The rigging manual

Overview

Bowline is a fixed-term lending protocol on Robinhood Chain. Borrowers pledge approved collateral, either memecoins that graduated on hood.fun or Robinhood stock tokens, and receive USDG at their tier’s loan-to-value. The loan has a deadline. Repay principal plus a flat fee before it, and the collateral returns atomically. That is the whole product.

The defining design decision: liquidate() reverts for any loan before its deadline, at any collateral price. There is no health factor, no margin call, and no price-triggered code path in the system. Volatility is the borrower’s business.

Loans

• Memecoin tiers: Express 30% LTV / 2 days / 3% · Quick 25% / 3 days / 2% · Standard 20% / 7 days / 1.5%
• Stock-token tiers: Express 50% / 7 days / 2.5% · Quick 60% / 15 days / 3.5% · Standard 70% / 30 days / 5%
• You receive the full principal now and owe principal + fee at close.
• Partial repayments reduce principal first and are free. Top-ups are free.
• Extending adds one term and one tier fee, up to a 90-day loan lifetime.
• The quote you sign is enforced: if the oracle moves against you between quote and execution, the transaction reverts rather than filling short.

Pricing & oracles

Memecoins are valued by a 30-minute Uniswap v3 TWAP from the token’s canonical graduation pool, converted to dollars via the Chainlink ETH/USD feed. A manipulation gate blocks new borrows whenever spot trades more than 15% above TWAP. Stock tokens are valued directly by Chainlink equity feeds (24/5, frozen on weekends), with staleness rules: borrows need a price fresher than 26 hours; settlements tolerate 72 so Monday can clear. Since nothing is ever liquidated by price, a stale weekend feed cannot hurt an open position.

Settlement

The deadline is a ramp, not a cliff. For a 48-hour grace window no keeper can settle, and a late fee accrues at roughly 1% a day (capped at 10% of principal) straight to lenders, so a borrower can always still repay and reclaim their bag. Only past the grace may any wallet settle the loan and earn a 5% bounty in kind. The remaining collateral is swapped to USDG through a route fixed by the registry, behind a floor anchored to the oracle value, so a hostile keeper cannot route value away. Proceeds flow strictly: principal to the pool, the accrued late fee to the pool, fee to the splitter, a 5% penalty to the reserve, and the entire surplus back to the borrower. Shortfalls are realized openly as pool share-price events; the reserve exists to make them rare.

The pool

Lenders deposit USDG for shares. Total assets equal un-lent cash plus outstanding principal; fees arrive as plain cash, so the share price only ratchets up as loans close. Withdrawals come from un-lent cash, anytime. Caps protect the pool: 80% max utilization, 1% of assets per loan, and per-token exposure limits set at listing.

Fee split

Every fee splits on-chain: 40% to the $BOWLINE staker vault (paid out in USDG to stakers once the token launches; until then it accrues publicly), 40% to the pool (lender yield), 10% to the referrer of record (claimable on-chain), 10% to the reserve. For the first 7 days, a Genesis Epoch tilts the split to 55% lenders / 25% stakers to bootstrap the pool, then it settles to an even 40/40 on a timer. The base split is governance-adjustable only inside hard bounds (holders 40–80%, lenders 5–40%, referrer and reserve 5–20% each).

Collateral listing

Memecoins must graduate on hood.fun into a pool with locked liquidity and usable TWAP history, pass a sellability simulation (honeypots fail), keep top-10 holder concentration under 40%, and survive a symbol-impersonation check. Stock tokens list with their Chainlink feed and are flagged issuer-pausable: if the issuer pauses one, anyone can poke the contract to roll affected deadlines forward (24 hours per poke, up to 30 days), and settlement reverts while the token is paused.

Governance & upgrades

Contract upgrades and role changes, the one power that could touch custody, run only through a public timelock (24 hours by default). Bounded operations, listing collateral and moving parameters within their hard caps, are instant. The guardian can instantly pause new deposits and new borrows; repayments, withdrawals, and collateral returns are unpausable by anyone. Parameter bounds are fixed in code: tier LTVs ±5 points from genesis, fees ±0.5, keeper bounty ≤20%, penalty ≤10%.

Risks, plainly

• The contracts carry a full fuzz and invariant test suite. Caps start conservative while the protocol is young.
• Stock tokens are issuer-burnable and pausable; USDG is issuer-freezable. This is chain-wide counterparty risk no protocol here can remove.
• USDG is assumed at par. A depeg reduces what lenders’ USDG buys; it does not break loan accounting.
• A settled loan really does cost you the penalty and bounty. Set deadlines you can make.