Overview
What Nolus is and the moving parts that make it work.
What Nolus is
Nolus is a sovereign blockchain with a CosmWasm money market focused on fixed-rate, asset-backed spot margin. Instead of issuing a generic collateralized loan that can be margin-called and liquidated, Nolus opens a lease - a position that holds the asset the borrower takes exposure to, until the borrower closes it. The same primitive supports both longs and shorts.
Opening a position combines two pieces of capital:
- a down payment the borrower puts up as collateral, in whichever currency they choose
- a borrowed amount drawn from the Liquidity Provider Pool (LPP)
The down payment and the borrowed amount are swapped together into the lease currency - the asset the position holds for its lifetime.
The lease is its own on-chain CosmWasm contract instance. It tracks debt, margin interest, and the lifecycle (open → active → close) without ever forcing a liquidation in the traditional sense.
The moving parts
The protocol surfaces as a small set of CosmWasm contracts and a few chain-level pieces:
| Component | Source | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Leaser | nolus-money-market/protocol/contracts/leaser | Factory that instantiates new Lease contracts and tracks the open set. |
| Lease | nolus-money-market/protocol/contracts/lease | One contract per position. Holds the lease asset (post-swap), accrues interest, handles repayment, close, and liquidations. |
| LPP (Liquidity Provider Pool) | nolus-money-market/protocol/contracts/lpp | Single-sided lending pool - lenders deposit, the pool extends loans to leases. |
| Oracle | nolus-money-market/protocol/contracts/oracle | On-chain price oracle. Receives spot prices from feeders and produces an EMA used by leases. |
| Profit | nolus-money-market/protocol/contracts/profit | Routes protocol revenue. |
| Reserve | nolus-money-market/protocol/contracts/reserve | Backstop pool, used when a lease closes underwater. |
| Treasury | nolus-money-market/platform/contracts/treasury | Holds protocol-owned NLS, drives long-term economic flows. |
| TimeAlarms | nolus-money-market/platform/contracts/timealarms | Generic on-chain scheduler - contracts subscribe to time-based callbacks. |
| Admin | nolus-money-market/platform/contracts/admin | Registry of every platform and per-protocol contract; coordinates atomic CosmWasm migrations across them. Driven by chain governance (SudoMsg), holds no user funds. |
| Oracle Price Feeder | oracle-price-feeder | Off-chain daemon that publishes signed spot prices to the on-chain Oracle. |
| Nolus Core | nolus-core | The chain itself - Cosmos SDK + CometBFT plus custom modules. |
Why this design
Two practical consequences:
- Partial liquidations first. When a position's LTV crosses the max threshold, the protocol sells just enough of the lease asset to bring the ratio back to the healthy band. Full liquidation only kicks in when a partial sale can't restore the invariant. See Risk for the full mechanism.
- Self-contained accounting. Each Lease is its own contract, so debt, interest, and lifecycle state stay isolated per position. The Leaser tracks the active set; everything else lives in the Lease.