Gearbox

Gearbox is a two sided credit protocol: passive lenders deposit into ERC-4626 pools, and active users open Credit Accounts, isolated smart contract wallets that hold both the user collateral and the borrowed funds and can only call whitelisted adapters and hold whitelisted tokens (Gearbox dev docs, V2 architecture overview). Because the borrowed capital never leaves the account, Gearbox can extend leverage well above what a normal overcollateralised loan allows while still enforcing a health factor check after every single call (Gearbox dev docs). The original design was published as a tech paper in April 2021 by Mikhail Lazarev and Ilgiz Gimaltdinov, framing Credit Accounts as a new DeFi primitive for margin trading, leveraged farming and leveraged CDPs (Gearbox tech paper). V3 added quotas and gauges, so GEAR stakers vote on the extra rate borrowers pay per collateral asset, and moved the protocol toward a permissionless, curator operated market model where the DAO builds rails and Market Curators set risk parameters (Gearbox docs, Protocol DAO). Current documentation frames Credit Accounts as user owned smart contract wallets with solvency checks behind every action, targeted at both retail and institutional flows (Gearbox docs, Powered by Credit Accounts).