Vela

 Vela is a stock-collateralized credit protocol on Robinhood Chain. Deposit your tokenized stocks (TSLA, AMZN, PLTR, NFLX, AMD) as collateral and borrow the USDG stablecoin against them — unlock cash from your portfolio without selling it, so you keep the upside while getting liquidity. An autonomous risk agent called the Helmsman watches every position around the clock, warns you before margin calls, and steps in only when the math demands it.

Problem -
Tokenized stocks are arriving onchain (Robinhood Chain, EqualFi, etc.), but there's no credit layer on top of them. A holder who needs cash has only one option: sell. Selling triggers taxes, kills future upside, and forces you out of a position you wanted to keep.

In TradFi this is already solved — Securities-Based Lending is a ~$700B market (Morgan Stanley, Schwab, Goldman) and Robinhood Gold's #1 retail request. Onchain, that primitive simply doesn't exist for equities yet.

Solution -

Vela is a stock-collateralized credit line. Deposit your tokenized stocks (TSLA, AMZN, PLTR, NFLX, AMD) as collateral and borrow USDG against them — no selling, keep the upside.

The differentiator is the Helmsman, an autonomous risk agent that watches every position 24/7. Unlike passive money markets that only react when you're already underwater, the Helmsman uses realized vol, option-implied vol, and the earnings calendar to pre-warn you before a margin call and only soft-unwinds on-chain when the math truly demands it. Equities give it signals crypto collateral never could.

Business Model -

Vela earns from the same proven, recurring streams Aave does — adapted to equities.

The core revenue is an interest rate spread: borrowers pay interest on the USDG they draw, and Vela captures the difference between that borrow rate and what's paid out to liquidity suppliers. On top of that sits a small origination fee charged when a new credit line is opened, and a liquidation penalty that accrues to the protocol treasury whenever the Helmsman has to unwind an unsafe position. Longer term, the Helmsman itself becomes a paid premium risk tier — tighter LTVs, early-warning alerts, and event-aware limits offered as a service.

Why it compounds: Aave generates ~$200M/yr from this exact primitive on volatile crypto. Vela runs it on equities — assets with known earnings calendars and lower structural volatility — meaning safer collateral, stickier borrowers, and no token incentives needed to bootstrap demand. It's revenue-bearing infrastructure from day one, not an emissions-subsidized farm.

  Everything is built during Hackathon

  - Zero → deployed — wrote and shipped 6 Solidity contracts (LendingPool, Vault, Liquidator + oracle adapters) live on Robinhood Chain Testnet (chain 46630)

  - Hardened, not hoped — 65 passing tests written this timeline: unit, fuzz, invariant, and a full open→borrow→liquidate E2E lifecycle

  - The Helmsman went live — built an autonomous risk agent (Bun + viem, HTTP/SSE) that scores every position and soft-liquidates underwater ones on-chain by itself

  - Wired the whole stack — Next.js app reads live on-chain state + real-time agent alerts, deployed and public at vela-finance.vercel.app

  - 5 stocks + USDG, real collateral — integrated TSLA, AMZN, PLTR, NFLX, AMD as borrowable collateral against USDG

  - Beyond the MVP — added a charts page (live TradingView + in-app sparklines), full docs, and a keyboard-driven 8-slide pitch deck

  Bootstrapped (pre-seed)