About

Clearpool is a decentralized credit marketplace that offers permissionless crypto lending and borrowing services. Users can earn compounding interest on their crypto assets by lending to vetted institutions, with dynamic risk-adjusted interest rates and no lockup periods. Clearpool also offers staking services for its native token, CPOOL, and a bridge for securely transferring CPOOL between Ethereum and Polygon chains. The platform is transparent and audited for protocol security. In addition, Clearpool provides institutional-grade DeFi services with KYC and AML compliance for wholesale borrowing and lending of digital assets.

History

Clearpool was founded in June 2021 by Robert Alcorn, a former trader at an investment bank, and Alessio Quaglini, CEO of Hex Trust, with the goal of allowing institutions to borrow crypto-assets without overcollateralization. As it stands, the vast majority of global debt is unsecured, and institutional borrowers prefer this because overcollateralization is very capital inefficient. So while the current large overcollateralized lending protocols (i.e. AAVE, MKR, COMP) make sense for individual, pseudonymous users they do not for larger borrowers, who need to have options for uncollateralized borrowing to really be compelled to come on-chain. Clearpool is tapping into this need by creating the first dynamic marketplace for uncollateralized institutional liquidity, giving these larger players the option to borrow from global, liquid pools of crypto-native capital or get higher risk-adjusted returns and less counterparty risk on the money they lend out along with programmability, flexibility, transparency and lower execution, brokerage, underwriting and sales/marketing time and costs.

Prior to mainnet launch, starting late-September 2021 and going through December 2021, along with raising money from some notable investors such as Sequoia Capital, Sino Global Capital, Hashkey Group and ArringtonXRP Capital, Clearpool also announced partnerships with many technology platforms and crypto protocols, such as Hex Trust, X-Margin, Parsiq and Lithium Finance (LITH), to bolster its capital markets ecosystem for both borrowers and lenders. Over this same period, over 20 large digital asset institutions (primarily crypto hedge funds and market makers) were confirmed as borrowers (pre-launch borrowers were whitelisted by the Clearpool team as opposed to a CPOOL token holder vote). Some notable borrowers include Wintermute, Amber Group, Folkvang Trading, Nibbio, and FBG Partners. Clearpool’s utility and governance token, CPOOL, was publicly launched on October 28th, 2021 through IDOs on Uniswap, DAO Maker, and ZENDIT along with token sales/listings on KuCoin (burning drop), Gate (airdrop), and AscendEx. In addition to this there were high APY (100%+) pre-staking programs on Uniswap, AscendEX, Kucoin, and Gate from 10/28/2021 to 1/26/2022. On 12/11/2021 AscendEX's exchange hot wallet was hacked and a small amount of CPOOL was part of the incident, losses to users were covered by AscendEX, hacker addresses were blacklisted by KuCoin and Gate, and Clearpool temporarily removed liquidity from the CPOOL/ETH Uniswap pool.