Securities lending is one of the largest revenue lines at every major retail broker.
The holder whose shares are being lent sees none of it.
Where the fee goes
How it worksSomeone wants your stock
To bet against a stock you must first borrow it from someone who owns it, then give it back later. You pay rent for every day in between.
The fee already exists
Your broker collects it today and does not consult you. It is legal, disclosed, and ordinary. It is also not a law of nature.
Collateral lets you leave
Borrowers post 150% in ETH, and no more than 80% of a pool can ever be lent out. A fifth of every pool stays withdrawable, always.
There is currently no way to short a tokenized equity onchain.
Not expensively. Not at all. No borrow means no short, no delta hedge, no cash-and-carry against the listed market.
Kunox is the locate. Post ETH collateral, borrow shares from the vault, return them to close. No maturity, no desk to call.
- Collateral
- 150% in ETH
- Liquidated at
- 125%
- Origination
- 0.50%, to the buffer
- Term
- Open-ended
- Rate
- Floats with utilisation
- Close
- Any block, return shares
- Network
- Robinhood Chain · live
The questions a skeptic asks first
FAQWhere does the yield come from?
Borrowers. It is rent on your shares, paid in the share itself — a borrower returns more shares than they took, so your claim grows in shares. Not a token emission, not a subsidy, not paid out of a treasury. Nothing is skimmed on the way: there is no reserve factor and no owner.
If you cannot see who is paying you and why, assume you are the yield. Here the payer is a borrower with a position and a reason to hold it.
What is the rate?
Whatever borrowers will pay — a function of how badly someone wants to be short and how much supply is already in the vault. It changes block to block.
There is no fixed rate, no target rate, and nobody is promising you a number.
What happens if there is no borrow demand?
You earn nothing. The rate is zero, your shares sit in the vault, and you can withdraw them whenever you want.
This is the normal state for most assets most of the time. A borrow market only pays when somebody wants to be short, and for a lot of tickers, on a lot of days, nobody does.
What stops a borrower from just never giving the shares back?
Nothing does. That is the honest answer, and it is why the design does not depend on it. A borrower is never compelled to return anything — they are made to pre-pay for the possibility that they won't.
Before a single share leaves the pool, the borrower has locked ETH worth 150% of it. To get that ETH back they must return the shares. If they walk away and the position falls to 125%, anyone can liquidate it: the liquidator returns the shares and takes the ETH at an 8% premium. The pool is made whole by whoever takes that trade, not by the borrower's goodwill.
Three things still have to be true for that to work, and it is worth saying them out loud. A price has to not gap past the collateral before anyone acts. Someone has to be running a liquidator. And that liquidator has to be able to source the shares. None of those are guaranteed. They are why the buffer below exists.
What happens if a borrower defaults?
Borrowers post more collateral than the shares are worth, and positions are priced continuously. If collateral falls below its maintenance floor the position is liquidated: collateral is sold, the shares are bought back and returned to the vault.
The honest risk is a gap. If the price jumps far enough, fast enough, that liquidation cannot buy the shares back for less than the collateral is worth, there is a shortfall. It is absorbed first by a buffer funded entirely by borrowers — a 0.5% origination fee on every borrow, which never touches the supply rate. Only what the buffer cannot cover reaches suppliers.
Overcollateralisation plus the buffer makes that unlikely. It does not make it impossible.
Do I still own the stock?
You hold a redeemable claim on the vault for the same number of tokenized shares you deposited, and you keep the economic exposure throughout. While they are lent out you hold the claim, backed by the borrower's collateral.
A tokenized share is not the underlying equity. It does not make you a shareholder of record and carries no voting rights. What it entitles you to is defined by the token's issuer, not by this protocol.
Can I always withdraw?
Any block, against available liquidity. When the vault is fully utilized a withdrawal triggers a recall on borrowers rather than a queue for you — but a recall takes effect over blocks, not instantly.
Utilization is onchain. Look at it before you assume the exit is empty.