Pillar is live on Robinhood Chain mainnet. Nine markets are open: AAPL, SPY, QQQ, NVDA, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, META and TSLA, each one a real Robinhood Stock Token, each one priced by a Chainlink feed on the same chain. You can deposit a Stock Token, borrow USDG against it at a conservative loan to value, and never pay interest. All of that works today. What does not work today is the part of the pitch that makes Pillar interesting: the yield that repays the loan. Right now it is zero, and the app says so in plain text.
Here is why. A self-repaying loan needs the collateral to earn something while it sits in the protocol. On other chains that means lending the collateral out, or staking it, or parking it in a vault that does one of those. On Robinhood Chain there is no venue yet that pays a yield on Stock Tokens. Nobody lends AAPL to anybody. So Pillar's yield source holds your collateral in a custody vault that does nothing except hold it, one to one, and reports a yield of zero, because that is what it earns.
We could have hidden this. The obvious move is to print an estimated rate on the landing page, something like the rate that a stock lending desk might pay, and let the number do the marketing. The app would look finished and the loans would look like they were repaying themselves. They would not be, and the first person to check the time to zero column against their actual debt would find out. We would rather you find out from us.
What you get from Pillar today, honestly described, is a loan against your stocks with no interest, no maturity, and no repayment schedule, from a protocol that charges nothing while the yield is zero, because its only fee is a share of yield. The debt does not shrink on its own yet. It also does not grow. If you have a reason to want USDG without selling AAPL, that is a real product, and it is the one that is live.
The yield source is a single contract that the protocol can swap without touching positions. The day a stock lending venue opens on Robinhood Chain, the custody vault gets replaced with a vault that earns, and every open position starts repaying itself from that block. We will write that post when it happens. This is the post for now.