Risks

All DeFi protocols, including Solend, come with risks, which are important to understand before depositing significant amounts of crypto. The main risks involved in using Solend are outlined here.

Smart Contract Risk

This is a risk that the Solend smart contracts get exploited to steal or permanently freeze funds. This risk is inherent to all smart contracts and can never be fully eliminated, but can be mitigated in various ways.

• Solend has undergone audits by Kudelski, Neodyme, and OSEC.

• Solend has a bug bounty program which will pay up to $1MM if a critical vulnerability is found, in order to encourage responsible disclosure rather than hacking.

The Solend smart contracts have been live on mainnet with hundreds of millions in total value locked (TVL) since 2021.

100% Utilization Risk

When an asset is fully utilized (100% of supply is lent out), there are no tokens left in the pool, which means that withdrawals and borrows will fail. Users have to wait until the utilization rate goes down, either through some users repaying their loans or depositing new funds.

A user is more likely to be affected by this if their deposit represents a large share of the pool, or if the asset has extremely high borrow demand.

Oracle Risk

Solend relies on Pyth and Switchboard for their price feeds to power liquidations. There is a risk that these oracles report incorrect prices, causing wrongful liquidations.

Liquidation Risk

Solend offers over-collateralized loans, which means loans must be backed by collateral of greater value than the loan. If the value of the collateral dips below a threshold (determined by asset LTVs), a user's position will be liquidated with a liquidation penalty.

Untimely Liquidation Risk

In the event of large-scale liquidations or market turmoil, there is a possibility that assets liquidated are unable to cover the loans taken out by the liquidated user. The shortfall "or negative balance" is treated as "bad debts". Solend manages this proactively by isolating newer or riskier tokens in Isolated Pools and managing deposit limits or collateralization ratios to keep the protocol safe.

In the past, Bad debt in main pool has been filled via top-ups from the Insurance fund, which can be found at our DAO addresses.