FiRM
Inverse Finance's Fixed Rate Market
The Fixed Rate Market or “FiRM,” is Inverse Finance’s new Fixed Rate Market lending protocol that implements a new DeFi primitive called DOLA Borrowing Rights. A novel money market architecture, Personal Collateral Escrows, ensures that different tokens from different users are not comingled.
Using FiRM
Security
Voting
FAQ
Deposit WETH in the FiRM app. You can use another asset to purchase WETH as a part of the borrowing transaction. Make sure that you have enough WETH left to continue transacting as it is the gas token of the Ethereum blockchain.
Decide how much DOLA you want to borrow. Note that if your WETH collateral drops in value to the point where your deposit no longer meets the collateral factor, or you borrow the maximum amount of DOLA that you are allowed, you may get liquidated.
Input the loan duration you wish to secure or DBR amount that you wish to purchase as a part of the borrowing transaction. The cost of the DBR will be added to your DOLA debt.
Double-check that the app parameters express what you intend and execute the transaction. There may be multiple transactions to approve and execute depending on how complex the transaction is.
Click the button “Exit Mode”. The tabs let you decide if you want to repay, withdraw collateral or both at the same time.
Enter the amount of DOLA that you want to repay.
Enter the amount of the collateral tokens that you want to withdraw.
Execute the transaction.
To borrow DOLA in FiRM, a user must first deposit collateral in one of the markets.
The user must also hold DBR tokens to service the debt. DBR's can be purchased on the open market or you can buy DBR tokens as part of the loan transaction.
FiRM and Inverse Finance does not custody any funds from FiRM users. All user funds are held in Personal Collateral Escrow contracts controlled by the user and are isolated both by individual user and by token type. This means that FiRM takes a step beyond shared pools of user collateral, commonly found in protocols like Compound Finance or Aave.
The PCE’s are highly flexible which allows for individual collateral factors and borrowing limits per token and per position.
While no lending protocol is completely immune to hacks, PCE’s were designed to enable multiple new layers of security. First, by isolating deposits in such a granular fashion compared to cross-collateral pools, PCE’s no longer offer intruders a single pool of assets to target but rather many, smaller targets. Second, with a PCE a depositor’s collateral cannot be loaned. As the only borrowable asset in Inverse Finance’s implementation of PCE’s is DOLA and since borrowable DOLA is capped per collateral asset, the potential impact of a price oracle manipulation incident is reduced to an undue liquidation.
This new approach to price oracles for borrows and liquidations in FiRM uses the lower of two recorded prices: either a) the current collateral price on Chainlink, or b) the 48-hour low price as observed by the PPO on Chainlink, divided by the collateral factor. For example, if the current Chainlink price for wETH is $1,500, the 48-hour low was $1,000 and the collateral factor is 80%, the PPO returns $1,250. ($1,000 / .80 = $1,250)
Attackers who rely on flash loans and other short-term techniques will be frustrated by the implementation of PPO’s.
- First, using the 48-hour low price minimizes the risk of FiRM allowing borrows against a rapidly and artificially inflated collateral asset price.
- Second, dividing the 48-hour low price by the collateral factor creates a bias for more conservatism with volatile collateral and more freedom for less volatile collateral like stablecoins.
- Finally, the PPO provides greater protection for FiRM along with its other security features such as preventing users from borrowing against more than the lowest recorded value of their collateral over the prior two days. Daily borrow limits curtail the amount of funds at risk and user collateral is not pooled but held separately in an entirely non-custodial way.
Users depositing select governance tokens that carry voting rights as collateral in FiRM are able to vote and delegate their votes.
Each user's collateral is deposited into a personal escrow contract, which is deployed as gas efficiently as possible. Snapshot delegation is built into to the personal escrow account and whenever an escrow is initialized, it will automatically delegate to the owner. This means the OHM voting power of your collateral gets delegated to your main wallet. It's also possible to move the delegation to a different address if you wish.
FiRM is a new Fixed-Rate Market for borrowing DOLA using DBR tokens and it is focused on simplicity and safety. All markets are isolated and collateral cannot be borrowed by others.
FiRM does not have shared collateral pools like traditional DeFi markets. FiRM uses Personal Collateral Escrows which ensures that deposits are not only isolated per collateral but also per user. FiRM also has flash loan protection and a limited amount of borrowable DOLA per market. FiRM has been audited by Code4arena.
DBR is a Borrowing Rights token. Holding it in your wallet gives you the right to borrow the DOLA stablecoin in FiRM.
DOLA is a stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar. This means it is designed to be valued as close to $1 as possible with minimal volatility. DOLA is debt-backed rather than algorithmic, meaning that DOLA is backed by retractable debt.
One DBR gives the right to borrow 1 DOLA for 1 year (or 2 DOLA for 6 months, etc). This is assuming you have deposited enough collateral.
Yes but not a standard one: your DBR wallet balance will decrease over time when you have an open loan position.
Either via the airdrop if you're eligible or on Uniswap / Balancer. In the future an auto-buy DBR feature will be available.
No, DBRs should stay in your wallet to pay the fee when you have a loan. Your DBR wallet balance will decrease only if you have a DOLA loan in FiRM.
DBRs are "spent" over time when you have a loan, the rate depends on your amount of debt. If you don't have a loan the balance does not decrease.
If you have a DBR deficit and an active loan then someone can top-up your DBR balance, purchasing DBR at a higher price than the current DBR market price. The cost of this forced top-up is added to your debt which can lead to liquidations if left unchecked, so it is recommended that you top up your DBR wallet balance yourself before it runs out.
As a lending market, front running does not put user funds at risk. The worst case scenario in a front running scenario, is that a user’s transaction fails due to there not being enough liquidity in the lending market.
A flashloan attack can be applied to the protocol if a price oracle turns out to be faulty. Therefore we only allow whitelisted contracts to interact with the protocol. To mitigate oracle risk, we only use assets with chainlink oracles.
Last modified 14d ago