Borrowing on Milky

Milky lets you unlock USDC liquidity from your graded trading cards without selling them. Each loan is a fixed-term, fixed-rate contract secured by the card itself: you set up the loan, take the cash, and either repay on time to get the card back, or let the card go to auction.

When borrowing on Milky makes sense

Borrowing here is a good fit when you:

• Want short-term liquidity without realizing capital gains or losing exposure to a card you believe will appreciate.
• Have a clear repayment plan within the loan term — these are not perpetual loans, and there is no interest-only option.
• Are comfortable with the possibility that, in the worst case, the card is sold at auction to repay the lenders.

It is not a good fit when:

• You don't have a credible path to repay before the maturity date plus the pool's grace period.
• You expect the card's price to drop significantly during the loan and would prefer to sell now.
• You need to redeem or move the underlying physical card during the loan window. While the loan is open, the on-chain NFT is locked by the protocol — and since the issuer redeems the physical card only against that NFT, you effectively cannot pull the card from the issuer's vault until the loan is closed.

What you get from a Milky loan

The actual headline number depends on three things: the fair market value the oracle assigns to your card, the maximum LTV of the pool you borrow from, and the principal cap that pool applies to any single card.

For example, a card priced by the oracle at $1,000, in a pool offering 70% LTV with a $5,000 per-card cap, can secure up to $700 of USDC. Repayment is the principal plus the fixed interest accrued for the chosen term.

Costs at a glance

There are two fee components a borrower will see:

• Interest — fixed APR per term, set by the pool. The interest amount is locked in at draw time and does not vary with how quickly you repay.
• Origination fee — a small percentage of the interest amount, withheld from the disbursement. The maximum allowed by the protocol is 5%, with a typical default of 2%.

There is no late fee in the loan accounting. After maturity plus the grace period, the loan defaults rather than continuing to accrue penalty interest. See default and liquidation for what that means in practice.

What can go wrong

The biggest risk is straightforward: if you don't repay before maturity plus the grace period, you lose the card. Specifically:

• Once the grace window closes, anyone can submit a transaction that flips the loan into auction state. The card is then sold via a Dutch auction, and any sale proceeds beyond the debt go to the protocol — not to you.
• Until the loan defaults, you cannot transfer or sell the NFT — it's locked under the protocol's on-chain authority. And because the issuer redeems the physical card only against the NFT, you effectively can't pull the physical card from the issuer's vault either.
• The interest is fixed: even if you repay one day after drawing, you owe the full term interest. There's no early-repayment discount.

The full risk register is on the Risks page.

Read next

• The loan lifecycle — every step of a loan from quote to close.
• Terms and fees — the concrete numbers.
• Default and liquidation — what happens when a loan isn't repaid.