Crypto Startup Pitches Interest-Free Loans That Can't Be Liquidated (6:25)
Every loan in history has come with an interest rate, a due date, and someone who can take your collateral.
"When you say credit or debt, it's a loaded term and people assume certain things," Colin Sinclair, chief business officer at Mayflower said to TheStreet Roundtable. "You're gonna have to repay somebody by this point in time. Until you repay them, there's gonna be interest payments. And if the value of your collateral goes down, they're gonna liquidate you so they don't lose money."
None of that is malice, it's what lending between humans requires. His answer is to remove the human. The Assured Value Machine, or AVM, is what he calls "the core innovation of our whole stack."
"It charges a one-time borrow fee. There's buy, sell and borrow fees, but there is no ongoing interest," he said.
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A vending machine with a floor
"Think of it like a vending machine," Sinclair said. "I put my dollars in, I get my token out."
Every dollar that buys in stays inside the machine, creating a bonding curve that is itself the entire market for the token.
"Now it has a full view of the supply. So using math, some calculus and code, it can establish a floor price. If everyone who just bought their tokens decided to turn and sell, the last one sold would still fetch that floor price," he said.
Because the machine knows the minimum every token can be redeemed for, it can lend against that minimum with no fear of a shortfall.
"There's no need for a liquidation engine. It doesn't even have one. This is trustless. You could leave and go to Mexico and spend your money on the beach, and your tokens are locked until you repay that debt. But if you don't repay that debt, everything else functions as normal," Sinclair said. "Think of it like a perpetual loan where no other holder of those tokens cares or relies on anyone else to be a good steward of that debt."
It's worth being precise about what the borrower gives up. The loan is capped at the floor value, which sits below market price, and the tokens stay locked until repayment.
In practice, "obligation-free credit" resembles a partial redemption with an option to buy back in. The obligation hasn't vanished so much as been prepaid in collateral.
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'Tell that to the guy who bought Nakamoto'
To explain what the AVM actually fixes, Sinclair pointed to one of crypto’s biggest trades in 2025: digital asset treasuries.
More specifically, he pointed to Nakamoto ($NAKA), the Bitcoin treasury formed through a merger with KindlyMD. Nakamoto’s stock has fallen roughly 95% from its May 2025 peak, and its market cap sits at around 25-30% of the value of its Bitcoin holdings.
Many would use this extraordinarily low multiple of net asset value (mNAV) to argue that NAKA was undervalued and a good investment. Sinclair doesn’t see any reason to think that.
"There's zero actual connection between the NAV and what the shares are worth," Sinclair said. "Tell that to the guy who bought Nakamoto 40% below."
The AVM, he argues, is what a treasury company would look like if the discount were impossible.
"Think of it like an on-chain reserve, a digital asset treasury, where it cannot trade below the NAV. It can trade above it, and there's an area of volatility above this floor price. But that floor price is a hard stop. Math and code doesn't care what anyone thinks or says," he said. "If you think you could sell one of these AVM assets below the floor, that would be the equivalent of saying: watch this, I'm going to take my calculator and type in 4 plus 4 and it's not going to equal 8. Good luck with that.”