Platform comparison
All platforms compared at once for your entered collateral, price and loan amount. The safest platform (largest price drop needed before liquidation) and the cheapest platform (lowest annual interest cost) are highlighted — they are often not the same platform.
| Platform | Initial LTV | Margin-call at | Liquidation at | Annual interest |
|---|
How it works
Every platform starts from the same collateral value: BTC amount × BTC price. Your initial LTV is the loan amount divided by that collateral value — if it's above a platform's max initial LTV, that platform simply won't originate the loan without more collateral, and the table flags this. From there, each platform sets two higher LTV thresholds: a margin-call LTV, where you get a warning to add collateral or repay, and a liquidation LTV, where the platform automatically sells collateral to cover the loan. Because LTV is loan-to-value and the loan amount is fixed once you've borrowed, those thresholds translate directly into BTC prices: price at margin call = (loan amount ÷ margin-call LTV) ÷ BTC amount, and the same formula with the liquidation LTV gives the price at liquidation. The percentage drop from today's price to each of those trigger prices is the real, comparable safety margin — a platform with a higher liquidation LTV number will always tolerate a bigger price crash on the same loan, because it takes a bigger value drop to push the same loan-to-collateral ratio that high. Annual interest cost is simply the loan amount times the platform's posted annual rate; it says nothing about safety margin on its own, which is exactly why cheapest and safest can be two different platforms.
Reading the comparison
With 1 BTC at $110,000 and a $40,000 loan (initial LTV 36.4% at every platform, well under all four max-LTV limits), Nexo's margin call fires if BTC falls to about $56,022 — a 49.1% drop — with liquidation at $48,019, a 56.3% drop, and $5,560/year in interest at its 13.9% illustrative rate. Ledn's numbers land differently: margin call at $57,143 (48.0% drop), liquidation at $50,000 (54.5% drop), and only $4,360/year in interest at 10.9% — the lowest annual cost of the three, making Ledn the cheapest in this example. YouHodler's wider 70% max LTV comes with a margin call at $53,333 (51.5% drop) and liquidation at $47,059, a 57.2% drop — the largest cushion of the three, making YouHodler the safest by this measure, despite carrying the highest rate at 15% ($6,000/year). That's the trade-off this tool exists to surface: the platform that survives the deepest crash isn't the platform that costs the least to hold. Push the loan amount up to $60,000 and the tension gets sharper still — initial LTV jumps to 54.5%, which exceeds both Nexo's and Ledn's 50% max LTV (the table flags them as unavailable at that size without more collateral), while YouHodler's 70% ceiling and the custom 60% preset still accept it.
FAQ
What's the difference between a margin call and liquidation on a crypto-backed loan?
A margin call is a warning, not an action — your loan-to-value ratio has climbed high enough that the platform flags the account and asks you to either add more collateral or pay down part of the loan. Nothing gets sold at this stage, and most platforms give you a window (sometimes hours, sometimes a day or two depending on how fast the price is moving) to respond. Liquidation is the platform actually selling your collateral, automatically, once the LTV crosses a second and higher threshold. Some platforms do this as a partial sale that only sells enough to bring the LTV back down, others close the whole position. The gap between the margin-call LTV and the liquidation LTV is your real reaction window: a platform that margin-calls you at 71% and liquidates at 83% gives you more room to react than one that jumps from a 70% call straight to an 80% liquidation, even if the liquidation number itself looks similar.
Why do Nexo, Ledn and YouHodler have such different LTV limits and interest rates?
Each platform is pricing a different risk appetite, not just competing on a single number. Nexo and Ledn both cap standard BTC-backed loans around 50% initial LTV, which leaves a wide buffer before their margin-call and liquidation thresholds even at roughly 50-80 points higher — that buffer is the product they're selling, and it's why their posted rates can look more competitive per dollar of real safety. YouHodler and similar high-LTV lenders let you borrow a much larger share of your collateral's value up front, which is attractive if you want more cash out of the same Bitcoin, but it compresses the room between where you start and where a margin call or liquidation hits, and platforms typically price that extra risk into a higher interest rate. Neither approach is objectively better — a low-LTV, low-rate loan and a high-LTV, higher-rate loan can both make sense depending on whether you value maximum borrowing power or maximum distance from liquidation more.
Is a higher liquidation LTV always safer for me as a borrower?
For a fixed loan amount, yes in the narrow mathematical sense — a higher liquidation LTV means the collateral's price has to fall further before the platform sells it, because liquidation is triggered by the ratio of loan to current collateral value, not by price alone. A platform with an 85% liquidation LTV will tolerate a bigger price drop on the same loan than one with an 80% liquidation LTV. But that number usually comes bundled with a higher starting LTV too, so you're often borrowing more against the same collateral to begin with, which eats back some or all of that extra cushion. This calculator computes the actual price-drop percentage for your specific loan amount and collateral, which is the only way to know whether a platform's higher liquidation LTV translates into more real safety margin for you or not.
What happens if I add collateral or repay part of the loan before a margin call hits?
Either move lowers your LTV and pushes both the margin-call price and the liquidation price further away from the current market price, buying you room. Adding collateral increases the denominator in the LTV ratio without touching what you owe, while repaying principal shrinks the numerator directly — both have the same effect of resetting how far the price needs to fall before you're flagged again. Most centralized lenders let you do either at any time from your account dashboard, not just during an active margin call, so borrowers who want to run a tighter LTV for a lower effective borrowing cost can top up periodically rather than parking a large collateral buffer up front. This calculator doesn't model a top-up sequence over time, but you can approximate one by lowering the loan amount or raising the collateral amount and re-reading the margin-call and liquidation prices.