MakerDAO Halts Lending to Tokenized Credit Pool After $2 Million Default

The DeFi protocol’s community voted to decrease the debt ceiling to the beleaguered tokenized credit pool to zero.

Stablecoin issuer MakerDAO will stop additional lending to a Harbor Trade tokenized credit pool on the Centrifuge protocol, following a unanimous community vote that concluded on Thursday.

The votes were on a proposal to decrease the debt ceiling for the Harbor Trade Credit pool to zero, effectively halting any further lending.

According to a post on Maker’s governance forum, Harbor Trade had minted $1.5 million worth of DAI stablecoins and secured them $2.1 million worth of loans made to a single borrower.

The borrower in question is an unnamed consumer electronics company, which defaulted on its loan obligations to Harbor Trade in April. 

“We have spoken to Harbor Trade to learn more about the causes behind this default as well as their strategy for recovering value moving forward,” explained a member of Maker’s Strategic Finance (SF) core unit in the protocol’s Real World Asset report published earlier this year.

The Harbor team stated that they were optimistic about receiving a full or meaningful recovery, but believes the process could take longer than six months.

Although Harbor committed to voluntarily wind down the vault, a 7 million debt ceiling that was in place led to concerns about the risk of potentially increasing exposure to it.

 Moreover, a member of the SF core unit pointed out that the pool did not have enough turnover to generate a statistically significant default rate, and was generally higher risk in nature, to further arguments in favor of decreasing the debt ceiling to zero.