Borrow against pufETH

The highest ceiling Teller lends to

pufETH sits in the platform’s top collateral tier, level with mainnet wrapped ether and above every bitcoin wrapper. Teller pools take it at 83.3% LTV and 1% APR across 2 pools, which means more dollars against the same collateral than almost anything else on the list.

The token is at 0xd9a442856c234a39a81a089c06451ebaa4306a72 on Ethereum with 18 decimals. It is Puffer’s liquid staking token: rewards accrue through the exchange rate rather than by rebasing, so a deposited balance keeps working through the term.

What a high ceiling is and is not

Borrowing at the ceiling is not safer here than borrowing at half of it. The term carries no liquidation threshold either way, so the extra headroom buys size rather than protection. What it does change is the repayment, which is fixed in dollars while the collateral floats, so the sensible move is to borrow the amount you want to repay and leave the rest of the ceiling unused.

One pufETH is worth more than one ether

This is the part worth checking before you read the ceiling. pufETH is an ERC-4626 vault share, and its redemption value rises as staking rewards land rather than the balance growing. Call convertToAssets on the contract with one whole token and it currently answers a little over 1.08 ETH. That number only goes one way.

So a ceiling quoted against pufETH is a ceiling against something worth more than an ether per unit. The same headline percentage that a WETH pool offers reaches further here per token held. The vault reports roughly 24,060 ETH of assets behind about 22,237 pufETH in issue, which is where the ratio comes from, and both figures are readable straight off the contract.

Staking risk sits underneath, unchanged

The staking position behind pufETH carries its own exposure to validator performance and protocol design. Posting the token as collateral neither adds to that nor removes any of it. What the loan adds is the pool as a counterparty for the length of the term, and a date you have to meet.

The loan

Deposit pufETH, receive USDC, repay or roll on the due date. Rate, LTV and the roll window lock when the loan opens, and the protocol holds the collateral until you close it out. Every loan is fixed-term with no margin-call, so a price fall during the loan cannot liquidate your collateral. Miss the due date and the collateral is forfeit. Budget for mainnet gas across the approval and the borrow, which on this tier is usually small relative to the loan.

The other staking token on the platform is cbETH on Base, and plain ether borrows at the same tier on the WETH page.