Pogun
Internal Data as of 2026-06-12

Market Analysis

The custody reckoning

Borrowing against bitcoin is now a real market, and the competition is sorting itself along one fault line: what happens to the collateral. This is an internal read of fifteen lenders across native BTC and its wrapped variants, current as of 12 June 2026, with every load-bearing figure sourced. It is candid by design, including where each competitor beats Pogun.

  • The market is large and consolidating, not nascent. Galaxy tracks roughly $67B of crypto-collateralized lending, down from a $78.7B peak after the October 2025 liquidation event, with CeFi concentrating hard: Tether, Maple and Nexo hold 78% of the tracked CeFi book.15
  • Custody is the live battleground, and it is moving toward Pogun. Lava abandoned its self-custody design for a custodial model in November 2025, Ledn retired collateral re-lending entirely in July 2025, and Strike spent mid-2025 defending re-pledge language. Borrowers are rejecting rehypothecation, and lenders are responding.13
  • Nobody offers a margin-call-free product at scale. Every competitor here liquidates on price, from Aave's automatic 86% health-factor close to Strike's 85% threshold. Strike's Tether-funded "volatility-proof" loan is the only exception, and it is private-desk only.
  • The volume is in custodial and wrapped models, not bilateral self-custody. Coinbase alone has originated $2.3B through a Morpho-on-Base rail; the bilateral escrow lenders closest to Pogun (Firefish, Debifi) are measured in tens to low hundreds of millions.12
  • Wrapped BTC is re-concentrating in one company. cbBTC roughly doubled in a year to about 86k BTC while WBTC shrank to about 116k, and Coinbase is issuer, custodian and dominant loan rail for cbBTC at once.1
  • The unserved combination is exactly Pogun's: native BTC, no margin call, per-counterparty pricing, and a transferable claim. Each competitor holds one or two of those; none holds all four.

Top threats

Positioning

Custody versus structure

Every lender in this analysis, placed by who controls the collateral and how credit is priced. Bubble area tracks the estimated BTC-collateral loan book. Hollow dashed bubbles mean the book is not disclosed.

Comparison

The matrix

Sortable and filterable. Every numeric cell carries a footnote to its source. Industry terms are used as the market uses them.

Pricing

Rates and LTV

Borrow rates

Maximum LTV

Pogun reference: there are no margin calls by design. Collateral Coverage is fixed when the loan is agreed, and the loan survives price moves. The only default trigger is a missed payment, which raises a Default Claim.

Collateral Forms

Native BTC and its wrappers

Most BTC-collateral lending does not touch native bitcoin. The DeFi venues, and Coinbase behind them, run on wrapped tokens: a custodian or bridge holds the bitcoin and issues an on-chain claim that can be posted as collateral. The wrapper is the custody decision, made once and inherited by every loan written against it. Here is how the three that matter for lending compare, and why their custody models are the opening Pogun's native-BTC rail is built to take.

Share of wrapped supply

Why the wrapper is the opening

Every wrapped-BTC loan carries two custody risks stacked on top of each other: the lending venue, and the issuer who holds the underlying bitcoin. WBTC's supply has fallen as holders react to its offshore custody arrangement; cbBTC's has surged while concentrating issuer, custodian and loan rail inside one company; tBTC stays decentralized but thin. A loan on Pogun removes the layer entirely. Collateral is native bitcoin locked in a contract on the Bitcoin network, with no wrapper to mint, no bridge to trust, and no Collateral Coverage that depends on a token holding its peg. Pogun is the credit rail for Bitcoin, not for a claim on bitcoin.

Deep Dives

Nine lenders, in depth

The nine that set the terms of the market: two bilateral escrow lenders, three custodial desks, a CeDeFi front-end, two DeFi protocols, and an institutional asset manager. Each profile carries a fact grid sourced to primary documents, a candid read of strengths and weaknesses, a plain list of where they beat Pogun, and a score against the eight structural properties defined in the Pogun section below.

Profiles

The wider field

Also watching

    Positioning

    Where Pogun stands

    Pogun is a non-margin-call credit market on native Bitcoin: a borrower and a lender agree terms one to one, the bitcoin is locked in a contract for the term, the only default trigger is a missed payment, and the loan mints a transferable Bond Token. The scorecard below scores Pogun and the nine Tier-1 lenders against the eight structural properties that follow from that design. It is a map of who can reach which corners, not a quality ranking.

    Scorecard reframed from the original eight-property deck for the credit-rail-for-Bitcoin positioning. The Cardano-specific eUTxO dimension is replaced with "rehypothecation structurally impossible," the institutionally legible version of the same guarantee, and oracle-free operation is folded into the non-margin-call definition. Half marks denote partial or conditional satisfaction, explained on hover.

    Where Pogun is behind

    • No live product and no track record. Firefish, Coinbase, Maple and Ledn have all proven their models through the October 2025 crash; Pogun has not originated a loan.
    • No distribution. Strike and Coinbase reach borrowers through installed apps with tens of millions of users. A bilateral marketplace has to bring both sides itself.
    • No committed capital. Strike has a $2.1B Tether facility, Maple over $4B in pooled funds, Coinbase a self-funding lend side. Pogun's lender book starts empty, and a marketplace is only as deep as its capital.
    • No audits, licenses or regulatory footprint yet. Firefish holds MiCA authorization, Arch and Salt hold US state lending licenses, Coinbase is FCA-registered. Those are real moats Pogun has not built.
    • Competitors' loan books are already in the hundreds of millions to billions. Pogun is pre-revenue against incumbents compounding originations every quarter.

    White space

    • The full combination is unclaimed: native BTC, no margin call, per-counterparty pricing, and a transferable claim. No competitor holds all four, and the scorecard shows why.
    • No margin calls is the widest gap. The whole field liquidates on price; the institutional capital that structurally cannot accept that risk has nowhere to go.
    • Bilateral plus transferable claims is unserved. Maple prices per counterparty but pools the funding and issues no per-loan claim; Morpho's fixed-term Midnight is still pre-launch and pooled.
    • Verifiable native-BTC custody is contested but open. Firefish and Debifi reach it with multisig escrow but still liquidate on price; the custodial desks make it a policy promise, not a structural one.
    • Agent-operable credit is empty space. Every competitor is app-mediated or pool-mechanical; none exposes a negotiable, full-term credit relationship an agent can manage.

    Methodology & Sources

    How this was built

    Data was gathered on 12 June 2026 by parallel research agents running live web searches and fetches, one per Tier-1 competitor plus combined passes for the Tier-2 profiles and market context. Primary sources were preferred in this order: official product, terms and documentation pages; then on-chain data (DefiLlama, Aavescan, CoinGecko) for protocol figures; then established press (CoinDesk, The Block, Bitcoin Magazine) and analyst reports (Galaxy Research) for events and market sizing. Every figure carries its own source and as-of date, and each source carries a confidence label. Where a primary page blocked automated fetching (Strike, Coinbase), copy was captured from current search-index snippets and is labeled medium confidence.

    Two cautions on reuse. Rates, LTVs and loan books move continuously, so every number is a dated snapshot, not a standing fact; treat anything older than a quarter as stale. And undisclosed CeFi loan books are shown as "not disclosed" rather than estimated, except for the positioning map, where estimated books are marked and undisclosed ones drawn as hollow bubbles. To refresh: re-run the research prompts, replace data.js, and bump meta.asOfDate. Run POGUN_MARKET_QA() in the browser console to check that every numeric cell is sourced and dated.

    This is an internal document. It is not investment advice, and it is not for external distribution without a sanitizing pass over the candid competitive assessments.