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By Indentura
Rebuilding credit markets on top of stablecoin rails.
Indentura lets borrowers pledge high-quality offchain collateral and draw on stablecoin credit lines from a global onchain liquidity pool. Our offchain infrastructure gives lenders enforceable legal claims and real-time visibility into collateral while preserving borrower privacy.
Our first product enables speciality lenders to access revolving credit lines to manage cash flow more effectively and also offer similar revolving products to SMEs.
To do so, we’re developing three key pieces of infrastructure:
Soroban Credit Vaults: Vaults that support ERC-4626 behavior on deposit and ERC-7540 on withdrawal, adapted to Soroban’s native architecture. At a high level, a lender deposits Stellar USDC into a vault, and receives in return a yield-bearing receipt/share token representing its position. The vault allocates all deposited capital into whitelisted protocols to generate yield. When a borrow wants to draw down a credit line, a designated MPC wallet calls a function to unwind yield positions and release stablecoins or offramped USD to the borrower. Interest is accrued and tracked on a block-by-block basis. This represents a new asset primitive for the Stellar ecosystem and an adaptable vault standard that leverages best practices from EVM protocols to interface between onchain and offchain capital flows, driving real-world utility to Soroban.
Custody and Compliance: Vault depositors require a legal security interest over the collateral backing their credit exposure. Borrowers, in turn, require institutional-grade interfaces, including bank accounts for fund disbursement and MPC wallets to manage on-chain obligations. This demands a legal and operational layer built around bankruptcy-remote SPVs that support custody, loan servicing, and payment flow management on behalf of vault participants. We’re building the robust, institutional-grade bridge required for assets to flow safely between traditional legal structures and the Stellar network.
Reporting and Automation: Moving funds from a Stellar USDC vault deposit to a borrower’s bank account involves treasury operations across various systems, including yield management, compliance checks, and disbursements. On repayment, syncing borrower data back to on-chain vault interfaces requires connecting private data warehouses with privacy-preserving pipelines. This infrastructure ensures capital flows and reporting are seamless, secure, and trustworthy for all participants.
This grant will allow us to develop and launch these infrastructure components on Soroban, beginning with a live credit facility for a U.S.-based specialty lender. It’s the first step toward building stablecoin-native credit rails that are programmable, transparent, and globally accessible.
Yes
$120.0K
We’ll consider this build successful if we meet the following criteria:
One real-world borrower is live on mainnet, accessing a stablecoin-denominated credit line via Soroban vault infrastructure.
One lender vault is deployed and capitalized, with $500k of Stellar USDC earning yield via a mix of DeFi strategies and borrower repayment.
At least one half of a repayment cycle is completed, demonstrating stablecoin flow from vault to borrower and back through fiat on/off-ramp infrastructure.
All supporting infrastructure is live: custody (MPC), legal structure (SPV), and lender-facing reporting.
End-to-end flows are auditable via on-chain data and off-chain reporting, ensuring transparency for vault participants and protocol stakeholders.
Impact:
This launch will demonstrate that stablecoins can serve as more than just payment rails. They can function as the foundation for programmable, enforceable credit infrastructure. That opens the door to:
Improved capital access for businesses excluded from traditional credit.
New sources of yield for lenders seeking real-world exposure beyond volatile DeFi tokens.
A new class of financial products on Stellar that serve real economic activity.
This deployment will serve as a reference implementation for future vaults and borrowers, laying the foundation for permissionless credit infrastructure across the Stellar ecosystem.
We’re sequencing our go-to-market by pairing crypto-native capital with real-world borrowers, starting with a market wedge where stablecoin mechanics unlock new products that banks and credit funds can’t offer.
Our distribution strategy scales both capital and credit demand, with each phase unlocking new types of depositors and borrowers. A more detailed view into our 4-phase expansion plan can be found in the Indentura Thesis Document here: https://www.notion.so/indentura/Indentura-Thesis-Document-225c4663170780adb8e5de0045ac1224.
Initial Borrower Strategy
Our first borrower will be a U.S.-based specialty finance company that originates term loans or revenue based financing to small businesses and has expressed explicit demand for a revolving credit structure. We are collaborating directly with this partner to structure the initial facility, validate the legal + off-chain infrastructure, and confirm repayment data flows.
This initial borrower relationship gives us:
A controlled underwriting + servicing relationship.
Clear operational requirements for drawdowns and repayments.
A proving ground for cross-chain and off-chain capital orchestration.
Initial Lender Strategy
Our first vault will be capitalized through closely held sources: the team, advisors, and aligned partners with experience in DeFi and credit underwriting. These stakeholders understand the risk profile and serve as both early liquidity providers and feedback channels.
We especially want to focus on lenders who already have positions in DeFi protocols, as Indentura provides an additional way to stack yield on top of their existing positions.
This demonstrates:
Programmatic yield movement between DeFi and borrower capital.
