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I’m guessing you’re talking about DeFi lending, like via Compound or AAVE, right? Totally decentralized, trustless lending. As opposed to handing your money over to a centralized exchange where they move it in a centralized, trust-required way.
These protocols work in a way where there is always MORE collateral provided than money borrowed. If you wanted to borrow $750 worth of ETH on Compound, you have to provide at least $1000 worth of USDC. While that loan is outstanding, the borrower slowly accrues fees. Eventually when the borrowed value gets too high, anyone can trigger a liquidation, where that borrower gets their USDC sold off, and they keep the borrowed ETH.
When you hear about liquidations, or collateralization ratios, this is what they’re referring to.There is no way to run off with the borrowed money because you always have more than enough collateral provided to just buy the borrowed money outright.
As a lender, you just throw USDC into the pool and get some portion of those fees that borrowers accrue. You lose control of your USDC and swap it for a new token called „cUSDC“ on compound, and „aUSDC“ on AAVE. These tokens act like a claim check where you can redeem them against the pool for the asset you provided.
There is an outside chance where _ALL_ USDC in the pool is being lent out, which would mean that you couldn’t redeem your cUSDC back for USDC until someone repaid their loan. This would be incredibly unlikely, and the protocol uses the fee structure to align incentives to keep that from happening. In a world where there was no USDC left for Compound to lend out, you would be making TONS of money by leaving yours in the pool. The APYs would be insane.
Hope this long explanation helped. When I was learning this, I found these Finematics videos to be incredibly helpful [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTp9er6S73M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTp9er6S73M)