What is Trilobyte?
Trilobyte is a decentralised lending protocol built on Stellar's Soroban smart contract platform. It connects businesses that need working capital with investors who want transparent, yield-bearing exposure to real-world cash flows.
The Problem
Small and medium-sized businesses often struggle to access affordable credit. Traditional lending is slow, opaque, and gatekept by institutions with misaligned incentives. Businesses with strong incoming cash flows — invoices, receivables, contracts — may still be denied credit because they lack conventional collateral or credit history.
The Trilobyte Solution
Trilobyte creates a transparent marketplace where:
Businesses can borrow against their future cash flows without the friction of traditional finance
Investors can earn yield by funding these loans in one of two risk tranches, with full on-chain visibility into repayments and losses
Pool Managers act as professional underwriters who evaluate businesses, structure loan terms, and put their own capital at first risk
Every loan is represented by a Vault — a dedicated smart contract that manages the entire lending lifecycle: fundraising, disbursement, repayment tracking, yield distribution, and settlement.
Senior and junior, in one vault
Rather than every investor sharing risk pro rata, each vault splits its funding into two tranches (see Tranches and the Waterfall):
Junior — first-loss capital, anchored by the pool manager's own collateral. Earns the highest yield.
Senior — paid first out of every repayment and protected by the junior cushion beneath it. Earns a lower, steadier yield.
This is the same structure used in traditional structured credit (and in DeFi lenders like Goldfinch and Maple): the party closest to the borrower puts capital at risk first, so external capital can participate at a lower risk profile.
Why Stellar?
Trilobyte is built on Soroban, Stellar's smart contract platform, for several reasons:
Low transaction costs — Stellar's fee model makes micro-payments and frequent repayments practical
Fast finality — Transactions settle in seconds, not minutes
SEP-41 token standard — Native fungible token support for debt tokens
Growing DeFi ecosystem — Soroban provides a modern Rust-based smart contract environment with a growing developer community
Global reach — Stellar is designed for cross-border payments and financial inclusion
Built With
Soroban SDK v26.1.0 — Smart contract framework
OpenZeppelin Stellar Contracts v0.7.2 — Battle-tested security modules (Access Control, Pausable, Upgradeable, FungibleToken, Timelock Controller)
Rust — Systems-level safety and performance
TypeScript — Deployment scripts and client SDK
As of September 2026.
Last updated