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stable-lending

Fraxlend

Rejected
Max sleeve
Reviewed
2026-08-14 · v1
Next review
2026-11-15
Chains
Ethereum · sovereign, Arbitrum One · hybrid

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

Fraxlend, from the Frax team, lets anyone create an isolated lending market between any pair of ERC-20 tokens with a Chainlink price feed. It held $11.1 million across 34 pools on Ethereum and Fraxtal at the 2026-08-14 survey. The registry rejects it on size: one practice advising 100 households moves $1M to $8M into a venue on the same research, and below $100M TVL that book becomes the exit crush. Size alone decides it, whatever the protocol’s quality. At size, the permissionless market creation would be the review’s center: isolated pairs contain bad collateral, but each market still needs its own underwriting.

The research file

Applicability to the surveyed record

Fraxlend is an isolated-pair lending protocol: one ERC-20 asset is lent against a different ERC-20 collateral asset, lenders receive redeemable fTokens, and each pair supplies its own oracle, rate and maximum-LTV terms. That mechanism establishes the surveyed Fraxlend record as lending; this application does not substitute for pair-level underwriting.

Current observation and perimeter

The DefiLlama API read on 2026-08-15 reported approximately $19.1M supplied and $6.13M borrowed across Ethereum, Arbitrum and Fraxtal. The observed supplied TVL remains well below the shared v1 $100M materiality threshold.

Control and exit applicability

A pair’s asset, collateral, oracle, rate calculator, maximum LTV and immutable liquidation fee define lender risk. fTokens are claims on that pair’s assets, so practical redemption depends on available unborrowed liquidity; liquidation recovery and any bad debt remain pair-specific rather than diversified across Fraxlend.

Why the class rule decides

The shared v1 below-materiality dossier controls. Reopen after supplied TVL sustains at least $100M for 30 days, then underwrite each candidate pair’s assets, oracle, deployer and administrative authority, utilization, caps, audits and incidents, liquidation and bad-debt history, stressed fToken redemption, and named lending alternatives.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.

ChainVerdictGradeControl constraint
EthereumApproved sovereign No sequencer, no upgrade key, no operator who can be compelled — rule changes require social consensus.
Arbitrum OneApproved · limits hybrid a single sequencer orders >99% of transactions and admin keys can upgrade bridge contracts on a ~7-day timelock.
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