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About Gearbox

Gearbox is onchain credit infrastructure for building lending and leverage products. It connects passive capital in pools with borrowers who use Credit Accounts to take positions across approved partner protocols.

The core primitive is simple: a Credit Account is a wallet with credit. It can hold collateral, borrow from a pool, and execute approved actions, while every action must keep the account solvent under protocol rules.

Gearbox started in 2021 as a protocol for DeFi investing with leverage. It then evolved through V2, V3, and V3.1 from a strategy-focused leverage product into infrastructure for purpose-built credit markets, RWA-backed debt positions, and wallet-native lending products.

The current architecture combines two goals:

  • Wallet-like UX: users or products operate through an account that can hold assets, debt, and execution routes in one place.
  • Lending-protocol efficiency: capital is supplied by pools, priced through protocol parameters, and protected by solvency checks, liquidation rules, and debt ceilings.

Two sides of the system

Pool side: passive capital

A pool is the savings product in Gearbox. Lenders deposit an asset into a pool and earn yield from interest paid by borrowers using that liquidity.

The pool does not make strategy decisions for each borrower. It allows borrowing by Credit Accounts under explicit debt ceilings. This keeps passive capital aggregated while limiting how much exposure any one market or strategy can take from the pool.

A pool is not a bank deposit or guaranteed yield product. It is an onchain lending position with protocol, market, liquidity, and liquidation risk.

Credit Account side: wallet with credit

A Credit Account is a user-controlled smart-contract account that combines collateral, debt, and approved execution routes.

Borrowers do not receive unrestricted funds. They operate inside a Credit Account. The account can interact with approved partner protocols, but each action is checked against collateral values, Liquidation Thresholds, allowed assets, and market-specific rules.

This lets a product expose a wallet-like experience while the protocol enforces credit boundaries in the background.

How capital moves

  1. Lenders deposit assets into a pool.
  2. The pool allows borrowing by Credit Accounts within configured debt ceilings.
  3. Borrowers open or use Credit Accounts.
  4. Credit Accounts deploy borrowed liquidity into approved strategies or products.
  5. Borrowers pay interest back to the pool.
  6. Solvency checks and liquidation rules protect the pool when a Credit Account becomes unsafe.

What this enables

For lenders, Gearbox turns a pool into a passive lending product. The lender does not need to choose every borrower or strategy manually, while risk remains bounded by market configuration.

For borrowers, Gearbox turns leverage into an account-level credit line. The borrower can use capital inside a Credit Account without repeatedly moving assets through separate lending, trading, and strategy interfaces.

For curators and builders, Gearbox provides the infrastructure to create specialized credit products. A market can define supported assets, debt ceilings, rates, oracle rules, and liquidation parameters for a specific use case.

Where to go next