Grapefruit Trading Borrow Request

Grapefruit Trading is a crypto proprietary trading desk and over-the-counter trader. We are excited about TrueFi, and we are interested in borrowing 1,000,000 TUSD for 30 days at a rate of 11.5%. If the loan is a success, we will likely make larger requests in the near future.

About us
Grapefruit Trading was started in March 2018 by Mike Komaransky, an early crypto investor who previously founded Cumberland Mining. Grapefruit is a subsidiary of a larger Chicago Trading firm 4170 Trading. Grapefruit’s focus is trading a wide variety of cryptocurrencies with a specialty in trading derivatives.

Grapefruit has been an early adopter of DeFi applications and continues to spend a significant amount of time and resources participating in the ever-changing space. Although we will not disclose private information, we can share our public accomplishments:

  • We were the second Airswap OTC provider and were responsible for many of the first large trades on the platform in early 2019. Airswap built the technology for instant swap OTC trades to eliminate counterparty delivery risk.

  • Grapefruit was the first OTC desk to become a Wrapped Bitcoin merchant and has to date minted 15764.69 WBTC (~$300M) and burned 1694.5 WBTC (~$32M). Coindesk cited us in an article back in September for the surge in WBTC supply.

  • We completed the first-ever DAO OTC trade, in which the Yam treasury exchanged $250k of YFI’s yUSD token for DPI.

Grapefruit Trading LLC is registered with FinCEN as a money services business for our OTC trading.

Use of funds
At Grapefruit, we primarily put on delta-neutral trades, which means the borrowed funds will not be used to take directional exposure in any tokens (long or short). Funds are typically used in a range of spot, derivatives, and DeFi trades. Grapefruit participates in many DeFi protocols but will only allocate significant capital to those that have been thoroughly vetted and have a long history of success. As for exchange risk, we carefully considered which exchanges to store funds on. We also have internal risk limits for the exchanges we participate on to limit our risks to any one exchange.

We appreciate the community and TrueFi for reviewing this proposal. Please feel free to ask any questions, and we’ll do our best to answer them quickly and concisely.

5 Likes

@Getty thank you for your application - I’m in support.

One point of feedback though: I’d request a higher APY on your loans given that Curve.fi is often paying around 13% and that’s where un-loaned funds are kept. Thus, if you’d be able to pay somewhere in the 13-16% range I think the loan application would be more competitive.

Looking forward to hopefully having you on the platform very soon!

1 Like

I think 15-20% APY for a 30 day loan seems appropriate. Maybe once this borrower has proven themselves reliable, a lower APY might be justifiable.

3 Likes

I agree with Kenny on this

1 Like

I support this. Enhanced due diligence has been performed on this borrower request, which includes but is not limited to criminal background checks on beneficial owners and authorized signatories, sanctions screening, any regulatory actions, validation of regulatory licenses or registrations, adverse media checks and strong team experience in the crypotcurrency industry.

1 Like

Thanks for your application @Getty - you’ve got a strong background to become a whitelisted borrower, imo. I’d vote yes to approve Grapefruit as a new borrower.

That said, I agree with @rafaelcosman that the requested loan rate should ideally meet or beat what’s otherwise available to TUSD Lenders on Curve - or, in approving this loan, TrueFi users & TRU holders would actually be acting against their best possible APY. I would vote to reject the loan as requested based on proposed APY.

I’d like to see this new standard (TUSD loan APY must beat Curve APY) propagated across future loan requests.

We appreciate everyone’s support for our request. The yUSD pool, which is the only Curve pool that supports TUSD, is currently paying a dynamic rate of 11.69%. After considering everyone’s points about Curve interest rates, we will improve our rate from 11.5% to 12%. In future requests, we will look at the Curve yUSD pool’s rate as an indicative rate.

3 Likes

Hey all, going off a similar poll that Raf used for the Invictus borrow request, I’m going to propose a poll Grapefruit. We’ll use the median vote to inform how to move forward with Grapefruit. I added an option for 3mm credit limit

Grapefruit Trading
  • Yes - with unlimited credit and term to 30 days
  • Yes - but limit credit to $10mm and term to 30 days
  • Yes - but limit credit to $3mm and term to 30 days
  • Yes - but limit credit to $1mm and term to 30 days
  • Yes - but limit credit to $100k and term to 30 days
  • No - do not add the borrower to the platform at this time

0 voters

This vote is closed and we will move forward with 3mm limit

1 Like