Company Name: Ledn

Founders: Mauricio Di Bartolomeo and Adam Reeds

Date Founded: September 2018

Location of Headquarters: N/A (Fully remote)

Number of Employees: 51

Website: https://ledn.io/

Public or Private? Private

“Lending is the type of relationship where you value the return of your assets more than the return on your assets.”

This was Di Bartolomeo’s answer when I asked him what has set Ledn, a bitcoin and crypto borrowing and lending platform, apart from its competitors, including now defunct companies that offered similar services like BlockFi, Celsius and Voyager.

“There’s no company in this space that has a better track record of returning your assets than Ledn,” Di Bartolomeo told Bitcoin Magazine.

Since its founding, Ledn has prioritized security and reliability. Di Bartolomeo and his co-founder, Adam Reeds, have not only wanted to win the trust of the traditional financial institutions with which Ledn interfaces but that of Ledn’s global user base, some of whom are accessing financial services for the first time thanks to the company.

And Di Bartolomeo’s work is quite personal to him in part because he understands the importance of Bitcoin thanks to his firsthand experience with it in his home country of Venezuela.

Di Bartolomeo’s Bitcoin Journey

“My family found Bitcoin and started mining it in Venezuela in late 2014/early 2015 in the middle of hyperinflation where basically it was illegal for them to buy or hold U.S. dollars or anything that would preserve value,” recounted Di Bartolomeo.

“When I saw how they and other Venezuelans were using Bitcoin to opt out of their broken system, I thought to myself “How many people in the world live like this and how many people in the world are going to need this?” And my answer was a number that I couldn’t compute in my head,” he added.

Di Bartolomeo decided to begin working in the Bitcoin space soon after. He moved to Canada where he and Reeds began helping miners grow their operations. Di Bartolomeo recalled that these miners wanted to expand but didn’t want to sell their bitcoin to do so.

“They had bitcoin revenues and fiat expenses, and there was no real place for them to get any type of financing,” said Di Bartolomeo.

“We sought financing, but nobody would give us a loan. So, we decided to solve our own problem,” he added.

“That was the genesis of Ledn.”

How Ledn Differentiated Itself

When Ledn was founded in 2018, only a few other services like it existed. However, there was a notable difference between Ledn and its competitors.

“There were other bitcoin-backed lenders in the market, but they required tokens,” said Di Bartolomeo.

“This was around the ICO era and we saw Nexo and Celsius come into the space with tokens. My view was that they were only using them to raise cash without selling off equity,” he added.

Di Bartolomeo and Reeds didn’t want to issue a token, as they saw it as a questionable practice from a regulatory perspective.

“When you look at finance at scale, immediately you think about compliance and regulation,” said Di Bartolomeo. “We wanted to build a company that was able to sit in front of BlackRock or Goldman Sachs, heavily regulated banks, and say, ‘Hey, I want to interact with you guys.’”

What is more, Ledn also prioritized transparency. In 2021, it became one of the first major Bitcoin companies to issue a proof of reserves, a system that allows anyone to audit Ledn’s bitcoin holdings.

“We’re still the only lender operating in the U.S. or other highly-regulated markets that has this proof of reserves where every six months our clients can come and check it out,” said Di Bartolomeo. “We’ve been doing this since before it was cool.”

Ledn also publishes a monthly Open Book Report that breaks down Ledn’s lending strategies.

From early on, Di Bartolomeo believed that taking a buttoned-up and transparent approach would foster trust amongst Bitcoin enthusiasts, a group that lives by the “don’t trust, verify” mantra, and his thesis has played out.

Reducing Risks

Of the many products Ledn offers, one is yield generation on bitcoin — the same type of product that caused the demise of BlockFi.

However, Ledn approaches its version of this product differently than its former competitor did.

“We generate Bitcoin yield on bitcoin primarily by lending it to market makers that arbitrage the BlockRock IBIT ETF and units of Coinbase spot,” said Di Bartolomeo.

“These groups are price neutral. They don’t have directional exposure. They’re just closing price gaps and benefitting from volatility,” he added.

BlockFi’s approach was far riskier.

“With BlockFi, there was a duration mismatch,” explained Di Bartolomeo.

“They were taking open-term deposits, and they were deploying them into mining infrastructure that had five-year payback. What do you think is going to happen when somebody shows up before the five years are done?” he added, alluding to the notion that what happened to BlockFi seemed inevitable.

What is more, Ledn only deals in highly liquid assets like bitcoin (and ether, which they added in 2023), which helps alleviate asset liability mismatch risk.

“With bitcoin, you always have people on both sides of the house with demand,” said Di Bartolomeo.

“When you start supporting things like Shiba Inu or Dogecoin and people want to earn interest on those, you then have to turn that Dogecoin into something else, and you create asset liability mismatch in the process,” he added.

Di Bartolomeo also noted that all of Ledn’s products are ring-fenced from one another.

“When you’re paying for a custody loan, you are not exposed to the credit risk of our other products,” he said. “This is very similar to how traditional finance works, and it’s something we do very differently as compared to our now defunct peers.”

Growing Competition

As more people begin to view bitcoin as “pristine collateral,” more bitcoin borrowing and lending platforms are destined to pop up. Many already have.

Centralized bitcoin borrowing and lending services like Salt and Nexo remain competitors to Ledn, while institutional bitcoin financing services like Newmarket Capital’s Battery Finance are also poised to cut into Ledn’s business. And services that enable users to borrow against their bitcoin in a non-custodial manner, including Debifi and Lava, may also increase their market share.

Di Bartolomeo is aware of the competition but doesn’t seem concerned. In fact, he believes that in such a market, the biggest winner will be the consumer, and he doesn’t have any plans to change Ledn’s strategy. Instead, he’s looking to double down on what Ledn does best.

“Our sweet spot is going to be individuals or people who prioritize transparency, security of funds and compliance,” said Di Bartolomeo.

“Safety, trust and transparency are what makes Ledn stand out. There is no other operator like us in this space with an equivalent track record as far as loans processed, years in the business and cycles survived,” he added.

“This industry is volatile. You have to have the right expertise and the right set of values powering your team, and I think other companies would be hard pressed to demonstrate what we have over the time that we have. Will you be able to find something cheaper? Yes. Will that be riskier? Absolutely.”

Fostering Financial Inclusion

One of the primary ways in which Ledn differs from traditional borrowing and lending platforms is that its rates don’t differ based on the jurisdiction in which the lender or borrower is located.

“This makes people feel very empowered because they know that whether they’re in Madrid or Medellín, they’re getting the same rate,” said Di Bartolomeo.

And Di Bartolomeo smiled from ear to ear as he discussed this point, as it seemed to remind him of why he got involved with Bitcoin in the first place.

“This is one of the things that makes me proudest about this business,” he said.

“We have people back in Latin America who’ve come to us to say we are the first loan they’ve ever been approved for. This is because all we look at is ‘Did you complete KYC?’; ‘Are you a compliant citizen?’; ‘Do you have Bitcoin?,’” he added.

“It’s not ‘Where do you live?’; ‘Who are your parents?’; What’s your skin color?’ I love this aspect of Bitcoin and what we do.”