Overview
FluidTokens is a lending and borrowing platform that lets you earn interest on your tokens, take out loans backed by tokens or NFTs you hold, and rent or stake assets to put them to work. It suits both casual holders chasing passive income and active traders who need short-term cash without selling their holdings. Lenders set their own terms — interest rate, who can borrow, what counts as collateral — instead of accepting a single pool's defaults.
The protocol launched on Cardano in 2022 and now spans Cardano and Bitcoin, run by FT Labs GmbH alongside FluidDAO, the project's community governance organization established in Switzerland. It groups several products under one roof — multi-pool lending and borrowing, peer-to-peer NFT-backed loans, asset rentals, boosted staking, and the Aquarium fee-payment protocol — all non-custodial, meaning your wallet stays in control of your funds1.
Key Features
- Pick the loan that fits. Choose multi-pool lending for instant loans against tokens, or peer-to-peer markets for larger or longer-term loans backed by NFTs and other assets — borrowers and lenders match directly on Cardano1.
- Set your own lending terms. Create a pool, then decide the interest rate, accepted collateral, and which borrowers qualify. Institutions can use shared wallets that need multiple approvals to manage their deposits, and the contract handles repayments and liquidations on its own1.
- Earn from idle tokens and NFTs. Asset holders can rent out utility tokens, metaverse items, or NFT memberships to other users for a fee, turning collectibles and unused tokens into yield-generating assets1.
- Boosted staking on top of regular rewards. Borrow staking power against your ADA to earn extra yield, gain governance voting weight, or qualify for new-project token launches that reward stakers — all without unstaking. Anastasia Labs audited the contracts behind this2.
- Bitcoin lending without a bridge. FluidTokens has also launched lending directly on Bitcoin itself, with native support for newer Bitcoin-based asset types (Ordinals, BRC-20, Runes) — so your funds never leave the Bitcoin network or get handed to a third-party custodian1.
What to Expect
You launch the app from fluidtokens.com and connect a wallet — any of the major Cardano wallets like Eternl, Lace, Yoroi, or Nami, plus Xverse or Unisat for Bitcoin. Once connected, the dashboard shows your positions across the products, total value at work, and any active loans.
Lending takes a few minutes: pick a pool, deposit tokens, and you start earning. Borrowing means selecting collateral from your wallet, choosing how much you want, and accepting the loan terms shown on screen. NFT-backed peer-to-peer loans add a step — you list your NFT and wait for a lender to fund the offer, similar to posting an item on a marketplace and waiting for a buyer.
The platform is non-custodial — every action is a signed transaction that runs on a public smart contract — and the lending, renting, boosted-staking, and Aquarium contracts each have third-party audit reports from Vacuumlabs or Anastasia Labs that you can read end to end23. Tracking sites like DefiLlama publish FluidTokens' total value locked, fees, and active loans alongside other Cardano lending protocols, so you can compare it to peers before committing capital4.
