Borrow Against Your Bitcoin Without Giving Up Your Keys

You want dollars. You do not want to sell your bitcoin. The question is whether you can borrow against coins that stay in your cold storage, with your keys still yours.

The answer, as of October 2026, is: mostly yes, with one big asterisk. Here is what actually exists, what is marketing, and what is still just a roadmap.

Hodl Hodl Lend: the live option

Hodl Hodl runs the most complete non-custodial lending market at lend.hodlhodl.com. It is peer to peer. Borrowers post offers, lenders take them, and the bitcoin collateral sits in a 2-of-3 multisig escrow. One key goes to the borrower, one to the lender, one to Hodl Hodl’s company (Hodlex Ltd) as arbiter.

The terms, from their current terms of service:

• Collateral: bitcoin only.
• Loan currencies: USDT and USDC (several chains), plus L-BTC, WBTC, and XAUT. No fiat.
• Duration: 1 to 12 months.
• Loan to value: 30 to 70 percent for stablecoin loans, up to 80 percent for bitcoin-equivalent assets.
• Interest: set by whoever creates the offer, for the whole period. The order book we checked showed established lenders offering roughly 9.5 to 17 percent APR.
• Fees: 1.5 percent origination, paid by the borrower.
• Liquidation: email margin calls at 75, 80, and 85 percent LTV, then automatic forced liquidation at 90 percent, plus a 5 percent liquidation fee.
• KYC: none. Email and password. But the United States is excluded, along with the usual sanctioned countries.

No single party can move the collateral, and nothing gets rehypothecated. That part is real. But read the asterisk: Hodlex holds the arbiter key, and its terms let it terminate any contract at its sole discretion through forced liquidation. So it is non-custodial in the normal case, not trustless. Its liability is also capped at one hundred dollars, and it can change the terms without notice.

Practical notes: you monitor your own loan to value, alerts are email only, and a flash crash can liquidate you before you react. Interest is charged for the full term even if you repay early.

More bitcoin-only P2P markets

Hodl Hodl is not alone. Four more live markets let you borrow without handing your coins to a company.

Firefish is the most established of the bunch. It matches borrowers and lenders peer to peer and locks the bitcoin in on-chain escrow, with no custodian in the middle. Loans come in euros, Swiss francs, and USDC, from 800 to 15,000 EUR, for 3 to 18 months, and you pick your rate between 6 and 13 percent. The company claims over one hundred million dollars in volume and nearly one thousand BTC in escrow, and it raised a 1.8 million dollar seed round with Braiins among the backers.

Debifi runs a 3-of-4 multisig escrow: borrower, lender, and trusted third-party signers each hold keys, generated on a separate device that Debifi never touches. Nothing gets rehypothecated. Terms run from short-term funding to five-year loans in stablecoins or fiat, with adjustable loan to value.

Lendasat is another P2P marketplace with bitcoin-only collateral in 2-of-3 multisig (borrower, lender, Lendasat as arbiter). Loan to value from 5 to 75 percent, liquidation at 90 percent, lender-set rates roughly 7 to 20 percent per year, a 1.5 percent platform fee, and no KYC advertised. It is earlier-stage than Hodl Hodl, and the company still holds one of the three keys, so the same arbiter asterisk applies.

Lava takes a different shape: self-custody dollar loans starting around 5 percent fixed, from one hundred dollars up to one billion, no credit check, and a stated no-rehypothecation policy.

The DeFi-flavored ones

Willing to leave the base chain? A few more options exist. Each comes with a bridge you have to trust.

Sovryn Zero on Rootstock has offered 0 percent interest loans against RBTC since 2023, with about a 0.5 percent origination fee, a 110 percent minimum collateral ratio, and no fixed repayment schedule. No KYC. The catch: RBTC is wrapped bitcoin via the Rootstock bridge, and its DLLR stablecoin has traded slightly under peg.

Mezo issues its MUSD stablecoin against tBTC collateral on mainnet since May 2025, at a fixed 1 to 5 percent APR starting near 1 percent, with a 0.1 percent issuance fee and a 110 percent minimum collateral ratio. No KYC, no fixed repayment. The cheapest rates we found, but tBTC is a Threshold bridge token, so bridge risk is the price of admission.

Cadena Bitcoin does P2P loans with discreet log contracts directly on the base layer: no company key, no margin calls, no in-term liquidation. Roughly 50 percent LTV for one year at 8 to 12 percent, a 1 percent fee, one thousand dollar minimum. The odd part: the contract does not disburse cash. You separately sell your own BTC, so it is a synthetic exposure model, not a real loan payout.

Liquidium is inverted: you borrow BTC against Ordinals or Runes collateral, so it only matters if you are on the lender side earning yield in bitcoin. Writz is a 2026 newcomer doing zero-knowledge private BTC-collateral USDC loans on Stellar up to 66 percent LTV, minimum 0.001 BTC. Too early to recommend.

Ark and Arkade: not lending, at least not yet

This one needs a correction, because the marketing blurs it. Hodl Hodl does use Arkade, but only on its trading platform. In May 2026 it replaced its old custodial Lightning wallet with an Arkade-based escrow: the seller’s Lightning bitcoin gets swapped into an Arkade VTXO locked to a Taproot multisig with keys split four ways (buyer, seller, Hodl Hodl, the Arkade operator). That is a genuine upgrade.

But the lending platform does not use Arkade. Its escrow is plain on-chain 2-of-3 multisig, as described above. We found no live lending or credit product running on Ark or Arkade anywhere. The closest things are developer tools: Satora’s Ark escrow SDK and its Lendaswap swaps, neither of which is a loan. Treat “Ark-based lending” as a roadmap item, not a product.

