Borrowing on MLKY

MLKY lets you unlock USDC liquidity from your graded trading cards without selling them. Each loan is a fixed-term, fixed-rate contract secured by the card itself: you set up the loan, take the cash, and repay on time to get the card back.

If you reach maturity without the cash, that is not immediately the end of it. You can extend — settle the interest you owe, pay down at least 10% of the principal, and start a fresh term on a smaller loan — up to three times, and only if a fresh appraisal still supports the reduced principal. Extending is a way out of a bad week rather than a repayment plan, and the page on extending a loan is deliberately blunt about what it costs and when it will be refused. If you neither repay nor extend, the card goes to auction.

When borrowing on MLKY makes sense

Borrowing here is a good fit when you:

• Want short-term liquidity without realizing capital gains or losing exposure to a card you believe will appreciate.
• Have a clear repayment plan within the loan term — these are not perpetual loans, and there is no interest-only option.
• Are comfortable with the possibility that, in the worst case, the card is sold to repay the lender — with whatever is left over coming back to you.

It is not a good fit when:

• You don't have a credible path to repay before the maturity date plus the pool's grace period.
• You expect the card's price to drop significantly during the loan and would prefer to sell now.
• You need to redeem or move the underlying physical card during the loan window. While the loan is open, the on-chain NFT is locked by the protocol — and since the issuer redeems the physical card only against that NFT, you effectively cannot pull the card from the issuer's vault until the loan is closed.

What you get from a MLKY loan

The actual headline number depends on three things: the fair market value (FMV) the oracle assigns to your card, the maximum loan-to-value (LTV) of the pool you borrow from, and the principal cap that pool applies to any single card.

For example, a card priced by the oracle at $1,000, in a pool offering 70% LTV with a $5,000 per-card cap, can secure up to $700 of USDC. Repayment is the principal plus the fixed interest accrued for the chosen term.

Costs at a glance

There are two fee components a borrower will see:

• Interest — fixed annual percentage rate (APR) per term, set by the pool. The interest amount is locked in at draw time and does not vary with how quickly you repay.
• Origination fee — a small percentage of the interest amount, withheld from the disbursement. The maximum allowed by the protocol is 5%, with a typical default of 2%.

There is no late fee in the loan accounting. After maturity plus the grace period, the loan defaults rather than continuing to accrue penalty interest. See default and liquidation for what that means in practice.

If you extend, you pay the interest you owe in full plus a fresh origination fee on the renewed term, and nothing else — there is no extension fee, no rollover fee and no penalty layered on top. See extending a loan.

What can go wrong

The biggest risk is straightforward: if you neither repay nor extend before maturity plus the grace period, you lose the card. Extending buys time but does not remove this: it needs cash on the day and a fresh appraisal that still supports the loan, and you only get three. Specifically:

• Once the grace window closes, the protocol admin can put the card up for sale. That is not your decision and not on a clock you control. Your lender cannot take the card — MLKY runs the sale and the lender is repaid in cash.
• Until the loan defaults, you cannot transfer or sell the NFT — it's locked under the protocol's on-chain authority. And because the issuer redeems the physical card only against the NFT, you effectively can't pull the physical card from the issuer's vault either.
• The interest is fixed: even if you repay one day after drawing, you owe the full term interest. There's no early-repayment discount.

What you keep if it does go wrong. A default is not a total loss of the card's value:

• You can repay until the card actually sells, not just until the sale opens. Repaying at any point gets the card back on the original terms.
• The money above your loan is yours. The card sells, a 5% commission comes off the sale price, your lender is paid principal then interest, and the remainder is recorded as a credit you claim. Your own claim never expires — the claim path does not check the clock at all. What happens at twelve months is that the protocol gains a competing right to sweep the credit, and from then on whichever transaction lands first wins. So claim well before twelve months, not because you lose the right, but because after that the money stops being reliably yours.
• You will be told before anything sells, and told again within 10 days afterwards with what it sold for and what you are owed.

The one case where you get nothing back is a card that finds no buyer even at your loan's principal — there are no proceeds to distribute.

The full risk register is on the Risks page, and the mechanics are in default and liquidation.

Read next

• The loan lifecycle — every step of a loan from quote to close.
• Terms and fees — the concrete numbers.
• Extending a loan — renewing instead of repaying, and the three limits on it.
• Default and liquidation — what happens when a loan isn't repaid.