Pledge Finance

PledgeDefi: Borrow Against Your Stocks. Don't Sell Them.

PledgeDefi (Pledge Finance) is a non-custodial, overcollateralized lending protocol live on Robinhood Chain Mainnet (chain ID 4663), an Arbitrum Orbit L2 built for tokenized real-world assets. Users lock official Robinhood tokenized stocks and ETFs as collateral and borrow Paxos USDG, a regulated USD stablecoin, while keeping full ownership of and upside on their shares.

Pledge brings the securities-backed loan (the "Lombard loan" private banks offer wealthy clients) fully on-chain. It's open to anyone with a wallet, runs 24/7, and every rule is enforced by smart contracts.

The Problem

Say someone holds $50k of NVDA and needs $20k of liquidity for six months. Today their options are all bad:

Tokenized equities are now arriving on-chain, but on-chain they sit as idle capital. Most DeFi lending protocols only accept crypto-native collateral, and many lend out their own minted soft-peg stablecoin, which adds depeg risk for borrowers.

The Solution

Keep your shares, borrow against them, pay interest only for the time you actually borrow, and never get liquidated while your position is healthy.

"I didn't sell. My shares are still mine. I have cash. Nobody can take my shares as long as I stay overcollateralized."

Our Five Product Promises (enforced by the contracts)

1. You don't sell. Shares are locked in your own isolated vault and remain your position.

2. No term, no maturity. Loans are perpetual, so you can hold them for years.

3. No seizure of a healthy vault. Liquidation happens only when the health factor drops below 1.

4. Interest follows time and is paid at repayment. There are no monthly bills. You get a clear receipt showing principal, time borrowed, interest and total due.

5. When your stock goes up, your position gets safer. The borrow APR never follows the share price, so the upside stays with you.

How It Works

1. Deposit tokenized stock/ETF tokens into an isolated vault (one user × one collateral × one USDG debt, with no cross-margin).

2. Borrow USDG up to the market's max LTV, paid out from real USDG liquidity in the vault. Pledge never mints its own stablecoin.

3. Use the USDG anywhere while keeping full exposure to your stock.

4. Repay anytime to see the interest receipt, then withdraw your collateral.

5. If a position's health factor drops below 1, anyone can liquidate it by repaying the full debt and receiving the collateral plus a 5% bonus, which keeps the protocol solvent.

Fees (simple and on-chain)

• Origination fee: 0.5% once at borrow, sent directly to the protocol Surplus Buffer

• Stability fee: 1.2% APR, time-based and paid at repayment

• Liquidation bonus: 5%, which goes entirely to the liquidator

Markets

Live now:

Pledge supports official Robinhood tokenized stocks and ETFs as collateral, and is built to scale to a broad catalog of equity markets. Each market runs in its own isolated vault with its own risk parameters (max LTV and liquidation ratio) based on the asset's volatility. New markets are activated only after their Chainlink price feed is verified, and the app picks them up automatically through dynamic live market discovery. No frontend release is needed.

Key Features

🏦 Isolated CDP Vaults. Every collateral has its own LTV and liquidation parameters, so volatility in one stock can never spread to the others.

💵 Real Stablecoin, No Minting. Debt is Paxos USDG (6 decimals). Pledge lends dollars that already exist and never creates its own peg.

📈 Chainlink-Powered Oracle. PledgeChainlinkOracle normalizes Chainlink equity feeds to 18-decimal USD prices. Staleness tolerance is tuned to 4 days, because equity feeds pause outside market hours. That way users can still repay and withdraw over weekends instead of being frozen.

⚡ Permissionless Liquidation. A built-in liquidator dashboard scans every position for health factor < 1. Anyone can liquidate with a few clicks, no bot or special access needed. Self-liquidation is blocked on-chain.

🔒 PLG Staking with Lock Boost. Stake PLG to earn PLG rewards. Longer locks earn more, up to 3.0× at a 90-day lock, tapering linearly down to 1.0× at 1 day. Includes an emergencyWithdraw escape hatch so principal is never trapped.

🛡️ Stability Pool & Surplus Buffer. USDG holders can park liquidity in the Stability Pool, and origination fees flow into an on-chain Surplus Buffer treasury.

🎁 On-Chain Referral Rewards. Referrers earn 20% of the origination fee from users they invite, and invitees get a 10% fee discount. Rewards are claimed on-chain in USDG through PledgeReferralClaim using EIP-712 signed vouchers, with the user paying their own gas.

🎯 Engagement Layer. Daily spin, mystery box and saved rewards, with on-chain claims to keep users coming back.

📊 Transparent Analytics. Real-time TVL, vault liquidity, open positions and a live activity feed, all verifiable on the explorer.

🧭 Beginner-Friendly UX. An interactive "How to borrow" guided tour, mobile-optimized flows, in-app docs and whitepaper, and one-click wallet connect through Reown (MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, WalletConnect).

Smart Contract Architecture

Written in Solidity 0.8.24 with Foundry and OpenZeppelin v5:

Security and engineering practices:

• Every core module is UUPS-upgradeable behind a branded ERC1967 proxy, so contracts show up as "Pledge Finance" on the explorer instead of a generic proxy.

• All implementations and proxies are verified on Sourcify (exact match).

• 100+ Foundry tests, covering the vault lifecycle, 6-decimal USDG paths, interest-accrual edge cases, liquidation, oracle staleness, proxy initialization, staking, referral claims, and mainnet-fork rehearsals of a full staking campaign.

• An internal security review of PledgeStaking against live on-chain state.

• Formal protocol invariants (solvency, health factor, interest, and product-promise invariants) documented for auditors.

• A 48-hour Timelock and a 3-of-4 Safe multisig are already deployed and being prepared for governance handover.

Full-Stack Architecture

• Frontend: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, viem + wagmi, Reown AppKit

• Backend: Hono (Node.js) and PostgreSQL/Drizzle. Handles event indexing, analytics, liquidator scans and referral tracking, with caching, rate limits and RPC fallback.

• Non-custodial by design: users sign every action from their own wallet. The backend only indexes public chain data and never holds user funds or keys.

Why Arbitrum / Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum Orbit L2 built to settle tokenized real-world assets, and it's where official tokenized equities live. It gives Pledge low fees, fast finality and full EVM compatibility. Pledge is building a missing DeFi primitive for this ecosystem: credit against real-world equities.

Links

• 🌐 Website: https://pledgedefi.com

• 🚀 App (Mainnet): https://mainnet.pledgedefi.com

• 🧪 Testnet: https://testnet.pledgedefi.com

• 🔍 Explorer: https://robinhoodchain.blockscout.com

Mainnet contracts (Robinhood Chain 4663):

• Staking (proxy): 0xEe8c2E6ED39B79Cd6806926d96CD570F5b94bF07

• ReferralClaim: 0x6D33001a3c4c548a32a32a3ADC675971fC1EFFa3

• PLG token: 0x1BE3010124C86e8a03c6Fb6e91c534D4A2b1fFCf

• Paxos USDG: 0x5fc5360D0400a0Fd4f2af552ADD042D716F1d168

Roadmap

• Onboard many more tokenized stock & ETF markets as their Chainlink feeds are verified

• Independent third-party smart contract audit

• Hand ownership over to the Timelock + multisig

• Third-party USDG liquidity providers, so lending liquidity scales beyond the treasury

• PLG → vePLG lock-based governance over protocol parameters

• Stability Pool as a liquidation backstop