On 7 June 2022, Atlendis Labs launched version 1 of the Atlendis protocol on Polygon mainnet. It was one of the first live attempts to offer institutional crypto loans with no collateral at all, structured like a revolving line of credit.
Launch facts
- Date and network: 7 June 2022, Polygon mainnet.
- First borrowers: DeversiFi (which rebranded to rhino.fi shortly afterwards) and the ZigZag exchange.
- Initial credit limit: $10 million.
- Audits: smart contracts audited by Runtime Verification and PeckShield.
- Background: the company was formerly known as JellyFi and had raised a $4.4 million seed round six months earlier.
The timing was difficult. The launch came weeks after the collapse of Terra and in the middle of a sharp market downturn, when appetite for unsecured crypto credit was falling across the industry.
How V1 worked for borrowers
Only whitelisted institutions could borrow: dApps, protocols, DAOs and, in principle, non-crypto companies seeking exposure to digital assets. Each borrower received its own pool per asset, with terms such as maturity and maximum borrowable amount fixed when the pool opened. The borrower could draw funds up to its limit without locking collateral and had to repay principal plus interest at maturity. rhino.fi said at the time it planned to use the credit line to fund fast withdrawals and cross-chain bridging.
How V1 worked for lenders
- Rate discovery: each pool was split into “ticks”, each representing a lending rate. Lenders chose the rate at which they were willing to lend, and the borrowing rate came out of the liquidity offered at each tick.
- NFT positions: every deposit was represented by an NFT showing the position and whether funds were lent out or waiting to be matched.
- Three sources of yield: interest from active loans, Aave yield on funds that were not borrowed, and liquidity rewards paid by the borrower on unused capacity.
- Borrower data: credit evaluations and financial performance data from Credora were shown to help lenders choose whom to trust.
What the launch tells us
V1 put the core ideas of institutional on-chain credit into production: isolated borrower pools, lender-chosen rates and third-party credit scoring instead of collateral. Its limitation was scale. The model depended on a steady pipeline of high-quality borrowers, and DefiLlama data shows the protocol never exceeded about $2 million in total value locked. In 2023 the team moved to a second version aimed at real-world businesses.
