Where prices come from
Every market reads a dedicated Chainlink price feed for its stock, published on Robinhood Chain by the same oracle network that secures most of DeFi. Two properties matter:- Feeds already include corporate actions. Dividends and splits are folded into the token’s price through the issuer’s multiplier mechanism, so one token is always priced as what it actually represents — the protocol needs no multiplier logic of its own.
- USDG is priced independently. Collateral value is converted into USDG terms through a separate USDG/USD feed. Denar never assumes the stablecoin is worth exactly $1: if USDG drifted from its peg, every collateral valuation would adjust automatically.
The 24/5 reality
Stock feeds update around the clock on trading days and stop when the US market closes. Two behaviors follow, and both are normal:- Off-hours, the feed holds the last traded price. Denar keeps operating against it — with a safety net: if a feed goes silent beyond a staleness bound sized for the longest normal market closure (holiday weekends included), the oracle refuses to answer and the market pauses.
- Even mid-session, updates are event-driven. These feeds publish on price deviation plus a daily heartbeat, not on a fixed clock. A stable name can legitimately go hours between updates while a volatile one ticks constantly. The price-age label in the app reflects exactly this.
What works when
The guard trips in three situations: the feed exceeds its staleness bound, the token issuer flags a corporate action in progress, or — once the chain publishes a sequencer uptime feed — the network’s sequencer has been down. In every case the market freezes rather than misprices, and repaying is always possible, so no borrower can ever be trapped.
Why freeze instead of guess?
A lending protocol has two options when a price becomes unreliable: keep operating on a guess, or pause the operations that depend on it. Denar always pauses. A wrong price can wrongly liquidate a healthy borrower or let someone borrow against phantom value — both irreversible. A pause only delays borrowing and liquidations, and the conservative LLTVs exist precisely to make those delays survivable. Institutional RWA lending platforms take the same approach with their NAV-based oracles.Why not an AMM price (TWAP)?
Stock-token AMM pools on a young chain are shallow — primary liquidity is off-chain RFQ. Manipulating a thin pool’s time-weighted price is cheap, and the manipulate-then-borrow attack is the single most common way lending forks die. Worse, pools trade 24/7 while the real market is closed: a weekend TWAP would diverge from true value exactly when arbitrageurs cannot correct it. Denar uses AMM prices for nothing; Chainlink feeds price everything.Layers of price protection
- Per-asset Chainlink feeds — no self-reported or single-party prices
- Staleness bounds on every feed, sized to market calendars
- Corporate-action pause flag honored on every read
- Independent USDG/USD pricing — no $1 assumption
- Sequencer-outage guard, ready for the chain’s uptime feed
- Off-chain monitoring with alerts on stale feeds, pause flags, and scheduled corporate actions