Market terms
On Wildcat every market is a single borrower's own credit line — they set all four of these, not a DAO-wide utilization curve.
Market health: reserve ratio check
Lender: wTKN value growth (scale factor)
Desglose completo
| Métrico | Valor |
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Penalty-cost table — same deposit & period, more delinquent days
Holding your deposit, holding period and market terms fixed above, here is what happens to your final value as the market spends more days delinquent beyond its grace period — the mirror image of the borrower's rising interest bill.
| Days delinquent beyond grace | Blended True APR | Valor final |
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Credit with no collateral and no oracle
Wildcat Protocol is a decentralized credit layer for fully uncollateralized on-chain lending — per Wildcat Labs' own reporting, institutional borrowers like Wintermute, Amber Group, Hyperithm and Keyrock have drawn over $150M in outstanding credit and $368M+ originated since the V2 launch on Ethereum. There is no collateral, no price oracle and no liquidation engine anywhere in the design. Instead, each borrower deploys their own market and sets every term themselves: a Base APR, a reserve ratio (the % of supply that must stay liquid for lender withdrawals), a grace period (0–2,160 hours of tolerated delinquency), and a Penalty APR that only activates once that grace period is blown through.
Lenders never hold a static-balance claim. They hold wTKN, a scaled token whose real value is tracked by a single number per market — the scale factor — which grows per Wildcat's technical docs as scaleFactor = previousScaleFactor × (1 + APR × timeElapsed / oneYear). The APR plugged into that formula is the market's True APR (Base APR grossed up by a fixed 5% protocol fee) in normal times, or True APR + Penalty APR for every day the market sits delinquent beyond its grace period. No rebase transaction, no claim button — the same wTKN balance is simply worth more (or, if the borrower never cures delinquency, at least worth more at a faster clip) as the scale factor climbs.
The practical trade a borrower is making explicit, on-chain, before anyone lends them a cent: how much standing liquidity buffer they are willing to park (reserve ratio), how long they can run low on it before it costs them (grace period), and exactly how much it will cost per year if it does (Penalty APR) — a risk-control model built entirely out of borrower-declared terms instead of a pooled utilization curve or a collateral ratio.
Preguntas frecuentes
What is Wildcat Protocol and how is it different from Aave, Compound or Maple?
Wildcat is a decentralized credit layer for fully uncollateralized on-chain lending, used in production by institutional borrowers like Wintermute, Amber Group, Hyperithm and Keyrock (per Wildcat Labs' own reporting, over $150M in outstanding credit and $368M+ originated since its V2 launch on Ethereum). Unlike Aave/Compound, there is no collateral and no liquidation at all, and unlike Maple's fixed-term pools, each market's terms (reserve ratio, base APR, penalty APR, grace period, withdrawal cycle) are set entirely by the borrower per docs.wildcat.finance, not by a pooled utilization curve. Risk control comes from a reserve-ratio requirement and an escalating penalty rate instead of an oracle or a liquidation engine.
What is the "scale factor" and how does my wTKN balance actually grow?
Per Wildcat's technical documentation, every market has a scale factor that starts at 1 and grows as scaleFactor = previousScaleFactor × (1 + APR × timeElapsed / oneYear). Your lender token (wTKN) is a "scaled" amount: normalizeAmount(x) = x × scaleFactor converts it back to the real underlying value. So you never receive new tokens or a rebase event you have to claim — the same wTKN balance is simply worth more underlying tokens as the scale factor climbs, continuously, for as long as the market exists.
What is the reserve ratio, and why would a borrower ever set it above 0%?
The reserve ratio is the % of total market supply a borrower commits to keeping liquid and available for lender withdrawals at all times — Wildcat's docs give the example of a 20% reserve ratio on $4,000,000 supply requiring $800,000 held back. A 0% reserve ratio is allowed and makes the market fully uncollateralized with no standing liquidity buffer at all; borrowers who want to attract more cautious lenders voluntarily set it higher, since it is the main signal (short of a track record) that they can actually honor near-term withdrawal requests.
What happens if a market becomes delinquent — do I get liquidated?
No liquidation exists on Wildcat. Per the docs, a market is "delinquent" any time its held reserves fall below the required reserve ratio. An internal grace tracker then counts up; as long as it stays under the borrower-set grace period (0 to 2,160 hours / 90 days), nothing else happens. Only once the grace tracker exceeds the grace period does the penalty APR activate on top of the normal rate — and it switches back off (with penalties calculated retroactively, not open-ended) as soon as the market is cured. The borrower's only real consequence is a higher accruing interest bill, not a seized collateral position.
Why is the protocol fee always exactly 5% of Base APR, and how does True APR differ from Base APR?
Wildcat's docs fix the protocol fee at 5% of whatever Base APR the borrower sets — it is not independently configurable. So True APR under normal conditions = Base APR + (Base APR × 5%) = Base APR × 1.05 (the docs' own worked example: a 10% Base APR becomes a 10.5% True APR). If the market is delinquent beyond its grace period, the borrower-set Penalty APR is added on top of that already-grossed-up True APR, not on top of the bare Base APR.