What is LTV in crypto lending? The warning-level arithmetic
LTV is the loan over the collateral's value. Two lenders' own levels, worked into the price fall each one allows and what a partial liquidation sells.
Crypto lending, risk first
This week
LTV is the loan over the collateral's value. Two lenders' own levels, worked into the price fall each one allows and what a partial liquidation sells.
Aave names no safe health factor. This table converts levels from 1.1 to 3 into the collateral fall each absorbs before liquidation, using Aave's formula.
SALT, Strike and Ledn on credit checks, bureau reporting and what liquidation does to your credit, from each lender's own page, read 16 October 2026.
Liquidation is the forced sale of collateral that no longer covers a debt. Exchange margin and Aave loans side by side, from the venues' own pages.
Mostly yes, but no penalty is not no cost. APX caps an early fee at 3 months' interest; SALT, Strike and Ledn print none. Read 8 October 2026.
Strike's page says 72 hours, Arch says typically 24, Ledn and SALT print LTV levels rather than hours. Each lender's cure window, read 4 October 2026.
SALT prints a ladder from 75% to 90.91% LTV; Lava sets a price, not a ratio. We read four lenders' own pages and turned SALT's triggers into BTC falls.
Unchained, SALT, APX Lending and Ledn each publish a promise about reusing bitcoin collateral. We read all four word for word and graded who can check it.
Ledn's page prices an LTV-triggered loan; Unchained's commercial-loan page defines a CTP violation and prints no sale level. Both read 20 September 2026.
Ledn says collateral is not lent for yield since May 2025, yet its own explainer allows re-posting to a funding partner. What its Open Book Report shows.
No. The price triggers are gone, but a missed payment still sells collateral after a 10-day grace. Both Strike ladders and Ledn's, tabulated and priced.
Blockaid's initial estimate put the MORE Markets drain at $9.3 million. The corrected figures reported four days later are roughly $410,000 at spot. What a lender should take from the gap.
A $250,000 minimum, up to 75% initial advance, margin call at 85% and liquidation at 90%. Every threshold is published in the launch release. What the release does not publish is the price source that decides when they are crossed.
The $8.7m the trackers reported matches the stablecoins the post-mortem traces off Base. What a forensic report published on the protocol's forum a day later adds is a different number: $9.13m of borrower obligations still outstanding. The mechanism is not a vote and not a broken contract, but a donation to a market contract and a price feed that believed it.
A revolving line against BTC, ETH and staked SOL at 50% loan-to-value and an advertised 8.99% variable APR. The pitch rests on collateral the firm says it does not lend on — a claim the borrower cannot check, and the launch coverage never describes the margin call.
An attacker bought majority control of a thinly held governance token, passed proposals against Term Finance's strategy vaults and moved roughly $8.5 million out. The contracts executed exactly as written.
The app is a familiar exchange account. The loan underneath it is a smart-contract position that a price feed can close without asking. Assessed on the gap between those two facts.
Coinbase, Uniswap and Crypto.com each ship a lending or borrowing button with their own branding on it. The documented integrations keep pointing at one shared backend, and that is a risk question.
Hand assets to a firm, receive an advertised yield. Assessed on the only question that has ever mattered in this model: who is paying that yield, and what happens if they cannot.
The word does real persuasive work on a landing page. Read closely, a great deal of it describes something narrower than customers assume — and sometimes nothing at all.
The model that outlasted the last cycle, assessed the way this desk assesses everything: what can go wrong first, and how much of it the published parameters actually tell you.
The crypto lending sector ran two models. One of them is largely gone, and the reason is structural rather than accidental.