The idea in 30 seconds
CoinCage is a pawnshop for crypto. That is the whole product. Everything else is detail.
You hand your coins to a locked vault and we send you cash the same day. You repay over a few months and your coins come back whole. If you never repay, the coins are sold once to cover what you owe, and whatever is left is returned to you the same day.
Nobody stands in the middle. No banker, no clerk, no company holding your coins. The vault is a computer program on a public blockchain that follows the written rules in this file, and nothing else.
The promise on the wall
Your crypto, locked. Your cash, unlocked. And the upside is always yours: if your coins double while locked, that growth is yours the day you repay.
The words you need
Eight terms, each in one sentence. This is all the jargon in the entire file.
The four moves
Every loan follows the same four steps, start to finish.
| Coin | Max LTV | Interest | Term |
|---|---|---|---|
 Bitcoin BTC | 60% | 2.0% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 Ethereum ETH | 55% | 2.5% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 Solana SOL | 50% | 3.0% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 XRP XRP | 50% | 3.0% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 BNB BNB | 60% | 3.0% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 Dogecoin DOGE | 40% | 3.5% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 Avalanche AVAX | 40% | 3.5% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 Chainlink LINK | 40% | 3.5% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 Litecoin LTC | 45% | 3.0% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
 USD Coin USDC | 90% | 1.0% / month | 3, 6 or 12 months |
Illustrative concept rates. Max LTV updates live from the same numbers shown on the website. Repay early with no exit fee, always.
The rules the vault follows
This is the smart contract, in plain English. Twelve rules. The vault knows nothing else.
The safety area
Crypto falls hard and often. The design question is not "if" but "how much room do we give the storm before anything happens."
Every loan gets a large safety area: the size of the drop the loan survives untouched. We sized the area from one question: how far does this coin historically fall in a bad season? The line sits at 95%, because a sale must always cover the debt, the interest owed, selling costs and fees, with room to spare.
The sizing formula
Healthy max LTV ≈ (1 − tolerated drop) × 95%
| If the coin routinely falls up to | Healthy max LTV |
|---|---|
| 10% | 85% |
| 20% | 76% |
| 30% | 66% |
| 40% | 57% |
| 50% | 47% |
Bitcoin's area is sized for its ~30-35% storms (60% LTV), Ethereum's slightly tighter (55%), Solana's tighter still because it falls harder (50%).
A plain example. Pledge £100,000 of Bitcoin at 60% LTV and borrow £60,000. Your loan survives the price falling to about £63,000, a 37% drop, before anything happens. Ordinary crashes, even brutal ones, pass inside the area and change nothing: no sales, no messages, no effect on the loan or your upside.
Why one big line instead of many small sales. Coins sold at the bottom cannot enjoy the bounce. The bigger the area, the more dips you ride out untouched. We deliberately chose the biggest area the maths allows, so a sale only ever happens in a storm bigger than anything the coin normally does, and even then it happens once: sold, settled, leftover returned the same day.
The Bounce-Back ticketthe second chanceplanned, later stage
Liquidation is the worst day, and one day there will be a ticket for it. Not part of the launch product: fully designed and priced, shelved until the numbers are stress-tested. When it arrives it will be an optional extra, never a requirement.
What you buy at signing: a prepaid ticket (illustrative: 1.5% of the loan). You can pay it from your coins or by card.
What it does: if a sale ever happens, your ticket gives you 90 days to buy the whole pledge back at the exact price it sold for. Pay the stamped price, get your coins back. If they have recovered, the recovery is yours. If they have not, you simply do nothing and lose nothing beyond the ticket. A right, never a duty.
A worked example
| Moment | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 0 | Pledge 1 BTC at £100,000. Borrow £60,000 at 60% LTV. Ticket: £900. |
| The storm | Bitcoin falls 37%, past the safety area. The line is hit at about £63,000. |
| The sale | The pledge sells once for £63,200. Debt (£60,000), interest and costs are settled. The leftover, about £1,700, returns to you the same day. The price £63,200 is stamped on-chain. |
| Days 1-89 | The market recovers to £90,000. You pay the stamped price £63,200 and receive 1 BTC back, worth £90,000. |
| The result | You are whole again. Your total cost for surviving a 37% crash: £900. |
| If it never recovered | You do nothing. The ticket expires quietly at day 90. No extra cost, ever. |
How the ticket price is calculated
At the moment a sale happens, the ticket pot buys, on a professional options exchange, the right to buy your coins at the stamped price for 90 days. That right is technically called a call option, and it costs roughly 12% of the sale value for 90 days on Bitcoin. Because sales are rare inside a big safety area, one fair ticket is:
ticket ≈ (chance of a sale, ~1 in 10) × (12% of the pledge)
which lands near 1-2% of the loan. We charge 1.5% illustrative. Shorter terms make cheaper tickets: a 3-month loan has far less time to reach its line than a 12-month one, so the ticket is priced by term as well as by coin.
