I bet a lot of the monkeys here on ET do that without even knowing. It's called margin lending and when you borrow a hard to borrow highflyer, you bet you'll pay double digit returns.thing is those returns talked about are very high, so someone gotta be paying for that, I can't think of why would someone legit be paying 2-digit yield to borrow tokens
Guess what the stock owner gets? Right, nothing. Compare that to Celsius where the stock (crypto) owner at least gets breadcrumps.
To anyone who is suspícious of high rates despite the low risk free rate:
Those two have nothing to do with each other. You can very well offer 15% p.a. when the bull market is pumping and carry pays 30%. The difference is that in a bull market the business works like commercial banking. Because you can hedge your interest rates in the open market, you don't have a duration mismatch. You borrow for 10% fixed term 6 months and hedge your epxosure right away with futures, same term, at 28%.
But now that the carry is basically nonexistent, you should lower your rates to a point where you know that margin traders will pay above your borrowing rate...which they did not. And they wanted to sit it out...and then the defaults came.
There isn't an active interest rate swap market in crypto yet. If there was, that could have been used to hedge the duration mismatch
