The Bitcoin Yield Curve

The market has not yet discovered this curve

There is no Bitcoin yield curve to publish today. The protocol is live on Arbitrum and the market is open, but only 14 auctions have settled, with 11 loans currently active. A curve needs enough settled auctions across enough tenors before a fitted line means anything, and we would rather show you nothing than a shape drawn through too few points.

This page publishes the curve the moment the market produces one. Everything below — how the rate is discovered, why there is no oracle, how the fit works — is true now and is why the number will be worth reading when it arrives.

This curve is published as ASCR-BTC

The Bitcoin rate has a name, a permanent methodology URL and a revision policy: ASCR-BTC, an instance of the Auction-Settled Credit Rate (ASCR) family. Cite it, chart it or republish it freely, with attribution — there is no licence to negotiate.

How the curve is built

A borrower posts Bitcoin (WBTC) as collateral and describes the loan they want: an amount in USDC, a duration, and the most they are willing to repay. Lenders then compete in an open auction, bidding the rate down. The auction closes, the loan settles on-chain, and that settlement is one point: a real rate, at a real tenor, that two parties actually agreed to.

Collect enough of those points and you have a term structure. The canonical curve bins settled auctions into standard tenors and fits a log-quadratic through the bin midpoints — rate = β₀ + β₁·ln(d) + β₂·ln(d)² — which captures normal, inverted and humped shapes naturally in log-duration space. Tenors with no underlying auction return null rather than an extrapolated guess.

No oracle, no algorithm, no committee

Every other rate in crypto credit is set by a formula. Utilisation-curve protocols compute the rate from how much of a pool is borrowed — a parameter chosen by governance, not a price discovered by anyone. Oracle-dependent protocols import an external price feed and liquidate against it, which makes the feed itself a risk. Neither produces a term structure, because neither has terms: the rate floats and the loan has no maturity.

Gavel has fixed terms and no oracle in the loan lifecycle. The rate comes from competitive bidding, and the loan runs to maturity without a price feed to trigger against. That is what makes a curve possible here and not elsewhere: there are discrete maturities, and the rate at each one was discovered rather than computed.

What this curve is not

It is not deep. It currently rests on 11 settled auctions. A benchmark earns its authority from volume and continuity, and this one is early. Treat it as what it is: the honest output of a young market, published as it stands.

It is not a risk-free rate, despite the temptation to read it as one. It is the rate at which over-collateralised Bitcoin credit cleared, including whatever the market prices for smart-contract risk, collateral volatility and the borrower's option to walk away. It is not a quote, not an offer, and not a rate you can transact at by reading this page — it is a record of what already happened.

Where a tenor shows no rate, the market has not discovered it. We do not interpolate across gaps or extend the curve past the longest settled loan.

Every point is a transaction

The curve is derived, not asserted. The auctions behind it settle on Arbitrum and are verifiable independently of anything on this page — the protocol is permissionless and open-source, and the contracts are public. The same data is available over the API and to AI agents over the Model Context Protocol.