# Cicero

*Co-building permissionless lending with institutional borrowers*

**Authors:** [Vadim Zolotokrylin](https://holdex.io/c/people/vadim-zolotokrylin)

---

Cicero is the protocol brand for Loda,
the Brisbane-based crypto-lending startup
that raised $15M in July 2021 to bring crypto-collateralised
and uncollateralised lending to APAC.
The protocol architecture
(a three-pool design with LODA and LODESTAR governance tokens)
is mechanism-design DeFi for institutional borrowing,
with the same intent that drives Clearpool's Dynamic Pools and Prime products.
Find a way to bring institutional credit on-chain without giving up the
permissionless lending side.

Our work at Cicero combines product co-building with advisory,
so the engagement covers the engineering of the protocol
and the strategic input around how it goes to market.

## What we shipped

The product co-building work covers the standard application surface.
Vault contracts, lender deposit interface, borrower-facing pool dashboards,
and the wiring between the three-pool architecture
and the LODA/LODESTAR governance system.
The advisory side maps to the kind of strategic input Holdex provides
where founder-level decisions about market positioning
and capital structure overlap with engineering decisions about protocol design.

## The story

Loda's investor list read as a serious DeFi syndicate: Spartan Group,
Framework Ventures, Mechanism Capital, and Pantera's Paul Veradittakit,
alongside Dao Ventures, PNYX, One Block, X21 Digital, Orthogonal Trading,
and Gleneagle Capital, with angels including Shiliang Tang of Ledger Prime
and Geordie Manolas.
The Cicero brand carried the same APAC institutional-credit thesis into a
protocol surface.

## Links

- Site: [cicero.network](https://cicero.network/)
- Docs: [docs.lodacicero.finance](https://docs.lodacicero.finance/)