The Gavel Protocol is permissionless, oracle-free settlement infrastructure. BTC-collateralised lending — rates discovered by competitive auction, settled by the contracts — is live and audited on Arbitrum mainnet today. v2, which generalises it into a shared vault substrate with spot and open composition, is running on testnet ahead of its own audit.
Deployed on Arbitrum One and Sherlock-audited (April 2026). Borrower-initiated, BTC-collateralised loans: a borrower posts wrapped BTC and opens a reverse-Dutch auction; lenders compete to fund it; the winning rate settles on-chain. A position-NFT marketplace lets lenders trade loans before maturity. This is what you use on mainnet today.
Use v1 on mainnet →Running on Arbitrum Sepolia, not yet audited and not on mainnet. v2 is the substrate redesign: a shared vault layer with credit and spot primitives, unified accounts, and an open composition surface anyone can build on — everything the roadmap below describes. It ships as a sibling deployment beside v1, then enters its own audit cycle before mainnet.
Preview v2 on testnet →The Gavel Protocol is autonomous code deployed on Arbitrum — no operating entity, no protocol treasury, no token, no governance. Today, v1 provides borrower-initiated BTC-collateralised credit. v2 — on testnet — generalises this into a shared vault layer that custodies balances as persistent accounts, with a credit primitive that borrows against them and a spot primitive that exchanges them. Anyone can use it. Anyone can build on it. The protocol extracts nothing from either.
Post collateral and borrow at auction-discovered rates, or lend and trade against those balances. No account, no KYC at the protocol layer, no permission required.
The primitives are open. Deploy your own orchestrator, vault, or composition product on top of them without asking, without a revenue share, without coordination.
A 2-of-3 multisig held personally by the author exists solely for emergency pause. It holds no economic functions. No admin can move user funds, change rates, or extract value.
How a Gavel auction works — from posted collateral to a market-discovered rate.
A borrower posts collateral and opens an auction: the amount they want to borrow, the duration, and the maximum rate they'll accept.
Lenders bid to fund the loan, each offer improving the rate. Competition, not an algorithm, sets the price. The best offer wins.
The contracts settle the loan and record the winning rate on-chain — one more point on the Bitcoin yield curve. Repay on time and reclaim your collateral.
No price oracle decides your fate. No algorithm guesses your rate. The market speaks, and the contracts settle it.
Illustrative curve. Faint regions indicate rate tenors the market has not yet discovered.
Every completed auction produces a data point: the rate the market actually charged for a loan at a given duration. Plot them all and you get the Bitcoin yield curve — the crypto equivalent of the Treasury curve, showing what credit costs when the market decides rather than an algorithm.
Traditional finance has SOFR and Treasury yields. Crypto had no benchmark, no reference rate. Gavel's curve is derived entirely from the protocol's own auctions — no oracle anywhere in the chain — built from real transactions and verifiable on-chain.
These are not aspirations that a governance vote could revoke. They are architectural — the functions that would break them do not exist in the code.
Neither the credit nor the spot primitive has a fee parameter. There is no on-chain mechanism by which the protocol extracts value from its users.
User funds live in open-source, non-upgradeable vault contracts. No party — not the author, not any multisig — has the technical capability to reach them.
Anyone who can send an on-chain transaction can use it, build on it, run a keeper, or index its data. No KYC at the protocol layer, no geographic restriction.
Rates and prices come from Gavel’s own auctions, never external feeds. Nothing to manipulate, and the most authentic market data available.
The layer above the primitives is open to everyone. Gavel builds reference implementations; it neither prevents nor taxes the alternatives anyone else builds.
The substrate is durable and changes rarely. The products on it are diverse and evolve freely.
Reverse-Dutch auctions for BTC-collateralised loans, plus a position-NFT marketplace. In production and Sherlock-audited.
The vault layer plus the credit and spot primitives, the auction orchestrator, position NFTs, and the marketplace — on one shared substrate. Live on Arbitrum Sepolia for integration testing; not yet audited and not on mainnet. Ships as a sibling deployment beside v1, not an upgrade.
Trustless native BTC as collateral via an EigenLayer AVS, exposed through the same vault interface. Gated by a decision point after v2 has run on mainnet.
v1 stays immutable and goes cold as its loans mature; v2 deploys beside it; the indexer presents a unified view. No migration, no forced cutover.
Designs the protocol publishes so anyone can build. Some Gavel may build; many it won't; several will only ever exist if the wider ecosystem builds them.
A worked example of the substrate's reach: a BTC-collateralised, term-structured dollar unit that could be issued natively on Gavel by composing the credit and spot primitives with the BOND design — modifying no core contract. It is the kind of product a crypto-native issuer could build; whether it is ever built is conditional on protocol volume, demand, and regulatory gating. It is not a Gavel or Aletheia product.
The open-source Solidity contracts, deployed addresses, and the direct-access guide. Interact with the protocol directly — no frontend required.
The Gavel Protocol on GitHub →Integration guide, auction lifecycle, the v2 architecture and roadmap, and the full contract reference for building on the primitives.
Read the developer docs →The Sherlock collaborative audit of v1 (April 2026), plus the internal security reviews. Read the report and the security model.
View the Sherlock audit →Use the protocol on mainnet, watch it run on testnet, or read the contracts that settle it.