We are glad to add Granite to the Borrow on Bitcoin DeFi Rate Index. Granite is a Bitcoin liquidity protocol on Stacks, a Bitcoin layer-2, where you post sBTC as collateral and borrow USDCx stablecoins against it. With Granite included the index now tracks 11 protocols, and Granite arrives with the lowest variable borrow rate of any market we cover.
It is a genuinely interesting addition, and not only for the rate. Granite has built deliberately around the borrower: liquidations that take the minimum rather than the maximum, collateral that is never lent onward, alerts before trouble arrives, and a full liquidation history anyone can read. Those are choices, not defaults, and they are unusual enough onchain to be worth spelling out.
Now tracked in the DeFi Rate Index
A Bitcoin liquidity protocol on the Stacks Bitcoin L2. Post sBTC, borrow stablecoins, no repayment schedule and no margin calls.
- Stacks Bitcoin L2
- sBTC collateral
- USDCx borrow
- Zero rehypothecation
- 50% max LTV
- 65% liquidation LTV
What Granite is
Granite is incubated by Trust Machines, the product studio behind Stacks, and built on the Stacks Bitcoin L2. It runs a single isolated market: you deposit sBTC, a token backed 1:1 by Bitcoin and settled on the Bitcoin blockchain, and borrow USDCx, a dollar stablecoin, without selling your Bitcoin. There is no application, no credit check, no repayment schedule, and no company holding your collateral. We cover the mechanics, the collateral and rehypothecation model, the liquidation design and the audit history in our Granite review.
Two things separate it from most of the index. The first is the chain and the collateral: the majority of markets we track run on EVM chains and take wrapped Bitcoin such as cbBTC or wBTC, where the peg depends on a custodian holding the underlying. Granite runs on Stacks and takes sBTC, whose 1:1 peg is secured through a threshold-signature arrangement on Bitcoin itself. It is the second Bitcoin layer-2 market in our index, after Zest.
The second is what happens when a position goes underwater.
Liquidate to maintenance
A liquidator can only take what is needed to bring the position back under the liquidation LTV. Many protocols permit 50–100% of a position to be closed in one event.
No rehypothecation
Deposited sBTC is not lent onward or reused. It sits in the isolated market, so a borrower is not exposed to the riskiest asset in a shared pool.
Position alerts
Configurable Telegram notifications fire as LTV approaches the liquidation threshold. That is unusual onchain, where most protocols expect you to watch your own position.
Liquidations on the record
Every liquidation is recorded onchain and readable from public dashboards, so the protocol’s history can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The liquidation design is the part worth dwelling on, because it is where onchain lending usually hurts most, and it is where Granite has done its best work. On many protocols a liquidator may close between half and all of a position in a single event, so a brief price wick can cost far more collateral than the shortfall ever warranted. Granite restricts each liquidation to the amount needed to bring the position back below its liquidation LTV, and nothing beyond it. For the same nominal LTV that is a materially better outcome for the borrower, and it is enforced in contract rather than promised in policy.
The Telegram alerts deserve a mention too. Most protocols simply expect you to watch your own position around the clock; being told your LTV is drifting toward the threshold, in time to add collateral or repay, is the kind of small practical courtesy that onchain lending has largely skipped.
Where it sits in the range
Variable USDC borrow rate, by protocol
Every permissionless market in our DeFi Rate Index, cheapest first. Granite enters at the bottom of the range.
Measured 29 July 2026. DeFi rates are variable and move with pool utilization, so these are a snapshot rather than quotes. A low rate is not a safety ranking, and the index is weighted by market size, so the cheapest market is not necessarily the largest.
Our DeFi Rate Index tracks the variable rate to borrow USDC against Bitcoin across permissionless protocols, snapshotted daily and weighted by each market's supplied size. Granite joins as the current floor of that range at roughly 1.65% variable APR, against a top end near 7.4%.
It barely moves the average, and the arithmetic is worth stating plainly rather than hand-waving: Granite's tracked market is about $5.0M of roughly $7.45B in total index size, or 0.067%. Adding it shifts the weighted average from 4.513% to 4.511%, about a fifth of a basis point. We checked that before listing it, because a protocol large enough to step-change an index that we invite people to cite would have needed a note on the methodology page explaining the discontinuity. This one does not.
Its history in the index starts on the day it was added. We do not back-fill a period a market was not listed, so the series begins at 29 July 2026 rather than reaching backwards.
The Granite figures update on their own. Utilization, supplied and borrowed amounts and the borrow rate are read from the protocol's own market data, so the numbers on the page reflect its live state rather than a fixed snapshot.
In Granite's own words
We asked Granite for a statement rather than writing their positioning for them. It appears in full, attributed, on their protocol page, including what they are building next: additional borrowing markets, incentive programs for liquidity providers and borrowers, and fixed-term markets tied to the Stacks Bitcoin Staking architecture, which would let Bitcoin be used without wrapping or bridging.
That last item is the one we will be watching most closely, and it is genuinely ambitious. Wrapping is the compromise sitting at the centre of nearly every market in this index, and a credible route around it would matter well beyond one protocol. Granite and Trust Machines are among the few teams with the Bitcoin-native footing to attempt it.
See it for yourself
Granite is live in the index from today, and it is a welcome addition to the set we track. You can see it next to every other onchain market in the DeFi Rate Index, compare the protocols side by side in the per-protocol roll-up, read the specifics in our Granite review, and go straight to the source at granite.world.
How we gather and weight these figures is set out in the DeFi methodology, and the numbers behind the index are free to reuse with attribution in our machine-readable feed.
Rates are variable and were read on 29 July 2026. DeFi borrowing carries smart-contract and liquidation risk; confirm current terms on the protocol directly before borrowing.