SALT prices its bitcoin-backed loans on collateral alone as borrowers spend them on tuition

SALT's rate card shows what the borrower pays. A one-year loan at 30% loan-to-value carries a 7.49% APR, and the top of the card is 10.50% at 70% LTV ^[4][5]. Going from the cheapest quoted tier to the most expensive adds about 3 percentage points to the rate ^[20]. It also cuts the bitcoin a borrower must lock up from $3.33 per dollar borrowed to $1.43 ^[21]. Hunter Albright, SALT's chief revenue officer, wants the product to look more familiar still. "Our ultimate goal is to have loan products behave much more like a mortgage, where someone can take out a loan, at a fixed rate over a longer term and have greater predictability around the cost of borrowing, even while Bitcoin remains volatile," he told CoinDesk ^[7].

The borrower's side comes from Ledn. "People borrow against their bitcoin because they believe it will be worth more in the future, and they also want to be certain they'll get it back," Adam Reeds, Ledn's co-founder and chief executive, said ^[8]. Someone who pledges instead of selling keeps the coins they would have sold, or rather keeps the exposure to them, since SALT, for one, holds pledged coins with an institutional custodian ^[16]. They pay the APR for that exposure. Borrowing beats selling only if bitcoin rises faster than the rate, 7.49% to 10.50% a year on SALT's card, before fees ^[18]. Whatever the proceeds pay for, the borrower ends up holding bitcoin financed at a fixed rate ^[18]. "Most clients renew their loans, because the whole premise of this type of lending is not selling bitcoin and continuing to hold the position," Reeds said ^[9].

The evidence fits three readings. In the first, the purposes are as the lenders describe them. "What I am seeing, both in the conversations I'm having and in the data, is that more people are starting to borrow against their Bitcoin for real-world needs," Albright said ^[2]. In the second, those purposes are a lender's account of its own customers: CryptoBriefing noted that SALT's figures are self-reported and that no third party has quantified the breakdown of loan purposes ^[11]. In the third, the model spreads to other hard assets such as gold, a move CoinDesk reported in a single line without naming a lender or terms ^[13].

Ledn's $1 trillion target is about 91 times what it has funded so far ^[22]. Its $11 billion is a cumulative funded total ^[10]. If a renewal is booked as a new loan, a book where most clients roll over will grow that total faster than its outstanding credit ^[9].

In my view the lenders have built ordinary secured credit on the cost side, with fixed rates, fixed terms and a loan-to-value grid ^[3]. The borrower's economics are still a financed position in bitcoin ^[18]. Albright's version of the counter-thesis is about who gets access. "Now, that is becoming available to a broader group of people based on the asset they own and hold," he said ^[17]. On that reading, a fixed payment over several years lets a household plan a tuition bill around the asset it already owns ^[3]. The view is wrong if independent data shows most proceeds going to non-trading uses and most loans repaid at maturity instead of renewed.