Stablecoin liquidity that can be committed, drawn down, and repaid.
Transparent, auditable performance and credit behavior.
Future Growth
Once the first facility is live and stable, we will expand across both borrower and lender channels:
Borrower side: additional specialty finance firms, fintechs offering embedded credit products, and eventually businesses operating entirely on stablecoins.
Lender side: crypto-native family offices, DAO treasuries, and eventually fintechs or neobanks embedding Indentura-powered yield products.
Over time, we aim to support the creation of permissionless credit vaults, enabling anyone to launch programmable credit pools backed by real-world collateral, with Stellar serving as the primary infrastructure layer for compliance, liquidity, and settlement.
Our approach to validation is grounded in our team’s experience in the credit industry. Our founder, Tom Meister, has structured debt transactions at both funds and fintechs, led legal and operations at unicorn fintech companies, and advised and backed leading DeFi lending protocols. His background gives us confidence that this pain point, the absence of flexible, programmable credit infrastructure, is both acute and systemically underserved.
That perspective led us to validate the problem directly with our target users: nonbank specialty lenders. We’ve already received clear confirmation through direct conversations and formal letters of support, one of which is enclosed below.
The lender, a U.S.-based specialty finance firm originating term loans to SMBs, provided a signed letter describing the structural challenge: they cannot access or offer revolving credit due to limitations in how their capital sources operate, and the inefficiencies of traditional financial rails.
In the letter, their CEO writes:
“If lenders like [us] could draw on a revolving credit facility in stablecoins, we would incur significantly lower interest costs and could pass the savings along to our borrowers... We would be interested in piloting a borrower-facing revolving credit facility backed by stablecoins.”
He also confirms this is an industry-wide issue:
“Virtually none of … businesses [like ours] are able to access revolving bank lines of credit, and so we are forced to obtain term loan credit facilities that present the financial drawbacks I have described above. This puts businesses like [ours], and the small and medium sized businesses we serve, in a much worse position than we would be in if revolving credit were available.”
The full letter is enclosed and signed. We’re currently in active discussions with other specialty lenders facing the same problem and can secure additional letters over the coming weeks, if needed. We have also received interest from a venture philanthropy looking to deploy this type of solution within their market. A copy of their signed letter of support is also attached.
This validation affirms strong borrower demand and growing pull from institutional participants who, while traditionally unfamiliar with crypto, are eager to adopt Stellar-based solutions that solve real-world capital inefficiencies.
Support letters are available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LGQLNPqNh380raMT_UG2hRzAagavhi8i?usp=sharing.
This tranche covers the design of the core smart contract architecture and the structuring of our first real-world credit facility. It includes prototyping of the Soroban vault system, legal design for off-chain custody, and scoping the first borrower credit line, including underwriting and capital sourcing.
Completion:
Credit Vault specification document (architecture and flow diagrams).
Legal scaffolding specification for custody and interest representation.
Onboarded into Fireblocks with a test MPC wallet created.
Draft or signed borrower term sheet and credit memo.
Frontend mockup showing lender deposit and borrower drawdown flow.
Timeline: 6 weeks
Budget: $40k in XLM
This tranche funds full testnet deployment and simulation of vault + borrower flows, including lender deposits, yield allocation, drawdowns, fiat ramping, and repayments. We will also build frontend functionality to interact with test contracts.
Completion:
Soroban Credit Vault contracts deployed to testnet (contract address provided).
Transaction history showing: lender deposit, DeFi allocation, borrower drawdown, and repayment.
Testnet yield integration (e.g., Blend) with logs confirming allocation and unwind.
Final or near-final borrower credit agreement or servicing workflow documentation.
Timeline: 4 weeks
Budget: $40k in XLM
This tranche covers mainnet deployment with real capital and a live borrower, validating end-to-end use of stablecoin rails, custody, and repayment. It marks the first production credit line on Indentura’s infrastructure.
Completion:
Audited Soroban Credit Vault contracts deployed to mainnet (contract address shared).
Fully functional front end with lender deposit and withdrawal flows enabled.
Signed credit agreement with borrower (redacted version or summary deck).
Borrower’s mainnet Fireblocks wallet address or bank account set-up (if fiat).
Legal formation documents for SPV structure.
Timeline: 6 weeks
Budget: $40k in XLM
Tom Meister has built three fintechs, with two (pending three) exits and two unicorns, advised leading fintech lenders and DeFi lending protocols, and structured credit programs at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley for over a decade. He is uniquely positioned to bridge traditional and crypto capital markets, and is supported by a team of engineers and DeFi-native contributors.
His broader team brings deep experience across DeFi protocols, fintech credit platforms, commercial credit underwriting, and institutional capital markets. This foundation enables us to design natively crypto credit infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with legacy financial systems.
Thomas Meister
No other submissions.