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What Taper is
A lending market on Solana where a falling price turns your collateral into dollars a band at a time, instead of liquidating it all at once.
Taper lends USDC against SOL, JitoSOL and NVDAx on Solana. What sets it apart is what happens when the price falls.
The short version
On most lending markets a loan is fine until the price crosses one line. Then a liquidator repays part of the debt and takes a slice of the collateral, plus a bonus, all at once.
On Taper, your collateral is spread over a range of price bands below today's price. If the price falls into that range, each band it passes through sells its collateral for USDC, a little under the market, and keeps the dollars. If the price comes back up, the band buys the collateral back. The loan stays open the whole time.
That conversion is soft liquidation. It comes from Curve's LLAMMA, the market maker behind crvUSD and Curve Lend, rebuilt for Solana: every band of a market lives in one account, and prices come from Pyth in the same transaction that uses them.
A loan, start to finish
An example on the SOL market's terms. The prices are illustrative; the limits are the market's own.
You deposit 100 SOL while SOL trades at $182.40 and choose 25 bands. Your range starts 15% under the price, at $155.04, and steps down 1% per band to $120.59. The most you can borrow is $10,032, 55% of the collateral's value. You borrow 9,000 USDC.
- SOL drifts between $160 and $190. Nothing happens. Your bands sit below the price.
- SOL falls to $140. About ten of your 25 bands have sold their SOL. You hold roughly 59 SOL and 6,000 USDC in your bands, and still owe 9,000 USDC.
- SOL climbs back to $170. The bands buy the SOL back on the way up, each a little above the price. You end with a little under 100 SOL.
- SOL falls through $120.59 and keeps going. Every band is now dollars: about 13,700 USDC against your 9,000 debt. The loan is still healthy, because the dollars cover it.
What Taper does not do
- It does not make falls free. Each band sells a little under the market and buys back a little over it. A price that chops inside your range for days costs you on every pass, and the app shows the running total.
- It does not protect you from a gap. If the price jumps past your bands in one step, as a stock can at the open or a staked token in a depeg, those bands sell at the new price. If health falls below zero, the loan is liquidated.
- It does not hold your funds outside the program. Collateral and USDC sit in the program's own vaults and move only through its instructions. The market admin can open NVDAx trading sessions and recenter an empty market; no instruction lets anyone move funds or change a market's limits.
Where to go next
The app lives at /app, with Borrow, Lend and Markets. It connects to Solana wallets that support the Wallet Standard, such as Phantom, Solflare and Backpack.
If you build on Taper, start with the program and the SDK. If you want to run arbitrage or liquidations, read Keepers.