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What Trade Dollar is

Trade Dollar is an on-chain vault that connects stablecoin liquidity to real-world commodity trade finance. You deposit a stablecoin, and the vault puts that capital to work financing the movement of physical goods across borders. In return, you earn yield from real trade activity, not from crypto lending or token rewards.

The model rests on three ideas:

  • Real yield. The return comes from the fee charged to finance physical commodity shipments, an asset class that has funded global trade for centuries.
  • Non-credit ownership. The vault finances the goods themselves, and a financing vehicle holds legal title to them on the vault's behalf. It does not lend money against a borrower's promise to repay.
  • The Glass Box. You can see where your capital is, the stage of each deal, and the vault's value, all on-chain. The Glass Box lets you verify your positions; it does not protect your capital from loss. See Transparency.

The vault runs on Ethereum and follows the ERC-4626 vault standard, extended with ERC-7540 for asynchronous withdrawals. A Risk Committee sets the risk framework, and a professional Curator executes within it.

The underwriting method behind Trade Dollar has a strong repayment record on the Salus trade-finance platform, built by the team members now running Trade Dollar over years of commodity trade finance; the current track-record figures are on The yield engine. That record belongs to the underwriting method and the platform, not to the protocol. Trade Dollar brings the method on-chain. The protocol itself is new and is building its own on-chain record.

Trade Dollar launches with one product, physical commodity trade, starting with metals, and runs a second product line on the same vault architecture: trade receivables, for example agricultural exports. The metals product is secured by owning the goods. The receivables product is secured by an assigned receivable rather than by goods.

Who it's for

Trade Dollar is built for allocators who want yield from real economic activity: family offices, treasury teams, and experienced on-chain investors. The audience already understands vaults and on-chain settlement, and wants a return that does not simply track the crypto market.

It will suit you if you are looking for yield sourced from real, physical trade rather than crypto lending or token rewards, a non-credit model backed by goods and insurance, and full transparency into where your capital is deployed.

Access is a verified whitelist, and it is not open in restricted jurisdictions. See Access: who can join and how.