How to request an under-collateralized crypto loan that lenders fund

TL;DR. A loan request on Unlloo has four terms the contract enforces (amount, rate cap, when offers close, when repayment is due) and four things lenders read (title, description, income, and the wallet behind them). Of the first five requests on Ethereum, one was funded in full and four got no offers at all. The funded one asked for 200 USDC, left offers open for six days, came from a wallet scoring 515, and said what the money was for. The others asked for too much, closed too fast, gave lenders a day to be repaid, or came from wallets with almost no history. Ask small, give lenders a week, set a repayment date your income can meet, and line up the first lender before you post.

This article is general education, not financial, legal or tax advice. Unlloo loans have no collateral, so a lender can lose what they lend and a borrower who does not repay carries a public default. The contract limits and the five requests below were read from the contract and the app's public loan pages on 31 October 2026.

What does a loan request consist of?

A request is four numbers the contract enforces and a short profile that lenders read. The numbers go on-chain when you publish: the amount in USDC, USDT or DAI, the highest yearly rate you will accept, the date and time offers stop, and the date repayment is due. The profile stays off-chain but public: a title of up to 80 characters, a description of up to 1,000, your source of income and yearly income. Your email and Telegram handle are private and used only for repayment reminders. Unlloo also takes a snapshot of your wallet's 0 to 1000 reputation score when the request is published and shows it next to the request, with its tier.

Lenders see the title, the amount, the rate cap, the closing time and the score tier in the list of open requests. They see the rest when they open yours. How to check a borrower's wallet is what a careful lender does next, and it is worth reading from the borrower's side before you write a word.

The contract's limits today: a request between 1 and 100,000 USDC on a USDC loan, a rate cap between 5% and 50% a year, offers open for at least one hour and at most 90 days, a fixed seven-day selection window after that, and a repayment window of at least one day and at most 180 days after the selection window ends. Each offer must be at least 0.5% of the request, a request can take up to 200 offers, and you must accept offers worth at least 80% of the amount for the loan to start. The protocol fee is 10% of the interest you pay, fixed into the request when it is created.

What should your wallet show before you ask?

It should show the things a lender will look for in the first ten minutes: age, regular activity, money passing through, and nothing alarming. The contract does not check any of it, so a request from an empty wallet is technically possible and practically pointless. Of the first five requests on Ethereum, the one that was funded came from a wallet whose score snapshot was 515, in the Fair tier. The four that got no offers came from wallets scoring 120, 120, 120 and 233, all in the Poor tier.

Unlloo's own wallet-history score gives nothing to a wallet younger than 12 months, so a new wallet is judged only by third-party services and by what a lender can see on a block explorer. If your wallet is new, building credit history with a new wallet explains what helps, and the first lenders will have to be people who know you rather than strangers. If you have an older wallet with an ordinary history, use that one, even if the money will be spent from another.

Before you post, open your own address on a block explorer and read it as a stranger. First transaction date, the gaps, what the wallet holds today against what you are about to ask for, any lending-protocol tokens and whether a liquidation sits in the history, and where the first funds came from. If you would not lend to that wallet, neither will anyone else.

How much should a first request be?

Less than you think, and less than the wallet holds or earns in a month. A first request is a test of whether strangers will fund you at all, and the amount is the first thing they weigh against the wallet. The funded request asked for 200 USDC. The request for 100,000 USDC, the contract's maximum, got no offers in its 24 hours, and a request for 500 USDC from a wallet scoring 120 got none in six days.

Three rules of thumb. First, ask for an amount a single lender could cover: because you must accept at least 80% of the request for the loan to start, a 200 USDC request works with one lender of 160 or four lenders of 50, while a 5,000 USDC request needs 4,000 of offers before anything happens. Second, keep it well inside what the wallet shows: income arriving, balances held, bills paid. Third, make it enough to matter, because the gas is the same for 50 USDC and for 5,000, and a lender's ten minutes of reading are the same too. For most first loans that means a few hundred USDC, repaid within a month or two, and then a larger second request on the strength of the record.

