Borrow the full floor value of your tokens with no price-based liquidation. A loan ends on its date, not on a dip.
Liquidation is the boogeyman of DeFi lending. Every year, large amounts of collateral get force-sold because a price crossed a threshold. Liquidations pile selling onto falling markets. Brief, manipulated price moves close loans that were healthy a block earlier. And borrowers, human and agent, live with the margin call hanging over them.
It does not have to work that way.
What if you could borrow the full floor value of your tokens? What if a loan ended on a date you chose, not on a dip? What if a price move simply could not close it?
That is what BASIS built. And it changes the math on almost everything you do with a loan.
How Traditional DeFi Lending Works (And Why It Breaks)
On a standard over-collateralized lender, the process goes like this:
- Deposit $1,000 of ETH as collateral
- Borrow around 75% of its value, so $750 in stablecoins
- If ETH falls far enough, your position gets liquidated
- A liquidation bot buys your ETH at a discount, and you lose the collateral
The problems with this model are well known.
Over-collateralization wastes capital. You lock $1,000 to borrow $750. A quarter of your capital sits idle as a safety buffer. For anyone optimizing capital, that is a lot of dead money.
Price feeds create attack surfaces. Liquidation fires off a price feed. If that feed is pushed around, even briefly, loans get liquidated that should not have been.
Cascading liquidations amplify crashes. Prices drop, liquidations add selling, prices drop further, more liquidations fire. The system turns on itself at exactly the moment stability matters most.
The risk is hard to model. A borrowing agent has to model asset volatility, feed latency, liquidation bot competition, gas during congestion, contagion from other protocols and rare extreme moves. Most of those it has no control over.
The BASIS Model: A Loan Ends on Its Date
BASIS lending works differently.
1. Put up collateral.
Collateral can be tokens, vault stakes and vested tokens. Tokens from every family (Stable+, Utility+, Floor+, Meme+, Yolo+ and Yolo, whose floor is its launch price) and Predict+ tokens all qualify.
2. Borrow at 100% LTV.
Not 75%. Not 80%. On the floor families you borrow the full floor value. On Stable+ you borrow the full value. Both before fees. If your tokens have a floor value of $1,000, you can borrow $1,000. On a 10-day loan the 2.05% fee comes off what you receive, so about $979.50 reaches your wallet, and you owe $1,000. The loan is paid out in the token's base asset: USDG for most tokens, or the base itself for tokens built on a stock or other base.
3. Manage the date.
You choose how long the loan runs: 10 to 1,000 days today. Before it expires, you repay or extend. If you do neither, after expiry a keeper closes the loan: the collateral that covers the debt is taken to repay it, 10% of the rest is the liquidation fee, and you claim the remainder. Claim within 365 days of the liquidation; after that the leftover may no longer be claimable.
No price liquidation. No health factor. No margin call. You never owe more than your collateral.
What you manage is the expiry date.
Why This Works (The Economic Design)
"Wait," you might be thinking. "If borrowers get 100% LTV and there is no price liquidation, what stops the loan from being worth more than the collateral?"
Fair question. The answer is in how BASIS tokens are priced.
Floors only rise.
On Stable+, the price can only hold or rise in its base asset. On Utility+, Floor+, Meme+ and Yolo+, the price moves both ways, but over a floor that only rises. Neither is an external price feed. Both are pricing rules of the token, applied on every trade.
So when you borrow against the floor value, the number the loan was made against does not fall away underneath you. The market price can dip toward the floor and back, and the loan does not care. That is why BASIS does not need a liquidation engine for price, and why a loan can be sized at the full floor value rather than a cautious fraction of whatever the market says today. A loan is sized at the floor, which never falls, so its collateral is designed to cover the debt.
No creator or LP can pull the liquidity.
Creators can never touch a token's liquidity. A token can be borrowed against from its first trade, with no graduation and no migration to wait for.
Loans are made by the BASIS protocol, not by other users or outside liquidity providers.
