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'We Don't Take Credit Scores'—The $60,000 Bitcoin Loan Machine

CORRECTION / A banner (designed by artists Stacey Coon, Anastasia Sultzer, and Nanu Berk) with the logo of bitcoin is seen during the crypto-currency conference Bitcoin 2021 Convention at the Mana Convention Center in Miami, Florida, on…

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"We don't take credit scores," Andrei Poliakov said in an interview at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto on July 21. His company, APX Lending, prices the loan off the coins and nothing else. "So if you have $100,000 worth of bitcoin we'll give you up to $60,000 worth of loan," he said.

"In classical lending you look at a borrower's credit score, credit history, their their ability to repay the loan. Then you validate that and you take that snapshot, you take a decision and you give them the loan, and then you kind of hope that your model works out," Poliakov said. He was one of three executives at the conference swapping the borrower's file for the borrower's collateral, a logic already rebuilding consumer credit in emerging markets with phones and solar panels.

'So No Coins For Us'

"We were the first in Canada to actually receive the securities administrators approval to offer Bitcoin and Ethereum backed lending to Canadians coast to coast," Poliakov said. The Ontario Securities Commission granted APX Inc., which trades as APX Lending, exemptive relief on April 1, 2025, on conditions covering client disclosure, appropriateness reviews and third-party custody. "Well, it wasn't it wasn't fast at all. It took us about two years," he said.

"It's insured up to $250 million. And it sits in segregated. So individual cold storage wallets," Poliakov said of collateral parked at BitGo Trust, whose crime policy is an aggregate limit rather than a per-customer promise. What the firm says it never does is lend those coins back out. "It's not reinvested. It's not it's not moved around. It's not co-mingled between different clients," he said, and the position is marked continuously: "every 15 seconds, we know exactly how much that collateral is worth."

"So I guess indirect exit to Robinhood," Poliakov said of selling his exchange Coinberry to WonderFi in 2022; Robinhood closed a CA$250 million deal for WonderFi in June. "The securities regulators in Canada don't look favorably on on coin issuances. So no coins for us," he said. Twenty minutes later APX announced a partnership with Netcoins.

'Don't Even Need To Be A Bank'

"I can make you a promise. And you know that I'm good for it. And I can't rug you and I can't pull away that value," Maximillian Schwartz said in an interview at the same conference. His company, Anvil Research Labs, works on an Ethereum protocol issuing fully collateralized digital letters of credit, enforceable without the asset changing hands. A banker told him the small ones are not worth writing: "we don't even do it for less than 500 K, because it's not even worth the operational costs to do this, right."

"Normally, you can't get a loan or a mortgage or a line of credit or any of that stuff, right, if you have crypto," he said. He puts the market at 741 million crypto owners, a figure from Crypto.com's own report; Triple-A counts closer to 560 million. What he wants to undercut is the buy now, pay later boom that prices defaults into everyone's rate. "All they're doing is risky loans, right," he said. "I can undercut all the competition. I don't even need to be a bank to be able to offer you like a buy now, pay later service."

"she was saying like the best use case of blockchain technology is for collateral management. And I'm like almost spit out my drink because I'm like, dude, this is the term I've been saying," Schwartz said of Caroline Pham, the CFTC's acting chairman until December 2025 and now at crypto firm MoonPay.

"the killer app to modernize markets and make dollars work smarter and go further," Pham wrote on X of stablecoin collateral, launching a tokenized collateral initiative at the agency. Schwartz also credits her with trillions in savings, which her published remarks do not contain.

'It's Not Very Investable'

"It's not very investable," Colin Sinclair said in an interview, his entire answer when asked to name crypto's biggest problem. Mayflower, where he is chief business officer, licenses a bonding curve that hard-codes a minimum price into a token and lets holders draw against that floor. "In other words, you have interest free non liquidated credit against any of these assets," he said.

"The problem is, is human discretion, right? That’s the problem with crypto," he said. "I could tell you what something's worth, but unless somebody is willing to buy it from me, it's not worth shit." His evidence is October 10, 2025, when roughly $19 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated in a day as Binance's USDe briefly traded near $0.65 on its own venue. "one margin collateral on one exchange goes down. There's a big drop in price. And it just nuked the entire market. Guys on 1x and 2x leverage got completely wiped out," he said.

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