Banks lend their depositors' money and call it credit. TCP does the same thing — except the lenders are people, the collateral lives on-chain at inDeFi, and the bank is a protocol.
See how the loop spinsNo financial institution will issue credit against money held in DeFi. We asked. Then we stopped asking — and designed the institution out of the product instead. That is TCP: a lending protocol for credit cards.
Lenders deposit into the TCP pool and earn the card's economics — the role a bank's balance sheet used to play, opened to anyone.
Their collateral already lives at inDeFi — deployed across strategies on venues like Derive and Hyperliquid, managed by the inDeFi desk. The card draws on the TCP pool, not on their positions.
Pool capital never sits idle: it waits in the shortest-duration strategy, liquid enough to settle merchants at end of day — or on T+30 terms where the economics are better, with the spread flowing back to the pool.
Balances are repaid from the cardholder's inDeFi holdings, lenders are made whole plus yield, and the loop spins again.
Cardholder collateral is held and managed at inDeFi. inDeFi stands behind each credit line the way a bank stands behind its deposits — lenders face inDeFi's underwriting, not a stranger's trading account.
The borrower's funds are already inside inDeFi strategies. There is no collection problem — repayment is an internal settlement, not a chase.
Lent money works in the shortest-duration strategy until the moment it's needed for settlement. Idle float is a bank habit. We don't have it.
Cardholders keep their positions compounding. Lenders earn credit economics. Merchants choose their settlement terms. The protocol takes a fee for spinning the wheel.
The pool's short-duration sleeve unwinds daily. Merchants are paid at end of day, every day — the credit card behaves like cash on their side of the counter.
Where merchants will trade time for economics, settlement stretches to thirty days and the pool keeps the capital working — the spread is shared with lenders. Same loop, better terms.
Issuers, rails, jurisdictions, the exact waterfall — all of it gets engineered after the thing worth engineering is stated plainly. This is that statement: credit cards, funded by people, underwritten by inDeFi, with capital that never sleeps.
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