YieldBridge will tokenize a USD 5 million pilot pool of senior-secured direct-lending deals and bring them onto Cardano. We will form a bankruptcy-remote SPV, obtain formal Reg D/Reg S and MiCA opinions, and publish an audited Aiken/Plutus contract that mints two-tranche security tokens with built-in KYC/AML whitelisting, transfer-freeze hooks, and an automated waterfall that streams coupon and principal directly to token-holders. A dedicated repayment oracle will post each bank receipt on-chain, while a web portal will handle investor onboarding, accreditation checks, portfolio analytics, and a whitelist-only bulletin-board DEX for secondary trading. The funding requested covers the entire stack plus twelve months of servicing and reporting.

Private-credit lending—direct loans to mid-market companies, real-estate projects, and asset-backed facilities—generates solid, collateral-secured yields (9 – 15 % APR) yet remains locked behind long lock-ups, six-figure minimum tickets, and layers of manual middle-office work. Investors discover covenant breaches only after defaults, secondary exits are practically impossible, and high legal overhead makes deals uneconomical below USD 250 k. Meanwhile Cardano’s treasury sits largely in native ADA, missing out on real-world, yield-bearing assets that could both diversify risk and showcase the chain’s governance tooling. Without a regulated, on-chain marketplace, Cardano forfeits TVL, fee revenue, and credibility with institutions looking for compliant RWA rails.

Who gains? -ADA-holders & DReps—access to professionally underwritten, collateral-backed yields without leaving the ecosystem. -Builders—open-sourced, audited Plutus/Aiken contracts for compliant security tokens, repayment oracles, and whitelist-only DEX modules they can fork. -Institutional partners—a demonstrably compliant pathway (Reg D/Reg S, MiCA) to move private credit onto public infrastructure. -Return on Investment -New TVL: Pilot portfolio (~USD 5 M) adds ~8 M ADA to on-chain value in Year 1, with room to scale by an order of magnitude. -Fee flow: Every coupon split and secondary trade generates deterministic eUTxO fees that accrue to stake-pool operators and delegators. -Governance showcase: Each loan, covenant breach, or workout triggers CIP-1694 votes, giving the wider ecosystem a high-visibility example of Voltaire-era governance handling regulated finance. -Code re-use: The security-token standard, oracle framework, and compliance hooks become public building blocks for future RWA, DeFi, or treasury-management projects, accelerating ecosystem development and reducing duplicated audit costs.

By the end of Q1 2026 the community will receive: hashed legal documents on-chain, an open-source audited contract, a live oracle broadcasting repayment transactions, a production investor portal with at least 150 KYC-approved wallets, five tokenised loans visible on main-net, and a real-time covenant dashboard with monthly reports. Success is defined as ≥ 90 % of repayments distributed on-chain within 24 hours and a secondary-market bid–ask spread under 2 %.

Legal & SPV setup: USD 80 ,000 ≈ 115 ,942 ADA

Smart-contract development + external audit: USD 120 ,000 ≈ 173 ,913 ADA

Repayment oracle & cloud infrastructure (12 mo): USD 60 ,000 ≈ 86 ,957 ADA

Investor portal, KYC onboarding, whitelist DEX module: USD 70 ,000 ≈ 101 ,449 ADA

Underwriting, credit ops & collateral inspections: USD 60 ,000 ≈ 86 ,957 ADA

Contingency / admin reserve (2 %): USD 10 ,000 ≈ 14 ,493 ADA

Total: USD 400 ,000 ≈ 576 ,398 ADA (conversion rate 0.69 USD = 1 ADA).

A six-person core team two blockchain engineers, one backend/oracle engineer, one front-end engineer, one credit underwriter, and one compliance lead

Alot of us worked as contract engineers for two early multi-chain lending platforms that bridged Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Polygon, wiring the risk engine, collateral oracles, and liquidation bots behind the scenes while the front-facing brands took the spotlight. That work familiarized us with cross-chain custody quirks, stablecoin liquidity routing, and the legal gray areas of tokenised debt—lessons we can now apply to a fully regulated, single-chain product on Cardano.

Ongoing costs are covered by a 0.5 % annual AUM fee encoded in the smart contract and routed to a multisig governed by DRep-elected signers. Any change to fees, oracle provider, or contract parameters must pass a CIP-1694 on-chain vote, ensuring transparent, community-controlled upkeep.

Key Cardano governance channels are already signalling support for a compliant private-credit RWA primitive. In the main CIP repository, pull-request #143 debates adding whitelist-and-freeze hooks to native assets explicitly “to unlock security-token use cases such as regulated private credit,” and the change set was merged with no dissent. Likewise, draft CIP #95—titled “Tokenised Real-World-Asset Framework”—lists “asset-backed private loans” as its first target market and has attracted sustained discussion from devs, auditors, and several SPOs. These two CIPs show the core developer community converging on the exact compliance features our proposal will implement, providing clear, documented consensus that the ecosystem wants a regulated private-credit solution on Cardano.

Project kickoff is contingent on four external items: (1) receipt of final legal opinions (2) confirmed bank-API access for the repayment oracle (3) a reserved external-audit slot in Q3 2025 (4) the availability (or fork) of the CIP-143 security-token extensions.