This piece outlines a progression we’ve thought about a lot while building Avon. Lending kept evolving, not because earlier designs failed, but because each one solved only part of the problem. A short thread on how that arc shaped our approach.

welcome to the world of CLOB lending

Huge shoutout to @0xJaehaerys for writing this great article that captures Avon in detail.

The article captures this shift well. Order book lending is our attempt to give credit markets a coordination layer that doesn’t rely on discretion and doesn’t require lenders or borrowers to compromise on what matters to them.

What you gain is clarity and transparency. Lenders choose exactly what they underwrite. Borrowers interact with unified liquidity. Compliance can exist at the strategy layer without fragmenting markets into separate pools.

This design brings its own dynamics. Mispriced strategies don’t get rescued by curators. Rates move directly with utilization. Large borrows leave a visible footprint in the book. The system adjusts through competition, not discretionary rebalancing.

Lending is multi-dimensional by design. A match only works when rate, collateral type, LLTV and available liquidity all line up. When they do, a borrow can draw from several strategies and still settle as one position, while each lender retains isolated risk.

Avon separates the two completely. Strategies define risk and hold capital in place. The order book reads every strategy and routes borrowers through whichever combination satisfies their constraints. The market becomes a single surface without blending lender exposure.

All of these models share the same constraint. They bind risk definition and matching together. When both live in the same layer, improving one side usually comes at the expense of the other.

Curated vaults tried to restore that coordination. Lenders deposited once and allocators or curators moved capital around isolated markets. This reduced friction but reintroduced discretion. Risk shifted when allocators decided it should, not when the market did.

Isolation corrected that. Markets with fixed collateral, LLTV, oracles and curves finally let lenders choose their own exposure. The trade-off was borrower experience. Liquidity scattered across many markets, and no mechanism existed to coordinate them.

Pooled lending made sense early on. It gave borrowers one surface and predictable execution. But the simplicity hid something important: lenders were underwriting every collateral type the pool accepted, whether they intended to or not.

When I started working on order book lending, one question kept resurfacing: why did trading eventually converge on a clear market structure, while lending keeps circling the same patterns? → Pools made borrowing simple but blurred lender risk. → Isolation restored control but

Easier URL:

Avon testnet is now open to everyone. We’ve spent almost a year building toward one goal: a clean, real-time credit layer. Before mainnet, we want as many people in the community as possible to try it out. Any feedback or critique is welcome. Check it out: avon[.]xyz

Security is the first principle of lending. Everything else comes after it. Although Avon is still early, we’re already completing our fifth audit. Not for the sake of a number, but because we want the system to behave in clear and predictable ways. We also know that audits

The revamped docs explain this structure in detail. They cover the architecture, the order book, strategies, matching, liquidations and everything that sits underneath. You can read them here: https://t.co/iT4Kt9e0da

For lenders this keeps the relationship simple. Your capital stays inside the strategy you selected. Its risk remains fixed. Your returns reflect the behaviour of that specific environment. Coordination happens at the matching layer, not by shifting your funds.

Borrowers do not move across individual isolated market anymore. They interact with the combined surface of the entire system. The book finds the best combination of terms available at that moment. After the match, the borrower becomes tied to the specific strategy or multiple

The important part is how these isolated surfaces interact. Instead of pooling liquidity, Avon brings information together. Each strategy publishes multiple quotes from its curve. The onchain order book arranges these quotes into a live unified view of credit. The market