Welcome to The Gavel.
Gavel is a credit market on Arbitrum where interest rates are discovered, not assigned. Borrowers post Bitcoin as collateral and describe the loan they want. Lenders compete in an open auction to offer the best terms. The lowest repayment wins. There are no oracles, no utilisation curves, and no governance vote that decides what your loan should cost — only the market clearing in front of you. Active positions trade on a secondary marketplace, so capital is not locked once committed.
Standard DeFi lending uses utilisation curves — interest-rate formulas the protocol authors chose — that produce whatever the formula gives you. Standard liquidations rely on price oracles, which add a trust dependency and an attack surface the lending contract cannot remove. Gavel inverts both. Lenders set rates by bidding against each other; the rate is a market clearing rather than a curve evaluation. Defaults are settled by the contract terms agreed at origination, not by an oracle-triggered liquidator. The protocol has no opinion about the value of your collateral. Its lenders do — that is what they bid on.
The protocol is three things: a credit market (loans against collateral, auction-priced), a secondary marketplace (live positions trade as NFTs), and a data product (yield curves, credit surfaces, and indicators derived from completed auctions). v2 adds Spot — a slot-cleared spot exchange — and unifies asset state under a vault account model, so that one account holds your loans, your bids, your spot balances, and your positions for sale. v1 is live now; v2 is scheduled for Q1 2027.
Gavel runs the venue and publishes the data. AI agents — yours, ours, or a third party's, via the Model Context Protocol — read that data and advise you. The protocol itself never advises, never custodies funds it has not been signed into, and never moves your capital without your signature. Every state-changing action begins with a transaction you sign. Read this page for the longer version of what that means in practice.