2019加密市场金融借贷领域研究报告（英文版） | TokenInsight

数字资产行业在2018下半年开始经历“寒冬”后终于在2019年一季度出现回暖态势。主流加密通证在一季度增幅超过20%，交易活跃度与市场参与人数环比显著提升。

在市场结束一段时间低迷的同时，借贷项目为数字资产持有者提供了在不折价出售数字资产的情况下提高资金流动性的方式。

自2018年Q4以来，借贷市场中入场资金和活跃贷款量持续上升，而这个趋势持续到了2019年Q1，目前仅基于Ethereum的去中心化借贷平台的活跃贷款量已超过2千万USD，较2018年底上升超过30%。

广义来讲的数字资产借贷业务包括所有以数字资产为质押物或贷款的市场活动，借贷双方分别是流动性提供者和需求者。借方资金筹措方式包括平台自筹、平台建立资金池和P2P网络。

值得注意的是，在本文中，TokenInsight仅选取以数字资产借贷为主营业务的项目作为研究对象，考察了30余个数字货币借贷项目在2019年一季度的主要发展情况。相应的，将借贷产品作为平台附加服务的项目（如交易所、钱包或理财平台）将在TokenInsight数字资产理财行业研究中进行讨论。

在本文的研究范畴中，数字资产借贷项目经营模式包括中心化与去中心化借贷，其中产品的类型包括质押法币（或稳定币）贷数字资产、质押数字资产贷法币（或稳定币）以及质押加密通证贷加密通证三种。所有产品均采用超额抵押模式，2019年Q1的数字货币质押率（按照Collateral to Loan方式计算）基本在300%以上。

总体而言，这个行业仍处于幼稚期，借贷规模相比于数字资产在二级市场的交易量体量极小，且产品与服务仍有较大的提升空间。只要有借贷市场就会催生出的同业拆借业务也才刚起步，可查信息极少。但不可否认的是，这些设计精巧的产品为加密市场提供了更多丰富度，也为行业发展开拓了更多可能性。借贷项目的技术创新和项目通过合作实现的新业态非常值得期待。

公众号后台回复“借贷”，即可获得【2019加密市场借贷领域研究报告】中文版和英文版PDF。

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Preface

Since the second half of 2018, the digital assets industry weathered a severe depressional state. Finally, in Q1 of 2019, the market began to see signs of improvement. The number of mainstream cryptocurrencies rose by more than 20% in Q1 alone. Moreover, exchange activities and market participation increased dramatically. The establishment of lending projects provided crypto asset holders with methods to improve financial liquidity without having to sell their crypto assets at a discount. This was especially useful during a time when the market announced the end of a  bleak period. Since Q4 of 2018, the admission of funds and active loan volumes in the lending market were constantly increasing and did not subside until Q1 of 2019. At current, the active volume on decentralized loan platforms merely based on Ethereum has already exceeded 20 million USD, a rise of over 30% from the end of 2018. Crypto asset lending is gradually becoming a preferable choice for users to improve their asset security and reduce their risk.

In a broad sense, crypto asset lending services include all market activities involving crypto assets as collateral for loans. The debit and credit are respectively regarded as the provider and demander of liquidity. For debits, the methods for fundraising consist of self-funding platforms, platform-established capital pools, and P2P networks. It should be noticed that, in this report, TokenInsight only selected projects which emphasized crypto asset lending as their main objective, and mainly investigating their developments during 2019 Q1. Correspondingly, projects (such as exchanges, wallets, and financial management platforms) that take collateralized products as extra services will, otherwise, be discussed in TokenInsight’s research on crypto asset financial management.

In this study, the operation models of crypto asset lending include centralized and the decentralized finance, and the product types which include pledging legal tender (or stablecoins) for crypto assets, pledging crypto assets for legal tender, and pledging crypto tokens for crypto tokens. All of the products covered adopt overcollateralization, the collateralization ratio (calculated with Collateral to Loan method) in 2019 Q1 was roughly over 300%.

In general, this industry remains in a very preliminary stage of development, where loan volumes are extremely small when compared with the trading volume of crypto assets within the secondary market. Additionally, there is still a large room for improvement in the products and services field for this industry. Moreover, it is believed that inter-bank lending services that have always kept up-to-date with the lending and borrowing market may just kick off. However, it cannot be denied that these deliberately designed products have diversified the crypto market and created more possibilities for industry developments. The new prospect brought forth by technological innovation and cooperation of lending projects is true of great and tremendous value to the ecosystem.

1. News on Crypto Asset Loan Industry

1.1 News Tracing

“JANUARY

1. On January 16th, 2019, Cred put forward CredEarn with which the users of Uphold (a cooperator of Cred) could gain an annual return of 10% from their deposited crypto assets.

2. Aave, a Fintech supporting ETHLend, acquired two regulatory licenses from the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU): one is for cryptocurrency trading, which allows Aave to provide users with various trading services including the exchange between fiat currency, cryptocurrencies, and inter-currency trading; the other is for operating a cryptocurrency wallet, allowing the company to provide wallet services.

