You hold 10 AAPL. You need 600 USDG. You have two ways to get it.
Sell three of them, or borrow against all ten. Selling looks like the simple option and the free one, because its cost does not arrive as a fee. This post is an attempt to price both honestly, including the parts that make borrowing worse.
Throughout, AAPL is $200.00, so 10 AAPL is 2,000 USDG of value. On Corpus, AAPL's maximum LTV is 50%, giving 1,000 USDG of borrowing capacity, and its liquidation threshold is 60%.
The two positions
Sell. Three AAPL at $200.00 raises exactly 600 USDG. You keep 7 AAPL, owe nothing, and can never be liquidated.
Borrow. Deposit 10 AAPL, draw 600 USDG. You keep exposure to all 10 AAPL and owe 600 USDG at no interest, with no maturity. Your health factor is 2,000 x 0.60 / 600 = 2.00, and you are liquidatable once AAPL falls below $100.00 — a 50% drop.
Both give you 600 USDG today. The difference is entirely in what happens next.
What happens next
Comparing stock value minus debt at various prices:
| AAPL price | Sold three (7 shares) | Borrowed 600 (10 shares) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| $300.00 | 2,100 USDG | 2,400 USDG | +300 |
| $250.00 | 1,750 USDG | 1,900 USDG | +150 |
| $200.00 | 1,400 USDG | 1,400 USDG | 0 |
| $150.00 | 1,050 USDG | 900 USDG | -150 |
| $100.00 | 700 USDG | 400 USDG | -300 |
The pattern is exact and unglamorous. Borrowing keeps you exposed to three shares you would otherwise have sold, so you gain or lose three times every dollar of price movement relative to the seller. 3 x (P - 200), in both directions.
That is the whole trade. Not a yield story, not a clever structure — you are choosing to remain exposed to the part of the position you would otherwise have converted to cash.
The costs that are actually costs
Selling costs you the exposure, permanently. Not for a while. The three shares are gone, and getting them back is a new decision at a new price. If the reason you held the position still holds, you have acted against it to raise cash. There is also whatever the sale itself costs in spread and fees, and in some jurisdictions a disposal has consequences the cash does not show — we cannot tell you anything useful about that, and it is not why we built this.
Borrowing costs you risk, not money. On Corpus the loan carries no interest, no origination fee and no repayment fee, so its monetary cost is gas and nothing else. What it costs is:
- Liquidation risk. At $100.00 the position above sits at a health factor of exactly 1.00, which the contract still refuses to liquidate; a tick below that and liquidators can act. Corpus takes only the slice that restores health — at $95.00, that is 81.08 USDG repaid for about 0.8962 AAPL seized — so a bad day costs roughly 4.05 USDG of bonus rather than half the position. But it happens without warning, including across a weekend when nobody can see the price.
- Collateral locked. While you owe, you cannot withdraw collateral below what supports the debt, and you cannot withdraw at all while the price is stale. Repaying is always permitted; the cash to repay may not always be there.
- A share of the yield. When an earning vault is eventually connected, Corpus keeps 10% of what it harvests, plus the cost of converting it. Today the yield is zero, so this share is zero.
- Contract risk. Selling exposes you to no smart contract. Borrowing puts your collateral in unaudited code with a live admin key. That is a real cost and it is on the risk page.
Which is better
Neither, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
If the price falls, the seller wins, cleanly and without stress. If the price rises, the borrower wins by exactly the amount of exposure they kept. If you do not have a view — or if the honest answer is that your view is not strong enough to fund with borrowed money — selling is the simpler position, and simplicity has real value.
What borrowing changes is the shape of the decision. Selling forces you to act on a price today. A zero-interest loan with no maturity does not: there is no rate eating the position, no date on which you must settle, and no possibility of the debt growing while you wait. You can leave the decision open.
That is what Corpus is for. Not a way to get money for free — a way to raise cash without being forced to choose a moment.
The honest footnote
Today, Corpus's yield is zero. Every market uses a 1:1 custody vault and nothing is harvested, so the loan does not repay itself and this comparison is purely between selling and borrowing at 0%. The self-repaying part, when an earning vault exists, would slowly shift the borrower's column upward — slowly, on the order of years, as laid out in What a self-repaying loan cannot do.
And the standing note: Robinhood Stock Tokens are not available to US persons and are restricted in other jurisdictions. None of this is financial advice, and the numbers above are arithmetic on one hypothetical position, not a recommendation about yours.