We announced Ribbon Lend [1] last week. The community needs to decide the first two institutional borrowers to onboard onto the platform. Other institutions will be voted on and their pools rolled out in the coming weeks.
Voting
The four borrowers are:
Folkvang [2] (Credit Rating: AA). Folkvang is a quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider active in all leading crypto markets. We trade all major coins on all major exchanges with a constant global presence.
Wintermute [3] (Credit Rating: AA). Wintermute is one of the largest market makers globally, running delta-neutral strategies covering over 70 exchanges and 200 tokens with an average daily trading volume of $5B. Wintermute also runs an OTC desk for institutional as well as crypto-native counterparties and is one of the largest providers of market-making services for blockchain projects.
Auros [4] (Credit Rating: A). Auros is an algorithmic trading and market-making firm founded by derivatives traders and trading system architects with over 20 years of experience, generating daily notional turnover in billions of dollars. Auros’ technological heritage combines sophisticated pricing models and state-of-the-art execution capabilities, delivering robust and reliable trading performance. Our unique partnership-based approach to external liquidity provision has rapidly established us as a go-to market maker for token projects. Auros also has deep expertise in structured product trading, DeFi optimization, and liquidity-led investments.
Amber Group [5] (Credit Rating: A). Operating at the center of markets, we act as liquidity providers, miners, and validators on 70+ exchanges, applications, and networks. We create wealth for clients of all sizes by providing digital asset trading, investing, infrastructure and financing services.
Note that all the choices presented have undergone KYC/AML and have completed credit underwriting with Credora [6] with strong credit scores [7].
Voting will be on Snapshot for 5 days. Each voter will be able to vote for two of the four options. The top two voted market makers will be part of the cohort at launch.
Big congrats to the Ribbon team and community on the announcement of Ribbon Lend!
As ongoing participants in Ribbon’s weekly vault auctions, Winermute would love to further increase our involvement and be one of the first borrowers on Ribbon Lend, and as always, if the community has further questions please feel free to reach out
With the recent market wide blowups I believe it’s important to act on the side of caution here.
I think especially high transparency via risk monitoring is very important to uphold.
I can’t seem to find the credit ratings/scores, where are these published?
Is there a way to retrieve the full breakdown of the achieved credit scores by these parties?
Remind me of the agreed risk containment here.
Who will carry the bad debt if one of these borrowers goes tits up?
to recap:
each institutional borrower will have each own pool
each pool will have it’s own insurance pool
correct?
example scenario:
10m in Ribbon Lend pool A
7m with borrower A (70% utilization)
let’s say we’ve been running the 10m vault at 10% APR for a year.
→ this has resulted in 50k in the insurance pool
Borrower A becomes unsolvable and files for bankruptcy.
After a long procedure ~1y, Ribbon is able to recoup 28.5% of the debt (2m)
When information about this first comes out:
users will quickly drain the remaining funds in the pool, resulting in 100% utilization
the borrower might front-run this and borrow as much as possible from the pool before news comes out to try and save their sinking ship. In this case Ribbon user capital will be used to effectively pay back other creditors, leaving ribbon holding more bad debt.
Can you explain more how this would play out in the given scenario?
Important questions:
can you guarantee no RBN or funds in the Ribbon treasury will ever be used to cover for user losses on a borrower default.
→ this basically means no risk exposure for any RBN holder/staker/user.
→ all risk is carried by users depositing in a Ribbon Lend pool.
do we have any systems in place that will prevent borrowers from maxing out their pool when things start going sideways? (this will happen before public knows anything about it)
Hey @0xRob, these are all important questions that will all be thoroughly answered. We are currently writing up documentation in docs.ribbon.finance to describe the mechanism for addressing bad debt in the pool / game theory surrounding it (pool utilization, etc). We will publicize this closer to launch.
In the meantime, I’ll try to answer the questions directly pertinent to this proposal:
Will each institutional borrower will have each own pool
Yes
Will each pool will have it’s own insurance pool
Yes
I can’t seem to find the credit ratings/scores, where are these published ?
They are published on our dashboard in our Credora account - its not public information and we had to ask the market makers to make it public. Clearpool shows the same credit scores.
Is there a way to retrieve the full breakdown of the achieved credit scores by these parties ?
This gets very confidential for the borrower very quickly - knowing the full breakdown means getting an inside peak on financials, ROA & ROE, Maximum Drawdown, Solvency ratio, liquidity ratio, amongst other things you can read up on here. This highly confidential for a market making trading firm.
Can you guarantee no RBN or funds in the Ribbon treasury will ever be used to cover for user losses on a borrower default
No, but needless to say no funds will be touched in the treasury without a community vote. We are working on a proposal that attempts to minimize the moral hazard between the protocol and lenders.
most of this discussion is probably more related to Lend in general instead of this proposal.
For this proposal I think it makes most sense to start with the most credit worthy institutions.
on credit scores and ratings
If the users/holders who carry the risk aren’t able to take a look at the detailed scoring and must trust only on the credit ratings provided, I would vote against integrating anything that does not achieve AA rating.
An A rated borrower could have:
Moderate operational practices and financial metrics, alongside medium transparency via risk monitoring
To me, this does not seem acceptable!
on bad debt and borrower default.
Guarantee was the wrong word choice. Given the impact of a default it’s important to talk about the expected outcomes.
If a borrower defaults:
it’s expected to be for a large notional amount (millions)
it’s expected to be for a large proportion (+50% of funds)
We should discuss now what we plan to do if we incur millions in bad debt in the future.
It should be clear from the start whether a) pool depositors need to expect to incur that bad debt or b) RBN holders should expect the possibility of a treasury bailout. Having that discussion only after a default happens is not acceptable to me.
Both lend depositors and RBN holders will need to account for the added risk, we should not expect them to account for the possible outcome of a future token holder vote.
Also, given the expected size of a default the insurance pools seem futile and probably give a false sense of security to depositors. I believe it would be better to remove those.
vote
I will be voting only for Folkvang and Wintermute as they hold AA ratings.
EDIT: Wintermute seems to have incurred a hack on their defi operations. We should not integrate with them for the following month to make sure everything is resolved.
@0xRob Point 3 understood, will take into account.
For point 4 - absolutely agree that this discussion needs to happen beforehand, not after a default. We will be releasing all these details at launch. It will be clear upfront what are the risks for lenders, risks for RBN holders, and where treasury fits in. I will say briefly now that the current mechanism does not involve rbn holders / treasury in any way.
There is a lever that dictates the insurance factor - might be prudent to keep around and make changes rather than remove altogether.
One of Wintermute’s wallets was compromised resulting in the loss of a substantial amount of funds from our DeFi trading operations. Importantly, this incident was isolated to a specific wallet used for DeFi proprietary trading and our internal systems, trading on centralized exchange and OTC services are unaffected.
We remain in a very strong financial position, with hundreds of millions in equity, and have been servicing all our loans as usual. Furthermore, we have continued to return any recall request regarding outstanding loans and are very appreciative of the many partners that have chosen to retain their trust in Wintermute.
We will continue to provide high transparency to all our lending partners (statements in Twitter from Maple, M11 and Credora), we have repaid funds on Clearpool in excess of our withdrawn limits and got continued support from Truefi.
We’d like to reiterate that Wintermute remains a strong and trusted borrower and is still very interested in becoming a part of Ribbon’s first borrowing cohort.
