Code-Enforced Lending: The Bitcoin Liquidity Idea CeFi Never Could Reach
On Diigo The browser signed out at some point between earlier sessions and now. Once you sign back in to @moneyprotocol on Diigo, I can drive the post. The content + tags + URL target are ready in 2026-05-18-web2-diigo-cross-post.md.
When you set the 2022 CeFi cycle next to the self-custodial Bitcoin-backed borrowing protocols shipping in 2026, what's striking is not the difference in outcomes. It's the difference in what they're built out of. CeFi lending was built out of trust. Trust the lender to hold your Bitcoin. Trust the lender to lend it sensibly. Trust the lender to be solvent when you want it back. Trust the lender's risk team to spot a credit cycle turning before it consumes the deposit pool. The depositor's right to recover their coins was a contractual claim, enforceable in court eventually, but worth whatever the bankruptcy estate ended up containing. The structural alternative — what the category has been quietly building since the rubble of 2022 — is lending built out of code. The holder doesn't trust the operator. The holder doesn't need to. The collateral lives in a smart contract whose rules are public and whose execution is deterministic. The operator can't move the collateral outside those rules even if they wanted to, because they don't have the keys. There is no operator balance sheet that holds the collateral, so there is no operator bankruptcy that can capture it. Same demand. Same broad use case. Radically different substrate. Money Protocol is one of the concrete implementations of this design. A holder opens a vault — a self-custodial smart-contract position controlled by the holder's keys. Bitcoin sits in the vault as collateral. The protocol lets the holder mint BPD, a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin, against the collateral at a one-time issuance fee. The borrowed BPD carries zero ongoing interest. When the holder repays, the smart contract releases the Bitcoin. There is no Money Protocol lending desk. There is no Money Protocol balance sheet holding customer Bitcoin. There is no credit book underneath the loan that the protocol has to keep solvent. The "loan" exists between the holder and a smart contract — and the smart contract is the only counterparty in the relationship. This is what code-enforced lending actually means. Not "better risk management." Not "more transparent counterparties." A different category, with a different failure surface that's bounded by the math of the collateralization ratio rather than by the credit decisions of an opaque operator. For Bitcoin holders who lived through the 2022 cycle and want to access dollar liquidity against their position without rebuilding the failure mode that took down the last lending category, the answer is structural, not behavioral. Bitcoin Liquidity — Borrow BTC at 0% Interest is the most direct way to access it. The CeFi category never could reach this. It couldn't because the substrate it was built on — pooled custody, yield-driven redeployment, contractual claims — produces a specific failure mode under stress, and that failure mode is the substance of the category. Removing the failure mode would have removed the category. Code-enforced lending is what the category should always have been. It just took until the substrate caught up.