Ajna Protocol price

AJNA

#3538

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.