collateral value sitting above the debt, plus a 5% penalty, so repaying is always the rational move. We replaced creditworthiness with collateral-worthiness plus a deadline: the protocol underwrites the asset and the clock, not the person.

Nothing. That is the point. There is no health factor, no margin call, and no liquidation bot watching your position. Your collateral stays locked and untouched until your deadline, however violently the price moves in between, even an 80% one-day crash. The risk question changes from "did the price wick below a line for one block" to "can this asset lose more than half its value and stay there for the whole term". LTVs and term lengths are calibrated per asset against its own multi-year drawdown history so lenders stay covered through severe moves. And if an extreme crash does put a loan underwater mid-term, anyone can mark that expected loss into the pool price on the spot, so lenders always see the true position instead of a stale one, while the borrower keeps every option to repay and recover if the price comes back.

Every loan is a fixed-term put option. When you borrow, you are buying the right to hand your collateral to the pool for exactly your debt at the deadline, and the one-time fee you pay is the option premium the lenders earn for writing it. That is why an 80% crash mid-term changes nothing: only the price at expiry matters, and if the collateral is underwater then, you simply exercise the option by walking away instead of repaying. The pool stays solvent because those pooled premiums are priced to more than cover the rare walk-aways, the same way an insurer's premiums cover its claims. No liquidation is needed because the right to default already lives inside the contract, dated to the deadline.

You get a 48-hour grace period first. After that, anyone can settle the loan by paying its floor price: an on-chain price floor that starts at 100% of the FTSO oracle value and eases to 85% over 24 hours, so nobody can ever dump your collateral cheap. Lenders are repaid first, a 5% penalty goes to the protocol reserve, and everything left over comes back to you. You can even settle it yourself and reclaim the collateral at that same price. Defaulting costs you the penalty, not your whole position.

Five layers. First claim on settlement proceeds: principal is paid before anything else. Conservative sizing: collateral is worth about twice the debt at open, terms are capped at 90 days, and a loan can only be extended while it still meets its LTV at current prices. Concentration limits: each collateral asset has its own exposure cap. A real first-loss buffer: 30% of every fee plus all default penalties accumulate on-chain and automatically cover lender shortfalls before anyone else is paid. And honest accounting: the moment a loan defaults, its expected loss is marked into the pool price, so no lender can quietly exit ahead of bad news. Even in an extreme crash, settlement never stalls and never fills below its floor: the buyout path needs no DEX at all, so a settler can pay stable and take the collateral in-kind while arbitrageurs hedge it anywhere. The residual risk, stated honestly: lenders only take a loss if the collateral falls past the break-even shown on the Why no-liquidation page within a single term and the borrower abandons the position, and that loss is bounded, priced by the fees, and never hidden. The contracts are covered by unit, adversarial, fuzz-invariant and live-Flare fork tests, and a three-part adversarial review found no path to steal lender funds.

Flare's enshrined FTSOv2 oracle, the same decentralized feed that the network itself stands behind. Not a DEX spot price that a flash loan can bend for one block. The oracle prices collateral at loan open and anchors the settlement floor on default. If the oracle ever goes down, settlement waits 7 days and then falls back to the last recorded price, so an outage can never be used to underprice a sale.

One flat fee, deducted from the amount you receive: borrow at 0.5% for a 7-day term, 2.5% for 30 days, or 2.5% for 90 days at a lower LTV, and repayment is exactly the principal, nothing more. No accruing interest, no variable rate that spikes while you sleep, no funding payments. You know the full cost of the loan before you open it.

You get about 26%, and that number assumes you borrow 52 times a year. If you plan to, this is the wrong product and a variable-rate pool is cheaper — we would rather say that than sell you a bad fit. What the fee buys is collateral you do not have to leave idle. On a market that can liquidate you, prudence means borrowing well under the LTV on offer, because the buffer is what survives a wick at 3am; that unused collateral is a real cost nobody puts in the APR. Here there is no wick to survive, so you can use the full LTV — and the collateral keeps earning its staking yield the entire time it is locked. The rest of the fee is the ordinary price of borrowed money, plus the liquidation penalty you are no longer exposed to. It is not cheap and we will not pretend otherwise; it is simply fixed, known before you sign, and unable to move while the loan is open. Nothing accrues, nothing compounds, and there is no rate to watch. Borrow $10,000 for 7 days and you repay $10,000, having received $9,950. Borrow $10,000 for 30 days and you repay $10,000, having received $9,750. Per day the 90-day term is the cheapest at about 0.028%, against 0.071% on the 7-day and 0.083% on the 30-day; the 30-day buys the higher LTV. The loan is also non-recourse — if the collateral is ever worth less than the debt at settlement, that shortfall is the lenders', not yours — but at these LTVs that would take a fall of more than half inside your term, so treat it as a backstop, not as what you are buying. Launch pricing is deliberately careful: as real loss data accrues on mainnet, fees come down, not up.

Yes. Any time before your deadline, hit Extend on your loan in Portfolio: you pay another term's fee and the deadline pushes out by that term's duration, while the borrowed USD₮0 stays in your wallet. The position has to still meet its LTV at current prices to extend (the panel shows exactly how much collateral to top up if it fell), and total loan life is capped at 90 days from open. Past 90 days you repay and open a fresh loan.

Leverage without a liquidation price. Lock collateral, borrow, buy more of the same collateral with the loan, lock that too, up to four legs in one transaction. Every leg is an ordinary Lodestar loan on the term you picked, with its fee paid once and one shared deadline, so nothing but that deadline can close the position. You set a price tolerance on the buys; a worse fill is refused on chain. Unwind in one click, last leg first, bringing only the innermost leg’s cash. Find it under Borrow › Loop.

No, and there never will be. Lodestar is fee-only: lenders earn real fees paid by real borrowers in USD₮0. Nothing to farm, nothing to dump, no emissions schedule subsidizing an APY that disappears.