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The Ajna protocol facilitates peer-to-pool secured loans without governance and without external
price feeds. Current lending and borrowing protocols which utilize smart contracts require active
governance (e.g. to set rates and to update contracts) and/or rely on external price feeds (such as oracles like Chainlink). Because the pricing of collateral and parameterization of loans are left
to subjective decision making through governance rather than market forces, these protocols
carry both solvency and liquidity risk. Governance and maintenance overhead create barriers to
entry in the market for lending and borrowing of on-chain assets. Ajna solves these problems
with its unique design, which is defined by the following features:
Permissionless pool creation: Much like the popular DeFi primitive, the “automated market
maker,” AMM, Ajna pools exist in unique pairs: quote token, provided by lenders and collateral
token, provided by borrowers. Pools allow lenders to assess borrower demand for their quote
token and for borrowers to assess lender demand for loans backed by their collateral. Pools are
created permissionlessly, meaning anyone can create a pool to borrow arbitrary fungible tokens
using arbitrary fungible or non-fungible tokens as collateral. Therefore, no governance process is
needed to whitelist approved tokens.
Price specified lending: Ajna replaces external price feeds (oracles) by allowing lenders to input
the price at which they’re willing to lend. This price is the amount of quote token (i.e. the token
they are lending) they are willing to lend per unit of collateral pledged by the borrower. For
example, if a lender deposits at price 100, they are willing to lend 100 units of quote token per
one unit of collateral. Ajna pools separate prices into predefined buckets to reduce the
complexity of the protocol, prices are therefore hereon referred to as “buckets.”. Borrowers are
then able to borrow from the aggregated liquidity of these various buckets. Depositing in a price
bucket allows lenders to have discrete solvency risk based upon their personal risk tolerance. In
the worst case scenario, a lender should receive collateral at the price which they lent to the pool
in lieu of their quote token deposit.
Market-derived interest rates: Ajna uses deterministic rules to set interest rates based upon user
actions in the pool. These rules are founded on the assumption that aggregate average loan
collateralization (pool collateralization) is an accurate indicator of the volatility profile of an
asset, because borrowers have a natural aversion to liquidation (which they will be forced into
over time if they fail to adequately collateralize their loan). Ajna uses pool collateralization to
inform the desired utilization ratio (i.e. the equilibrium between utilized and unutilized deposits)
for the pool: the target utilization. Subsequently, we can look at the meaningful actual utilization,
which is a short term EMA of the ratio of debt to total lender deposits available to the average
loan in the pool. Interest rates adjust based on these values to move
the pool towards equilibrium. When meaningful actual utilization is low relative to target
utilization, there is a surplus of lenders, and rates can be lowered. When meaningful actual
utilization is high relative to target utilization, there is a shortage of lenders and rates can be
increased.
Liquidation Bonds: While a loan’s eligibility to be liquidated is determined formulaically by the
contract, no actual liquidation will occur unless an external user triggers one. In order to trigger a
liquidation this user must pledge a liquidation bond. A liquidation bond is effectively a bet, with
a payoff curve similar to a short put option spread (effectively a bet that the bidders in the dutch
auction will place bids below the neutral price of the loan), on the outcome of a pay-as-bid dutch
auction for the collateral. This mechanism encourages fair outcomes by imposing a penalty on
spurious liquidations. While there is no endogenous incentive to spuriously liquidate a borrower
in Ajna, this introduces an overt disincentive to liquidate loans that are well collateralized with
respect to the market price of the collateral.
The live Ajna Protocol price today is $0.012218 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $136,928 USD. We update our AJNA to USD price in real-time. Ajna Protocol is down 0.17% in the last 24 hours. The current CoinMarketCap ranking is #3967, with a live market cap of not available. The circulating supply is not available and a max. supply of 1,000,000,000 AJNA coins.