The Setup
Membrane Labs builds crypto lending and collateral management for institutional money. OTC loans, collateral tracking, risk management, all on-chain. I owned two products: OTC Lending and Collateral Management.
The Problem
A missed margin call on an institutional lending platform isn’t a bug report. It’s a lawsuit. Loan booking flows, collateral management logic, client onboarding: each piece needed to work perfectly before anyone put real capital on the line. And the clients asking for this weren’t retail users. They were trading desks managing billions.
My Approach
Mapped every step of the OTC lending workflow before touching product specs. Worked backwards from what an institutional risk team would need to see, audit trails, real-time collateral valuations, automatic margin alerts. Led the first institutional client onboarding myself, sitting in every integration call to understand exactly where friction lived. That onboarding became the blueprint for every client after.
What I Shipped
End-to-end OTC Lending and Collateral Management platform. Loan booking flows built for institutional-scale transactions. Collateral tracking with real-time valuations and automated margin management. Trading desks, risk teams, and compliance officers all had different requirements, the product had to satisfy all of them without becoming three separate products.
The Results
$1B+ in loan bookings processed through the platform. First institutional client successfully onboarded and live. Two product lines running, each complex enough to be a company on its own.
Looking Back
Institutional trust is earned in details. Not in pitch decks. The client doesn’t care about your roadmap, they care that the thing they’re looking at right now works perfectly. I stopped trying to impress with features and started obsessing over the boring stuff: error handling, edge cases, documentation. That’s what closes institutional deals.