The explosive growth of loans facilitated by Ledn can be attributed to BTC’s price surge, which increased the borrowing power of bitcoiners, as well as the SEC approving several spot BTC ETFs earlier this year.
Ledn set a quarterly record in crypto-backed loans it facilitated, outlasting its lending rivals BlockFi, Voyager, and Celsius.
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Posted May 9, 2024 at 9:00 am EST.
Ledn, a financial services firm focused on crypto-backed loans, announced Thursday it had facilitated over $690 million loans to its retail and institutional clients in the first quarter of 2024.
According to a statement shared with Unchained, the number of loans Ledn facilitated in Q1 2024 was the highest quarterly figure and the largest percentage growth increase quarter-to-quarter in the firm’s six-year history.
In Q1 2024, Ledn lent $106.5 million to its retail customers, a nearly 330% increase from $24.8 million in Q4 2023. Meanwhile, Ledn’s institutional clients took out $584 million in loans during Q1 2024, representing a 233% jump from the previous quarter.
Ledn’s chief investment officer John Glover told Unchained that the surge in loans was the result of a combination of factors.
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The increase in loans from its retail clients, came in part from people who took out loans from now-bankrupt crypto lender Celsius and refinanced with Ledn. This group made up about $40 million of Ledn’s Q1 2024 loans. The overall market surge over the past few months also meant retail “could borrow a lot more against the same number of bitcoins,” Glover noted
Additionally, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission giving their stamp of approval for a number of spot BTC ETFs fueled the explosive growth in loans Ledn facilitated for its institutional customers. For Ledn’s institutional clients, who are some of the largest market makers to the spot BTC ETFs, according to Glover, the rapid growth of spot BTC ETFs meant those clients “needed to borrow more assets from us – more bitcoin – in order to settle the ETF transactions that they did, so we saw a big jump in our institutional loan demand as well.”
Ledn’s growth in processed loans comes as overall demand for crypto-backed loans has been gradually increasing, following the collapses of BlockFi, Celsius, and Voyager, all of which were rivals of Ledn.
Institutions and people “still have the need to borrow dollars against their crypto, so that’s slowly coming back into the marketplace,” Glover said. “We’ve seen a lot of ex-BlockFi, ex-Celsius, ex-Voyager clients join Ledn… the demand is there [and] I think it’s trickling back into the marketplace, as these people are licking their wounds from bankruptcy proceedings.”
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