We had , needed liquidity, but didn't want to sell and eat the tax bill or miss out on the upside we were waiting for. So we took a loan against our on Aave. No credit check, no application, no waiting for approval. The rate is often lower than what a personal loan or credit card would cost, and we keep our . That last part was the whole point.

We deposited 3 to borrow 4,500 . For about a week it felt like every other loan we've taken. But this one had no payment schedule or path to zero built in. No structure on day one like traditional loans. We had to figure out what to pay each cycle and manually make the payments ourselves. No clean math, no reminders, no auto-pay.

So we built the structure ourselves. And once we did, we never had to think about it again.

Every traditional loan we've dealt with has the same basic shape: a schedule, a payment amount, a maturity date, and a defined path from "I owe this" to "I'm done." With mortgages, car loans, student loans, and even variable-rate products, we know what we owe and when we'll be finished owing it. That clarity is built in on day one.

In DeFi, there's no payment schedule nudging us to close it out, no monthly bill chipping away at principal, no maturity date to work towards. Without that structure, many people don't sustain the position for very long: 48% of Aave borrowers who fully close their loan do so within the first month. And of those who stay past thirty days without making a single repayment, one in three gets liquidated within 100 days as prices move against them.

Every payment on a traditional loan reduces what we owe, moves us further from default, and stops interest from compounding against us. The same mechanic exists in DeFi: each repayment shrinks our debt and improves our loan health. The protocol just never tells us to make one. There's no bill arriving, no late fee, no system holding us to anything. Just us and a position that keeps drifting.

When we opened our loan, we realized we had to figure out how to pay it off in 12 months by ourselves, then show up week after week to ensure we stayed on track. Not making payments wasn't an option. We knew we had to make regular payments to keep our balance moving toward zero and our position safe.

We took the loan at a 50% LTV, borrowing 4,500 against $9,000 of collateral. would need to fall roughly 40% before we approached liquidation territory. We had room, and we had a plan.

We did the math: $4,500 divided by 52 weeks was $87 a week. We set a calendar reminder to repay this amount every week for the next year to chip away at our principal and stay on track. We knew this was a big commitment, but we didn’t have any other choice.

After a few tedious weeks of opening the Aave web app every Monday, clicking repay, entering our amount, and signing the transaction, we got tired of being on call to show up. So we built a plug that would show up for us instead. The idea behind Plug is simple: define an intent once and let it execute on our behalf.

We set it up to run once a week for 52 weeks. The first time it ran, it checked if a position was already open. Since we had already deposited our and borrowed , it skipped straight to the repayment. Every week after that, it repaid a fixed $87 until the schedule was complete.

Setting and forgetting our payment schedule was the quick win we needed, so we stopped checking the position every week and carried on knowing the plug was handling everything for us.

Then a few weeks later we checked our debt balance and it wasn't where we expected. We were already behind by $26 on week 6. Payments were being made, but our math wasn't right. Our fixed payments weren't accounting for interest accruing on top of our debt. Our borrow rate moved up and down, spiked when everyone showed up to borrow at the same time, and our debt moved with it.

The $87 we calculated on day one was based on what we borrowed, not what we really owed. What we owed kept growing: rates spiked, interest accrued faster than $87 could pay it down, and because the payment never changed, it never caught up.

Since we weren't accounting for interest accruing on top of our debt, our payoff date was a moving target.

We needed to repay exactly what we owed each week to protect our 12 month timeline. So we immediately updated our plug to check our live debt balance instead of the static 4,500 borrow amount.

We updated it to read our live debt balance from Aave: the principal plus accrued interest. Then divided that result by 52 instead of repaying a fixed $87. Every payment was now based on what we actually owed that week, not what we borrowed on day one.

No more stale data. But once again, we realized our logic was still flawed. We were dividing the totalBaseDebt by 52 on each run. But 52 was the total number of weeks in our schedule, not the number of weeks we had left. By week 26 we would have 26 weeks to close the loan, not 52. So dividing by 52 at that point would cause the plug to think we had twice as long as we actually did and would calculate payments that were too small to close on time.

So we made one more update to our plug: divide totalBaseDebt by however many weeks were left in our schedule. That way, as the schedule counted down, the denominator shrank and the payment adjusted accordingly.

Now the formula knew exactly where we were every week. Live balance on top, weeks remaining on the bottom. Rates spiked, balance grew, payment adjusted up. Rates settled, payment came back down. As the weeks passed by, the payment cleared whatever remained.

That logic held all the way to the final week. On week 52, weeks remaining was 1, so the payment was simply totalDebtBase. Plugs are atomic, so every step, read, calculate, and repay executed inside a single transaction. No dust, no room for error. The loan closed to exactly zero.

We simulated this against a fixed schedule across 52 weeks with rates swinging between 2.83% and 7.59%. Fixed payments left $121.60 still owed at week 52. Reactive payments left nothing.

This is the structure every traditional loan comes with. A payment schedule that always knows what we owe, adjusts when rates move, and gives us a clear path to zero. Now our DeFi loans have it too.

We had assumed taking a loan on Aave would force us to always be there. No structure built in meant we had to define and execute it ourselves. It took us a few times to get everything right, but we eventually got the formula and logic we needed. And once we did, our plug executed on our behalf for a year, managing payments more accurately and reliably than we ever could have manually. Our loan still required constant attention, but we didn't need to be the ones paying attention anymore.

We never had to think about it once the plug was running. The loan closed on week 52, we kept our , and moved onto the next trade. Next time we won't figure out our payment plan as we go. We'll simply use the plug.