Fees

Trilobyte charges two types of fees: a protocol fee that sustains the protocol, and a late fee that signals vault health.

Protocol Fee

A 0.5% protocol fee (a governance parameter, default 50_000 in 7-decimal fixed-point) is collected at two points, and always sent to the protocol treasury (the address stored in the Globals contract).

On investor deposits (funding)

When an investor funds a loan, 0.5% is taken off the deposit and sent to the treasury; the remainder is what gets lent. Debt tokens are minted 1:1 with the net amount.

Example: a 100,000 USDC deposit → 500 USDC to the treasury → 99,500 USDC enters the loan (and 99,500 debt tokens are minted to the investor).

On loan repayments — charged to the borrower, never the investors

Each repayment is first split by the vault's split ratio (the investor share goes to the EMI pool, the remainder to the borrower's cash pool). The 0.5% fee — calculated on the gross payment — is then charged only to the borrower's cash share. The EMI pool is never touched.

This is a deliberate design choice: investor amortisation is independent of the fee. Investors always receive their full split; the protocol fee comes out of the borrower's retained cash.

Example (50/50 split, 10,000 gross payment): 5,000 → EMI pool (investors, untouched); 5,000 cash share → 50 fee to the treasury → 4,950 to the borrower's cash pool.

Fee clamp. The repayment fee can never exceed the borrower's cash share. It would only bind if the protocol fee were raised above the cash percentage (e.g. above 50% on a 50/50 split). If it ever clamps, a ProtocolFeeClamped event is emitted so the treasury shortfall is observable.

Fee configuration

• Default: 50_000 (0.5%).

• Updated via set_protocol_fee(fee, caller) on the Globals contract by the Operations Admin. (This action is not currently timelocked — see Governance.)

Late Fees

When a borrower misses a payment deadline, the Pool Manager can apply a late fee penalty.

• Rate: 18% per annum on the overdue amount — currently hardcoded in the vault contract (1800 bps), not read from a configurable setting.

• Applied by: the Pool Manager, via apply_late_fee(caller).

• Condition: only when the payment is overdue (now > next_due).

• Effect: accrues to the vault's late_fees accounting balance and advances the schedule to prevent double-charging.

$$\text{late\_fee} = \text{overdue\_amount} \times \frac{1800\ \text{bps}}{10{,}000 \times 12}$$

Late fees are an accounting figure that signals vault health — they accrue in the vault's late_fees balance and are emitted via the LateFeeApplied event. Note that the default-trigger clock uses an immutable schedule measured from disbursement, so applying a late fee cannot delay when a loan can be marked in default.

Fee Summary

Fee	Rate	Charged on	Taken from	Recipient
Protocol fee	0.5%	Investor deposits	The deposit	Treasury
Protocol fee	0.5%	Loan repayments	The borrower's cash share (never investor yield)	Treasury
Late fee	18% p.a.	Overdue payments	Accrued (accounting only)	Vault