DeFi Debt Marketplace Credix to Open a $150M Stablecoin Credit Pool to Digital Lender Clave

Credix Finance, a decentralized credit marketplace, unveiled a $150 million stablecoin credit pool to Clave, a digital lending platform, to originate loans to businesses and consumers in Latin America, the firms said Tuesday.

The credit facility is set to open in 2023, with the debt being denominated in the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC, according to the statement. As with all Credix credit pools, the Clave debt pool will be split up into various smaller funds called “tranches” to offer investment opportunities for institutional investors with different return-on-risk profiles; tranches with lower risk, for example, would pay less yield.

Clave will receive funds via on-chain transactions and smart contracts in USDC into the firm’s crypto wallet, which it can convert to any type of traditional currency in order to lend to their borrowers, Credix Chief Growth Officer Chaim Finizola told CoinDesk.

Credix connects fintech companies and non-bank lenders that need capital to originate loans to their users with institutional investors such as hedge funds and family offices on the prowl for yield. The Belgium-based firm has an outstanding credit of $26 million using USDC on the Solana blockchain, according to data from decentralized finance data platform DefiLlama.

Clave originates loans to businesses and consumers in Argentina and Colombia, with plans to expand to Mexico next year.

The partnership comes at a time when crypto and traditional debt markets are increasingly becoming commingled as crypto companies bring and tokenize real-world assets such as traditional loans, mortgages and government bonds onto the blockchain.

Maker, one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols in crypto, recently incorporated $500 million in U.S. Treasury bonds to its reserve that backs the DAI stablecoin.

Clave’s debt from the Credix credit pool is collateralized by the receivables from the borrowers who take out loans, Finizola said. Technically, however, the debt is unsecured, meaning the debtor secures the loan with its reputation and its good financial situation and does not pledge any assets whose value would backstop the loan in case of a default.

Unsecured lending is standard procedure in traditional finance and is getting increasingly popular on DeFi lending protocols, but recent defaults demonstrate that there are several challenges and risks to implementing it in such a new and volatile market as crypto assets.