"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."