What rate cap should you set?

Set a cap that leaves lenders room to bid under it. The cap is not the rate you will pay; it is the ceiling on the offers you can receive, and the offers set the rate. On the funded request the cap was 5% and the four offers came in at 4.2%, 2.3%, 2% and 1%, which works out to about 3% on the 200 USDC if all four are accepted. Those lenders were not pricing risk, they were backing a request they trusted, and a 5% cap from a wallet nobody knows filters out every lender who wants paying for the risk. Two requests with 12% caps got nothing too, so the cap alone does not rescue a weak request, but a cap at the 5% floor from an unknown wallet guarantees silence.

Two things to keep in mind while you set it. The protocol fee is 10% of the interest, taken from each repayment, so a lender who offers 10% receives 9% and you pay the 10%; experienced lenders price that in. And interest accrues per second only on the money you actually accept, so a higher cap on a loan you repay in three weeks costs little in absolute terms: 300 USDC at 12% for 21 days is about 2.07 USDC of interest. How DeFi interest rates are set covers what lenders compare your cap against.

How long should the funding window be?

At least a week. Lenders are people with other things to do, and an offer costs them a wallet read, a transaction and locked money, so they rarely act on the day they first see a request. The funded request stayed open for six days and its four offers arrived on days two, three, three and five. The request that was open for under two hours never had a chance, and the 100,000 USDC request closed after 24 hours with nothing. The contract allows up to 90 days, but a window that long signals that you are not expecting anyone either; 7 to 14 days is the range where a request looks both serious and patient.

Remember what the window does to lenders: their offers are locked until it closes, and if the offers reach 80% of the request they stay locked through the selection window too. A two-week window is a two-week commitment for them. Say in the description when you plan to accept, and accept early once you have enough; the selection window is a maximum, not a waiting period.

When should repayment be due?

Set the due date from the income that will repay the loan, then add margin, and count from the end of the selection window rather than from today. The repayment window the contract enforces starts when the seven-day selection window ends, whether you accept offers on day one or day seven. One of the five requests set a repayment window of a single day after that: had it been funded and accepted late, the borrower would have had 24 hours to repay. The funded request went the other way, with a window of 144 days, which is comfortable for the borrower but a long lock for 200 USDC at 3%, and some lenders will pass on a small loan with a long term.

Thirty to ninety days suits most first loans: an invoice cycle, a month or two of salary, a season of sales. Interest accrues per second and any amount can be repaid at any time with no penalty, so a longer window costs nothing extra if you repay early, and it protects you from the one outcome that matters. A repayment after the due date is recorded as Repaid late, and a loan never repaid is recorded as Not repaid in time, and both stay on the wallet for every later lender to read. What happens if you don't repay covers the rest.

What should the title and description say?

Say what the money is for, what will repay it, and when. The title is the one line lenders see in the list of open requests, so make it the purpose: "Stock for the November drop, repaid from sales by 15 December" tells a lender more than "Short-term loan". The description has 1,000 characters for the specifics a stranger can check: the invoice that is late and from whom, in general terms; the salary date; the on-chain history that shows the income; any past loans and how they ended. Fill in the income source and yearly income honestly, because a lender who opens the wallet will compare them with what they see.

The five requests show the difference. The funded one said plainly that it was a test by one of our own team, what the money was for, and gave a business income the wallet's history supports. Among the others, one carried the title "USDT loan" on a request made in USDC, two described "temporary personal expenses" with no source of repayment, and one asked for 100,000 USDC for "token liquidity injection" from a wallet scoring 233. None of them is dishonest, but none gives a lender anything to verify, and a lender who cannot verify does not offer.

What to leave out: promises ("I will definitely repay"), pleas, and anything you would not want attached to your address forever. The description is public to anyone with the link and it stays readable after the loan ends.

How do you line up the first lender off-chain?