An honest note on pooling. The rescue option for a single sale costs real money (about £7,600 in the example above). A £900 ticket only covers it because tickets are pooled: most are never used, and the pot funds the few that are. The pot holds as long as sales stay rarer than priced, roughly 1 in 10 loans. That ratio is watched continuously, and if sales run hotter, the ticket price rises for new loans. Buying the same protection standalone, without the pool, would cost roughly 2-3x more.
The zero-risk trick, in one paragraph
Our promise to you is covered by the exact same promise we buy in the market, the moment your sale happens. If you redeem, the option we hold delivers the coins at the stamped price, you pay the stamped price, and we hand them over. Our cost is capped at the option's price, which the ticket pot paid for. We never bet, we never chase a rising market, and the worst case is the ticket pot. Never our capital, never your coins.
The choices at signing
How CoinCage makes money
All of it, honestly. If it is not on this list, we do not earn from it.
- Interest. The main engine: 1-3% per month depending on the coin, fixed at signing.
- Setup fee. 1-2% at signing. Covers checks, vault creation and origination.
- Ticket margin. The ticket is priced above the expected cost of the rescue options. Most tickets are never used; their margin pays for the ones that are.
What we do not earn from: your upside, early exits, hidden fees, or your data. And because we never hold your coins, we cannot profit from your coins' growth either. Our incentives are aligned: a loan you repay comfortably is our best outcome, by far.
Tax, in plain words
Use the value, pay no tax. That is not a slogan, it is the whole point of pawning instead of selling.
When you pawn a watch, the pawnshop's cash is not income and it is not a sale: it is a loan. Crypto works the same way when the structure is right, and the vault is built that way.
Everyone's tax position is their own, and this is not tax advice. This is the design intent of the product: the vault keeps your coins legally yours while they are locked, which is exactly why borrowing here is not a sale.
Crash protection: what history taught us
Crypto has already shown us every way this can go wrong. Each lesson below is built directly into the rules.
The history, in four events
- March 2020. Bitcoin fell about 40% in a single day during the Covid panic. The deepest one-day fall on record.
- May 2021. A ~30% intraday plunge that fully recovered the same day. Sales made at the bottom would have been pure loss.
- October 2025. A surprise tariff announcement wiped $19 billion of leveraged positions in three hours. On one exchange, "wrapped" copies of coins briefly fell 80-90% while the real coins fell 11%.
- March 2023. The USDC stablecoin wobbled to $0.87 for two days during a bank failure.
- Never trust one exchange's price. Rule 5 uses multi-exchange averages. Single-venue wicks, like the 80% ones in 2025, can never trigger a sale here.
- Never sell with human hands. Rule 7: sale orders are placed at signing, laddered across two venues. When the line is hit, execution takes seconds, not hours. The October 2025 cascade went from start to bottom in under three hours.
- Never accept exotic collateral. Only ten vetted coins: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, BNB, Dogecoin, Avalanche, Chainlink, Litecoin and USD Coin. Nothing wrapped, nothing synthetic, nothing staked.
- Insure the neighbourhood of the line. Loans close to their line, typically 10-20% of the book, are protected with put options (the mirror of a ticket: the right to sell at a preset price). We buy put spreads to keep costs low. Budget: about 5-10% of interest income.
- Cap the stablecoin book. A stablecoin depeg hits that entire book at once, and you cannot buy insurance against it. So it is capped at roughly 20% of lending, with a tighter 97% line and depeg alarms.
- Keep a reserve. A cash reserve plus a standing credit line, sized for a 30% overshoot: the worst a multi-exchange index has ever gapped.
What can go wrong, honestly
The ten things to remember
- Your coins go into a vault, not our pocket.
- Cash arrives in minutes.
- The upside is always yours.
- Big safety area: ordinary crashes change nothing.
- One line at 95%: worst case, one sale, leftover back to you the same day.
- The ticket (planned, later stage): 90 days to buy back at the stamped price.
- When tickets launch, they will fund rescue options bought the moment a sale happens. Matched, capped, no betting.
- We earn interest, a setup fee and ticket margin. Nothing hidden.
- The crash lessons of history are written into the rules.
- Every number and rule is visible on-chain, always.
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