Documentation

Introduction

What HaltGate is and the problem it exists to solve.

The problem#

Tokenized stocks trade around the clock, but the companies behind them do not. A stock split, a merger, a dividend or a trading suspension makes the old price wrong, and the feed that publishes it responds by pausing rather than by publishing something it cannot stand behind.

A normal lending protocol has no idea this happened. It keeps reading the last price it was given and keeps acting on it: it will happily liquidate a position using a number that stopped being true hours ago, and it will let someone borrow against collateral whose value nobody can currently establish. The borrower loses their collateral to a stale quote, and there is no recourse because the contract did exactly what it was told.

What HaltGate does#

HaltGate treats the pause itself as a first-class signal. A dedicated state machine watches the oracle, and when the price stops being trustworthy the protocol stops taking actions that depend on trusting it. Liquidations stop. New borrowing stops. Interest stops accruing, because charging for a window the borrower cannot act in is not a fee, it is a penalty for something outside their control.

One thing never stops: repayment. Paying down a loan only ever reduces risk, so it stays open in every state, including a full halt.

The one sentence version

Every action that could hurt someone when the price is wrong is gated on the price being right. Every action that helps regardless stays open.

What you can do#

ProductWhat it isCan it be liquidated?
BorrowSupply a tokenized stock, borrow USDG against it at a floating rateYes
Fixed TermLock a rate and an end date, with maturity replacing liquidation entirelyNo, at any price
MultiplyLoop into amplified exposure in one transactionYes
EarnSupply USDG and earn what borrowers payNot applicable

How it is put together#

  • Isolated markets. Five stocks, each with its own collateral token, oracle, halt controller, lender vault and market contract. Halting one leaves the other four trading normally, which is the only way to actually demonstrate that halts are per-asset rather than protocol-wide.
  • The vault holds the cash, the market holds the risk. Market never custodies lender deposits. It tracks collateral, debt and interest; LenderVault is a standard ERC-4626 vault that holds the USDG.
  • Nothing is unbounded. A halt cannot last forever, governance cannot remove the escape hatch, and the parameters that matter have on-chain ceilings rather than social conventions.

This is a testnet deployment

HaltGate runs on X Layer testnet (chain ID 1952). The collateral tokens and the oracle are mocks, the stablecoin is real testnet USDG, and none of it has been audited. See Using the testnet for exactly what is real and what is not.