Ask one person you know to make the first offer before you publish, and give them the exact amount and rate to offer. A request with one offer on it reads very differently from a request with none: on the funded request the first offer landed on day two, and the next three followed it. The people to ask are the ones with a reason to trust you that the chain cannot show: a client who owes the invoice, an employer who pays you in stablecoins, a colleague, a relative, a community or DAO you contribute to. How to lend crypto to a friend is written for them, and who uses under-collateralized loans explains why the inner ring lends first.

Be concrete with them. "I am posting a request for 300 USDC at up to 10%, open until the 14th, repaid by the 30th from the invoice that is due on the 25th. Could you offer 250 at whatever rate you want?" If that one person covers 80% on their own, the loan can start with nobody else; if they offer less, their offer is still the signal that brings strangers. Offers can be at 0%, and because the fee is a share of interest, a 0% offer from a friend costs them nothing in fees.

Once the request is live, the app gives you a share link and ready-made text for X, Telegram and other networks that states the amount, the cap and the closing date without quoting your title. Post it where the people who know you are. Do not post it in strangers' threads: an unknown wallet asking strangers for money is the pattern every lender has learned to skip.

Which mistakes get a request ignored?

The five requests between them made most of the mistakes a lender learns to recognise, and the table lists them with the fix. Each one is a reason not to open the request at all, which is why the lender never reaches the description.

What did the first five requests on Ethereum look like?

They are the whole dataset so far, and they show the pattern more clearly than any rule. One was funded in full. Four received no offers. The funded one was small, open for six days, from a wallet in the Fair tier, and from someone the first lenders knew. The amounts and dates below come from the contract; the scores are the snapshots the app shows on each request.

Request #0 is worth reading as a lender would. Its four offers came from four addresses over five days: 99 USDC at 4.2%, 50 at 2.3%, 30 at 1% and 21 at 2%. If the borrower accepts all four, the loan runs at about 3% a year, and holding the full 200 USDC to the due date would cost about 2.4 USDC in interest, of which the lenders share 2.1 and the protocol takes 0.2. The borrower can also accept only some of them, as long as the accepted total is at least 160 USDC, and the lenders whose offers are not taken withdraw their money.

What happens after the offers come in?

When the funding window closes you have seven days to accept offers worth at least 80% of the request, and the moment you do, the money is in your wallet and interest starts. Accept the lowest rates first, accept partial amounts if that gets you to the total you want, and leave the rest; unaccepted offers are refundable to their lenders and earn nothing. If you accept nothing, or less than 80%, the request expires and every lender withdraws.

From then on the only job is repaying. Repay in any amount at any time; each repayment pays the interest owed first and then principal, and lenders claim their shares from the contract themselves. Repaying before the due date records Repaid on your wallet, which is the whole point of a first loan: the second request can be larger, at a lower cap, and strangers will have something to read. How Unlloo works today has the mechanics in full.

What does it cost to post a request?

About ten cents in gas at late-October 2026 prices, and nothing else. Creating a request used about 201,000 to 204,000 gas on each of the five, which what a loan costs on Ethereum priced at roughly $0.10 at the gas price of 28 October. Cancelling an unfunded request costs about two cents, so posting a badly set request and replacing it is cheap in gas, though not in reputation: a lender who sees three expired requests from the same wallet reads them as three failures. Set the terms right the first time, and if you must repost, say in the description what changed and why.

Sources

1. Unlloo's CrowdLoanManager contract on Etherscan, public getters and transaction history read on 31 October 2026. The limits (principal, rate caps, funding, selection and repayment windows, minimum offer, offer cap, 80% acceptance, fee), the five requests' amounts, caps, windows and offers, and the gas used to create each request.
2. Unlloo app, loan pages #0 to #4, read on 31 October 2026. Titles, descriptions, income fields and the reputation score snapshots shown to lenders.
3. Unlloo, "Security". The 10% fee on interest, how it is fixed per loan, and what an admin can and cannot do to a request.
4. Unlloo, "What does a loan cost on Ethereum mainnet?", 28 October 2026. Gas and dollar figures for creating, cancelling and repaying a loan.
5. Unlloo, "How to build on-chain credit history with a new wallet". The 12-month rule in Unlloo's own wallet-history score.