About
From DeFi Summer to a New Season of Sustainable Bitcoin-backed Lending
During the 2020-21 bull market, liquidity surged in the crypto market, fueled by pandemic-era QE, driving risk appetite and greed among not only retail investors but also institutional players and service providers.
Coinlateral's concept began during the DeFi Summer of 2020, when a growing number of applications made it possible to use BTC as collateral for permissionless, collateralized loans.
Many DeFi protocols and crypto lending companies soon revealed their unsustainability, culminating in the collapse of well-known platforms like BlockFi, Celsius, and others, swept away by a domino effect.
The absence of bailouts and the power of a still largely free market allowed for rapid learning from these failures. Not everyone drew the same lessons, and many builders and investors exited the market.
One key lesson that shaped Coinlateral’s development is that the root of mismanagement in CeFi companies and flawed design choices in DeFi stemmed from a drift away from Bitcoin—both as a chain and as a set of foundational principles.
The Bitcoin-backed lending industry has learned hard lessons. On the CeFi side: rehypothecation, commingling of client collateral for reinvestment, and exposure to tokens and crypto hedge funds like Alameda.
On the DeFi side: opaque counterparty risks tied to wrapped BTC and bridge security vulnerabilities.
A new generation of Bitcoin-only players is now rebuilding lending applications on the foundations of these hard lessons.
Coinlateral joins them — contributing to an ecosystem built on Bitcoin as both a technological infrastructure and hard money: usable as collateral and turned into productive capital throughout the transition from Fiat to a Bitcoin Standard.
Team & Contact
Coinlateral started up in Switzerland, involving a remote international team.
For information, partnerships and collaborations, text to:
Email: team@coinlateral.finance
Meet the team in person by scheduling a meeting at:
- Startup Space Zürich
Wiesenstrasse 10A, 8952 Schlieren - PoW.space Lugano
Contrada di Sassello 10, 6900 Lugano
