System overview

ACE is an open credit market built as a set of Uniswap v4 poolswith the lending book implemented in the pool’s hook. Each market is an ordinary v4 pool: swaps route through it, LPs can exist alongside it, and the hook adds a term-credit facility on top of the same liquidity surface.

The system has no price oracle, no off-chain feeds, and no admin keys. Credit is priced by committed capital: lenders place bids that are binding commitments to buy the collateral asset at a stated price, and everything else — floors, liquidations, recoveries, rates — is derived from those commitments and from prices the market itself prints on-chain.

• No oracle — the market is the oracle; only persistent on-chain price moves settle anything.
• Permissionless — markets deploy with one call; no gatekeeper.
• Reversible — liquidation transfers a right, not the asset; recovery is possible within a window.
• Open execution — borrows execute against best committed bids the way swaps take the best price.
• Termed — every loan expires; rollovers reprice at the current rate.
• Either side first — lenders can commit before any borrower arrives, and vice versa.

Markets are isolated: each is its own pool with its own book. A failure in one market stays with the lenders who chose it. There is no shared pool, no protocol treasury backstop, and no cross-market contagion path.