Earn & Wealth

On a custodial exchange, Earn is a loan you make without being told the terms. Your balance moves to the platform, the platform does something with it you do not see, and what comes back is a figure it prints about itself. The mechanism is the part that goes missing. GreenX cannot borrow your collateral, because it never holds it - it sits in a vault you opened and can withdraw from without asking us.

That forces the question a custodial version gets to skip: where would the return actually come from, and who is on the other side of it? An honest answer has to be nameable - a counterparty, a fee, a position somebody is paying to keep open. We would rather ship this late with that written plainly on the page than early with a number and no sentence underneath it.

There is a second constraint particular to this venue, and it is the interesting one. Collateral here already has a job: it backs the positions you have open. So an Earn product cannot quietly assume your balance is idle. It has to be explicit about whether a balance that is earning is still a balance the margin engine can count, and about what happens to the earning side the moment a position needs it. Making that trade-off visible, and yours to choose rather than ours to decide, is most of the work. The vault and the margin accounting that reads from it are already running.