The Fee Structure
Simple, and fixed when you take the loan.
| Component | Rate |
|---|---|
| Opening fee | 2.0% flat |
| Daily fee | 0.005% per day |
| Total for a 30-day loan | 2.15% |
| Total for a 90-day loan | 2.45% |
| Total for a 365-day loan | 3.825% |
| Extending | 0.005% per day |
| Repaying | Free |
Formula: Total Fee = 2.0% + (0.005% × days)
Floating-rate lenders typically charge single-digit APRs that move with utilization. For a short loan, that can be less interest than the BASIS opening fee. What you get for the 2% is the full floor value instead of about 75%, a cost that cannot change after you sign, and no price liquidation. Over a longer loan, the fixed daily rate does most of the work: a year costs 3.825% in total.
Where the fees go: each $1 of loan-side fees pays 20c to the token's creator, 10c to the vault for that base, 10c to the operating team and 60c to the BASIS buyback. Creators earn when their holders borrow, not just when they trade.
What Traders and Agents Do With 100% LTV
This is where it gets creative. A loan at the full floor value is not just cheaper capital. It is a way to make one position do several jobs.
Hold and spend
You believe in a token and do not want to sell it. Borrow its full floor value in the base asset, keep the exposure, and use the cash elsewhere. If the token rises, you still own all of it. If it dips, the loan is not closed. Repay or extend before the date.
The Predict-Loan-Bet Strategy
- Buy the Predict+ token linked to a market you care about. It trades on a Stable+ curve, so its price can only hold or rise in its base asset, and you do not have to pick a winner to hold it.
- Borrow against it at its full value, less the loan fee.
- Use the loan to back an outcome in that market or another one.
- If the bet wins, repay from the winnings and keep the rest. If it loses, you still hold the Predict+ token and still owe the loan, so repay or extend before the date. Otherwise the Predict+ collateral that covers the debt is taken to repay it, and you claim what is left.
Two exposures from one stake.
The Vault Stake as Collateral
- Stake in the vault for a base. Stakers earn from trading and borrowing fees on that base.
- Use the stake as collateral.
- Borrow against it.
- The stake keeps earning while it backs the loan.
- Deploy the loan into another token, market or strategy.
One position, three jobs: fee income, collateral and liquidity.
Vested Tokens as Working Capital
Creators can vest themselves and their whitelist, and vested positions can back a loan. A locked allocation stops being dead weight. A team can fund work against tokens it cannot sell yet, without selling them and without a price move closing the loan.
For Agents and Traders: Risk Management
Managing a date is far easier than managing a price.
Traditional DeFi borrower checklist:
- ☐ Watch several price feeds
- ☐ Model volatility across correlated assets
- ☐ Keep a liquidation buffer for stress scenarios
- ☐ Watch gas for emergency deleveraging
- ☐ Track liquidation bot competition
- ☐ Model contagion from other protocols
- ☐ Keep emergency reserves to top up collateral
- ☐ Plan for extreme price moves
BASIS borrower checklist:
- ☐ Know each loan's expiry date
- ☐ Repay or extend before it
For an agent this is one scheduled job: check every open loan, and extend any that is close to expiry. Every loan action is available through the BASIS MCP server (205 tools) and the TypeScript and Python SDKs (595 methods), so the whole routine fits in a few lines. That is a real reduction in operational complexity, and it makes an agent far more reliable.
What Still Matters
No price liquidation does not mean no risk. On the floor families the market price can fall toward the floor, and whatever you bought with the loan can lose money on its own. Fees are paid whether or not the plan works. If a loan reaches its date unpaid, a keeper closes it and the collateral that covers the debt is taken to repay it; claim what is left within 365 days. A rising floor is a pricing rule, not a promise of profit, and contract risk applies like anywhere on-chain. Reviewed by two leading AI models, run independently (the latest Claude Opus and GPT), plus 1,450+ tests. A Hashlock audit is engaged, and its report will be published when complete. Bug bounty open.
The Bigger Picture
Zero-liquidation lending is not just a feature. It is a design choice.
Most DeFi lending copied traditional finance: collateral ratios, margin calls, forced selling. Those tools were built for a world where the lender cannot trust the collateral's price.
BASIS started from a different place: what does lending look like when the collateral sits on a floor that only rises? You get the full floor value. You get loans that end on a date, not a dip. You get capital that does several jobs at once.
For traders and AI agents who want predictable costs, simple rules and efficient capital, that is the lending model that should have existed all along.
BASIS lending: 100% LTV against the floor, no price liquidation, a date you control. On Robinhood Chain, in USDG. launchonbasis.com
Basis Team
Published Mar 27, 2026