🔬 How does it work?
The Pyra Flow
Pyra is built around a simple wealth-building loop:
- Deposit your paycheck into your Pyra account.
- Invest into a diversified portfolio of supported assets.
- Spend credit against your portfolio when you need to pay for expenses.
- Use future paycheck deposits to repay part of your outstanding balance and continue investing.
The goal is to move more of your income into assets earlier, instead of investing only what is left after spending.
Portfolio-Backed Credit
The Pyra card pays for transactions through a secured line of credit backed by your assets. This gives you liquidity for everyday spending without requiring you to sell from your portfolio first.
Credit is drawn in real time when you pay with your card. You do not need to top up a separate spendable balance or manually take out a loan before each purchase.
Loans and Repayment
Pyra uses smart contracts on Solana to manage portfolio-backed loans for card transactions and withdrawals. Pyra loans are powered by Kamino, which aggregates funds into lending pools. When credit is drawn, the protocol borrows USDC from the lending pool, and you pay interest on the amount borrowed.
All loans are over-collateralized, meaning the value of your collateral must be higher than the value of your outstanding loan. When a new paycheck arrives, Pyra can use part of the deposit to repay existing loan principal and interest. The rest can be invested back into your portfolio so the cycle continues.
Available Credit
On the dashboard, you can see your available credit: the amount you can still spend through your secured line of credit. Since loans are over-collateralized, available credit is lower than the total value of your portfolio.
Available credit changes as you spend, repay, accrue interest, and as asset prices move. If your available credit reaches $0 while you have outstanding loans, the protocol can automatically sell some collateral at market rates to bring your account back above $0 and avoid liquidation fees.
Liquidation Protection
With other DeFi protocols, liquidation can come with a fee, often up to 10%. Pyra is designed to protect users from liquidation fees through auto-repay. If the value of your collateral approaches the value of your loan, either because prices fall or interest accrues, collateral can be sold at market rate to repay part of the loan before a liquidation fee is triggered.
Pyra uses Jupiter to swap collateral for USDC, aggregating decentralized exchanges to find competitive execution. If you want to manually repay your loan, you can do so by depositing USDC or selling some collateral through the dashboard.
Auto-repay is made possible through our permissionless, open-source bots. You can run your own instance by following the README in the GitHub.
Yield
Some supported assets may earn variable yield through integrated lending pools. When this applies, yield is automatically reflected in your collateral balance without extra action from you. Yield is variable and depends on the underlying protocols and market conditions.
Self-Custody and Authorization
The Pyra protocol and card are self-custody. This means no one, not even Pyra, has access to your balance until you authorize a transaction.
In the app or website, you can set a spending limit that Pyra is authorized to use. This can be a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or all-time limit. This authorization is made possible through smart accounts on the Pyra protocol, which manage permissions for card spending and account actions. These accounts are created with Privy, and your private key can be exported from the app at any time.