Summary

The Ajna Protocol is a decentralized, noncustodial system for permissionless lending and borrowing that functions without governance or external price feeds. It operates through isolated pools where lenders provide liquidity at market-driven price levels, and borrowers secure loans using fungible or non-fungible collateral, ensuring autonomy, fairness, and resilience.

Ratings

Chain

The Ajna Protocol is deployed on Ethereum mainnet.

Chain score: Low

Upgradeability

Ajna is fully permissionless, allowing anyone to create, lend, or borrow in pools without the need for approval.

The protocol further is fully immutable without the ability to upgrade or make changes to the protocol, its functions or parameters.

Upgradeability score: Low

Autonomy

The protocol has no external dependencies and operates in a fully autonomous manner.

Ajna eliminates external dependencies by using a market-driven system where lenders specify lending prices and borrowers provide collateral, removing the need e.g. for oracles.

Autonomy score: Low

Exit Window

Ajna Protocol's contracts are fully immutable, no upgrades or changes can be made, removing the need for an exit window.

Exit Window score: Low

Accessibility

Multiple user interfaces exist and are operated by independent actors, such as ajnafi.com and ajna.arb.capital, ensuring access to the protocol and user funds even if one interface is shutdown or censors a user's transactions. Positions created on one interface are interoperable with the other, allowing users to manage or close positions through either frontend.

A list of the third-party user interfaces to access the Ajna protocol can be found here.

Accessibility score: Low

Conclusion

The Ajna protocol on Ethereum Mainnet achieves Low centralization risk score for its Upgradeability, Autonomy, Exit Window and Accessibility dimensions. It thus ranks Stage 2.

Overall score: Stage 2

Reviewer's Notes

There were no particular discoveries made during the analysis of this protocol.

Protocol Analysis

The Ajna protocol is deployed through two immutable factory contracts: the ERC20PoolFactory for fungible token pairs and the ERC721PoolFactory for NFT-collateralized pools. Anyone can permissionlessly deploy a new pool for any token pair through the appropriate factory. Each pool is a standalone, isolated contract that manages its own lending, borrowing, and liquidation logic without relying on shared state or external contracts.

The PositionManager allows lenders to wrap their pool positions into ERC-721 NFTs, enabling composability with other protocols. PoolInfoUtils and PoolInfoUtilsMulticall are stateless read-only helper contracts for querying pool state. The GrantFund manages the distribution of the AJNA token treasury through a community-driven coordination mechanism.

Dependencies

No external dependency has been found.

Ajna Finance enables borrowing and lending without external oracles by relying on a market-driven mechanism where lenders specify the price (in terms of quote tokens per unit of collateral) they are willing to lend at. This design eliminates the need for external price feeds by aggregating lender inputs into "price buckets," which act as discrete pricing tiers for collateral. Borrowers can access liquidity by pledging collateral against these buckets, while the protocol automatically adjusts interest rates based on pool utilization and collateralization levels. This ensures stability and fairness through self-regulating market dynamics, independent of external dependencies​.

Ajna's liquidation works without oracles by triggering auctions when a loan's collateralization falls below the pool's Lowest Utilized Price (LUP). Liquidation is initiated by users posting a bond and proceeds through a Dutch auction, where collateral is sold at decaying prices until the debt is repaid. This market-driven process ensures fair price discovery, with penalties discouraging unnecessary liquidations and rewards incentivizing valid ones.

Governance

Security Council

The protocol is completely immutable, thus no Security Council is required 🎉

Exit Window

The protocol is completely immutable, thus no exit window is required 🎉

Contracts & Permissions

See Whitepaper: AJNA PROTOCOL: Automated Lending Markets

Contracts

All Permission Owners

None. Ajna does not have any permissioned owners because it operates as a fully decentralized, governance-free protocol, with all functions controlled by deterministic smart contract rules. Anyone can deploy the protocol on compatible EVMs, ensuring its accessibility and independence from centralized authority or ownership.

Permissions

None. 🎉