PRISM achieves this by refracting digital assets into two distinct parts: a yield component and a principal component.
Currently, investors in digital assets have inadequate ways to raise capital or access liquidity with their holdings. Many choose to pledge these assets as collateral to borrow against their value. Stories of mass liquidations regularly punctuate newsfeeds given typical crypto market volatility and the usual overcollateralization requirement for these secured loans.
PRISM innovates on these inefficiencies and enables users to raise liquidity instantaneously by selling their future yield for a period of their choosing and effectively borrowing against that future yield. Users no longer face any liquidation risk and can maintain a liquid instrument that can be freely traded or deployed elsewhere in DeFi.
The same principles can also be used in yield farms or liquidity pools (LPs), where returns can reach thousands of percentage points. PRISM will enable users to guarantee their yield and protect against price movements for a period of their choosing. Conversely, as people fix their interest rates, others will be able to buy the instruments created by PRISM and gain leveraged exposure to an asset’s yield or principal with no risk of liquidation.
PRISM’s mechanisms originate from the founding team’s experience in the $564 trillion interest rate and currency derivatives markets in traditional finance where participants can guarantee their returns by swapping variable yields into fixed yields or swapping future payments in one currency into another currency of their choice.
PRISM will empower DeFi users with these new instruments, and numerous other risk management and investment options, in a fully autonomous and permissionless manner.