Risk disclosure
What can go wrong
Every limit of the product, stated in one place rather than scattered through the marketing.
Yield can stop, and then so does the repayment
A self-repaying loan repays itself at the speed the collateral earns, and no faster. If the yield rate goes to zero your debt stops shrinking. It does not grow — Pillar charges no interest and nothing accrues against you — but it does not disappear either. Any estimate of time-to-zero on the dashboard is a projection from the current rate, not a promise.
The collateral market closes; your loan does not
A tokenized equity tracks a market that shuts on Friday afternoon and does not reopen until Monday. Your loan stays live every second in between. On Monday that stock can open well below Friday's close on an earnings miss or an overnight headline, with no window in which anyone could have traded out of the way.
There is no mechanism that removes this — not a faster oracle and not a dynamic curve. The only honest response is to lend less against it, which is why maximum loan-to-value sits at 30–50% depending on the market and why a broad ETF is allowed more than a single company. Conservative limits reduce the risk. They do not remove it.
Liquidation is partial, but it is real
When a position becomes unhealthy, the contract computes the smallest repayment that restores it to health and reverts any liquidation attempting to seize more. You lose a slice, not the position. That is a constraint enforced in the contract rather than a policy we promise to follow — but you can still lose part of your collateral, and a large enough gap can move a healthy position to an unhealthy one between blocks.
Your health factor, current loan-to-value, and the percentage the price would have to fall before liquidation are shown continuously on the dashboard.
Oracles can go stale
When a price feed is stale, Pillar blocks new borrows and collateral withdrawals, because those are the actions that could exploit a wrong number. Repayment, deposits, and the yield harvest are never blocked — a user should never be locked out of making their own position safer. The cost of this is that borrowing may be unavailable for a period you did not choose.
Smart contract and counterparty risk
Pillar is software. Bugs in the protocol, in the yield source it routes collateral to, in the oracle it reads, or in the token contracts themselves can cause loss. The USDG you borrow comes from a treasury the protocol holds; borrowing depends on that treasury having a balance. Yield depends on an external venue continuing to produce it.
The protocol is in open beta. Start with small amounts. See also the terms and the documentation.