3. According to Celsius Network’s reporting, the company has already issued cryptocurrency loans with a total value of 0.63 billion USD since it began its operation last July.

“FEBRUARY

1. ETHLend announced that users were able to pledge BTC for LEND tokens. Before then, users were only allowed to use ETH or ERC20 as collateral.

2. BitBond gained the approval of the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) to raise funds on Stellar’s blockchain by issuing security tokens.

3. Nuo has reduced its leverage ratio for users from five times to three times.

4. Binance Exchange pulled five crypto assets including SALT and Wings (WINDS) on 22nd.

“MARCH

1. SALT added more options of LTV (Loan to Value), on the basis of “30%”, “40%” and “50%”, options for “60%” and “70%” were also available.

2. BlockFi put forward deposited income accounts and had received a cryptocurrency deposit worth 25 million dollars in two weeks.

3. Coindcx, an Indian cryptocurrency exchange, announced that its crypto loan project Dcxlend had gone through beta testing and is prepared for full-on operation. This project supports six kinds of cryptocurrencies: BTC, USDT, ETH, XRP, BNB, and TUSD.

“APRIL

1. Dharma announced the official public opening of its crypto loan platform. Currently, platform Dharma supports ETH and stablecoin DAI, acquiring 2.7 million USD of mortgage assets after only launching for one week.

2. According to the results of a community vote, MakerDAO has decided to raise its maintenance fee by 4 percent to 11.5%, marking the fifth time that it’s raised its maintenance fee this year.

3. Celsius Network allowed Dash users to gain interest from their deposits on its own platform and to apply for loans from Dash directly without the need for lockup periods.

1.2 Industry Focuses

“MORE DIVERSIFIED SERVICES

Asset lending platforms provide more diversified services and collateral types for everyone. For instance, ETHLend not only allows users to pledge BTC for LEND tokens but is also adding more alternatives including Huobi token (HT), POA20 (POA), PAXOS (PAX) and USDCoin (USDC) as choices for collateralization. Moreover, DAI, TrueUSD (TUSD) and other stablecoins are also becoming more easily accessible. For Nexo, in addition to the existing options for BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB, and NEXO, it has added Litecoin (LTC) as its latest collateral option. The Ripio Credit Network published an RCNv4 engine labeled “Diaspore” which integrates many new functions and features including multi-credit to multi-debit products. More flexibility is clearly being added to the loan repayment plans due to the permission of payments by installments.

“ASSORTED MEASURES HAVE BEEN ADOPTED TO MAKE ASSETS MORE SECURE

All lending platforms require collateral before lending out debts. While some manage on their own, others entrust the collateral to a third party. The security of collateralized assets cannot afford to be neglected since such a large sum of funds is involved. At present, most platforms actively adopt measures to secure users’ assets before providing their services.

SALT has put forward two new types of insurance for asset securitization: Cyber Liability Insurance aims at protecting SALT when it is under the attack or threats of third-party hackers. Crime Insurance is targeted at protecting users’ crypto assets when fraud or theft occurs. Nexo has always entrusted its users’ assets to BitGo. Up till now, it already has available insurance claims up to 0.1 billion USD provided by Lloyd’s. No extra fees are required from users for this service. Moreover, Cred has also established official cooperation with BitGo and has entrusted users’ crypto assets. BitGo provides a multi-signature guarantee for Cred’s fund security through the multi-signature technique and will effectively reduce the risk of hacker assaults and key thefts, fully improving asset security.

“CLOSE INDUSTRY COOPERATION

In order to strengthen competitiveness and increase service diversity, loan platforms have continuously developed internal and external collaborations. Bloqboard has integrated into MakerDAO protocol from its own loan platform in order to appear more attractive to asset lenders and borrowers. Additionally, Bloqboard has also put forward Maker, Collateralized debt positions (CDP) over the counter (OTC) trading services, in collaboration with cross-border payment platform Wyre. This partnership is aimed at meeting the CDP holders’ demand for purchasing DAI and MKR in a market of insufficient liquidity, to clearing their debts and further facilitate large-scale CDP repayments. Nexo officially joined Binance Info’s transparency plan, in hopes of improving its transparency by sharing news, progress reports, and other related information. In February, Celsius Network announced its cooperation with MakerDAO, on which DAI was hence available. In April, it further announced its cooperation with Staked. Celsius users could deposit their tokens on Staked and gain access to another profit source. Cooperation among different enterprises can stimulate the development of the whole industry while undoubtedly benefiting the company itself.

“INDUSTRY’S CONTINUOUS HOTNESS

As Bloomberg reported, though having weathered the bear market of 2018, crypto asset loan services remained very popular. Service providers not only gained profits during this time but also continued to expand their services. Celsius Network’s report in January announced that it had issued an accumulated crypto loan worth 630 million dollars since its operation in last July. During the same period, Genesis Global Trading, a subsidiary company of Genesis Capital, also announced that it had given out an accumulated crypto asset loan worth 700 million dollars from March 2018 to January 2019. Even though the com