USDB on Spark: issued, but thin

USDB is a dollar token issued natively on Bitcoin through the Spark layer 2 network. The issuer is Brale, a US-regulated entity, in partnership with Flashnet and Magic Eden. It claims to be backed one to one by US Treasury bills.

Here is what we could not verify: no public supply, no market cap, no attestation or audit, no published mint or redemption terms. And there is no lending product denominated in USDB, no way to borrow it against your bitcoin. The BTC to USDB liquidity pools announced at launch are not confirmed live.

One more trap: the “USDB” you see quoted around eleven million dollars in market cap on price aggregators is an unrelated token on the Blast chain. Same ticker, different universe. There is also a separate Brazilian bank stablecoin with the same name.

The custodial crowd, for contrast

Everything else in bitcoin lending makes you send them your coins. Ledn and Arch Lending hold your bitcoin in their custody (segregated, not rehypothecated, but still their custody). APX Lending uses BitGo cold storage. The Better Mortgage and Coinbase bitcoin mortgage goes further and can rehypothecate your pledged bitcoin, meaning it can reuse your collateral while promising to return an equivalent amount later. That is the opposite of cold storage lending.

One business-only exception: Unchained Capital still offers bitcoin-backed loans, but only to US businesses. Max 50 percent LTV, around 14.18 percent APR, 12-month terms, liquidation near 83 percent LTV, a 150,000 dollar minimum, 2-of-3 multisig where you hold a key, no rehypothecation, and full KYC with corporate underwriting.

And a short graveyard, so you do not go looking: BTCPOP closed in July 2026, 10101 shut down at the end of 2024, BitBorro never got past a GitHub demo, and Babylon’s native bitcoin lending on Aave is still a governance proposal, not a product.

The other direction: interest on your bitcoin

Some platforms flip the model. Instead of you borrowing against BTC, you deposit BTC and they pay you interest. Every one of these is fully custodial. Your coins leave your wallet, sit on their books, and they lend them out to earn the yield they share with you.

Nexo is the biggest name still standing. Its Earn product pays up to about 5 percent APY on BTC at the base tier, up to 7 percent if you take payout in NEXO tokens at the top loyalty tier. Nexo returned to the US market in February 2026, where it advertises lower rates. The yield comes from Nexo lending your bitcoin to institutional borrowers, so you carry counterparty risk on Nexo and on whoever they lent to.

Wirex pays interest through its X-Accounts. Older reviews list around 6 percent APY on BTC, but one current rate tracker says bitcoin interest is switched off right now while stablecoins still earn. Check the live rates before you move anything.

Others in the same bucket: YouHodler with flexible and fixed terms, Ledn’s growth accounts, and CoinDepo, which advertises double-digit rates on BTC that should make you ask where the yield comes from. Coinbase pays nothing on bitcoin. Kraken pays 0.02 percent, which is functionally nothing.

One more model, and the newest: 21bitcoin, an Austrian bitcoin platform, started paying 1.21 percent annual interest on customers’ idle euro balances in October 2026, with the option to receive the interest in bitcoin at no conversion fee. It calls the feature the Bitcoin Bonus and claims to be the first in Europe to pay savings interest directly in bitcoin. The mechanics are refreshingly boring: your euros sit in a segregated trust account at Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Bayern Mitte, a German bank that owns a stake in 21bitcoin, and the bank pays the interest, which 21bitcoin says it passes on in full with no margin. No minimum deposit, no lock-up, and the rate is variable. Note the difference: this is interest on your euros, not on your bitcoin. Nobody lends out your coins. It is a bank savings rate with a bitcoin payout rail, which makes it the least exotic entry on this list.

The rule here is simple. Interest on bitcoin is never free money. It is rent for taking your coins, and the rent exists because someone riskier than you is borrowing them. If the rate looks too good, the risk is hiding somewhere you cannot see.

The skeptics have a point

Not everyone in bitcoin thinks you should do any of this. Two voices worth hearing before you borrow a single sat:

Cory Klippsten, CEO of Swan, put it bluntly: “While we’re at it, there is no such thing as self-custody for a Bitcoin asset-backed loan, and any company making that claim is misleading you. No free lunch out there, sorry!” His point is the one this whole article keeps circling: the moment your coins secure someone else’s loan, some part of your custody is shared, whatever the marketing says.

Pierre Rochard goes further. His standing advice: don’t borrow against your BTC, don’t lend your BTC, don’t daytrade your BTC. Do accumulate, do self-custody, do study how bitcoin works.

You do not have to agree with either of them. But if you borrow, do it with their warnings ringing in your ears: keep the loan small, keep the loan to value low, and never pledge coins whose loss would change your life.

The bottom line

If you want to borrow against bitcoin you actually control, the live P2P markets are Hodl Hodl Lend, Firefish, Debifi, and Lendasat, plus Lava’s self-custody loans. Understand the arbiter-key asterisk on each, stay far from the liquidation line, and never borrow against coins you cannot afford to top up in a crash. The DeFi-flavored options (Sovryn Zero, Mezo) trade key control for bridge risk, which is a different bet entirely. Ark-based lending does not exist yet. USDB is worth watching but not worth trusting with size until Brale publishes attestations.

And the oldest rule still applies: if a lender needs your keys, it is not a loan against your bitcoin. It is a loan against their bitcoin, and you are just hoping they give it back. For why key control matters in the first place, see our guides on whether multisig is worth it and choosing a hardware wallet.