Sharky

Sharky, also written Sharky.fi or SharkyFi, is an NFT lending protocol on Solana. You borrow SOL against an NFT, or you lend SOL to people who do. Loans are peer to peer and short, running 7 to 16 days.

What sets Sharky apart is that it holds nothing in escrow. The NFT you borrow against never leaves your wallet. It is frozen there until you repay, so you keep your access to token-gated communities and airdrops while the loan is open. Miss the deadline and the lender can take the NFT.

Sharky launched in 2022 and was still running in October 2026. Its SHARK token has lost almost all of its launch value.

How Sharky NFT loans work on Solana

Sharky runs an open order book of loan offers for each NFT collection it supports. Lenders post offers in SOL. Borrowers who hold an NFT from that collection pick an offer and get the SOL straight away.

No pool of shared money sits in the middle. Each loan is a contract between one lender and one borrower, created by the Sharky program on Solana (address SHARKobtfF1bHhxD2eqftjHBdVSCbKo9JtgK71FhELP).

The loan has a fixed term and a fixed amount owed. Sharky has no price-based liquidation: if the collection's floor price halves on day three, nothing happens to your loan. Only the due date matters. Repay in full by then and the NFT is released. Fail to repay and the lender can claim it.

Sharky's borrow page describes the escrow-free part in its own words: "When you accept a loan offer, a secure contract is created, freezing the NFT in-wallet." A frozen NFT cannot be sold, listed or transferred, but your wallet still shows it. That is why DAO votes, gated Discord roles and airdrop snapshots keep working during a loan.

Borrowing SOL against an NFT on Sharky.fi

To borrow on Sharky.fi you connect a wallet, choose an NFT from a supported collection, and accept the best offer on that collection's order book. The SOL arrives in the same transaction that freezes the NFT. You owe the loan amount plus a fixed sum of interest, due on a set date between 7 and 16 days out.

The interest is small in SOL terms because the loans are so short, even though the yearly rates look huge. The Sharky client README gives a worked example: borrow 1 SOL for 7 days at about 145% a year and you owe roughly 1.028 SOL at the end.

The cost that matters is the one you do not see on the screen. If you cannot repay on time, you lose the NFT, even if it is worth far more than the loan. Sharky's page puts it plainly: "Not repaying by the due date means the lender can repossess your NFT."

Only collections Sharky has added can be used. The list still grows: in September 2026 Sharky announced on X that loans were open on OTC Desk NFTs, and on The Chart Breakers the same week.

Lending on SharkyFi: offers, APY and the fee on interest

Lenders on SharkyFi earn SOL interest by posting loan offers on a collection's order book. You decide how much SOL to offer against any NFT from that collection. When a borrower accepts, your SOL goes out and comes back with interest at the end of the term, or you receive the NFT instead.

Phantom's guide to Sharky quotes yields of 100% to 360% APY and gives an example: a 50 SOL offer on Famous Fox Federation returning more than 1.3 SOL in two weeks. A yearly figure like that assumes your SOL is lent out again and again all year, with no idle days and no defaults.

Two details in the README are worth knowing before you lend:

• The rate stored on-chain is labelled APY but is used as APR, a simple yearly rate with no compounding.
• Sharky takes its fee out of the lender's interest. In the README's worked example the fee is set at 16% of the interest earned.

A default is not a payout. You end up holding an NFT you may not want, in a market that may have fallen since you made the offer. Lending on Sharky is really a way of saying, "I would be happy to buy this NFT at this price."

Lenders who want to automate offers can use the @sharkyfi/client npm package, which lists order books and places or cancels offers from code.

SHARK token: Jupiter LFG launch, supply and price history

SHARK is Sharky's own token. It went on sale on 16 April 2024 through the LFG launchpad run by Jupiter JUP$0.296-1.3%. There are 100 million SHARK in total. Sharky calls it a governance token, which means holders are meant to vote on how the protocol is run.

In February 2024 Jupiter's founder named Sharky as one of three projects that could launch on LFG next. The other two were Sanctum and deBridge, The Block reported.

The sale offered 5 million SHARK at $1.06 each and raised $5.3 million, according to CoinCarp's sale record. About 15% of all SHARK was due to be in public hands at launch, per Phantom's airdrop guide.

The price has fallen hard since then. In early October 2026 SHARK traded below a tenth of a cent. That is more than 99% under its sale price. Only a few thousand dollars sat in its trading pools, Solana Compass token data shows. The live figures are on this page.

Phantom's guide said at launch that Sharky "hasn't released a lot of details on its governance token". We found no votes and no other stated use for SHARK since.

Sharky points, sharx NFTs and the airdrop

Sharky points were the scoring system behind the SHARK airdrop. Borrowers and lenders earned points by using the protocol, and the points set the size of each wallet's airdrop on 16 April 2024. A boosted period ran from 12 February to 16 April 2024, per Phantom's airdrop guide. Recipients claimed through Jupiter's LFG site. The token listed on the Bybit and MEXC exchanges at launch, per Sharky's launch announcement.

sharx is Sharky's own NFT collection, traded on Magic Eden ME$0.062-0.9%. The Sharky site still carries a page where holders can upgrade a sharx NFT and claim rewards it calls "chowder". Phantom's guide describes a separate FISHY token used for sharx upgrades.

Sharky has not announced a new points season or a second airdrop in any source we checked.

Who Sharky.fi suits

Sharky.fi suits two kinds of user. The first is a holder of a supported Solana NFT collection who needs SOL for one to two weeks and is confident of repaying. The second is a lender who knows a collection well enough to be content owning one of its NFTs at the loan price.

It is a poor fit if you want a long loan, since the longest term is 16 days. It is also a poor fit if your NFT is not in a supported collection, or if you want to lend without watching NFT prices. The headline APY is not a safe yield, because a default pays you in an NFT, not in SOL.

Sharky lends in SOL only. A token lending product that Sharky promoted in a Superteam Earn bounty in April 2025 was no longer linked from the site in October 2026, and its pages returned errors.

Is Sharky safe? Audits, defaults and other risks

Sharky has run on Solana since 2022 and we found no report of an exploit of its program. That is the good news. The rest of the picture is thin, and you should weigh it before using the protocol.

• No public audit. Sharky's site, its GitHub README and its Jupiter LFG application name no auditing firm and link no audit report.
• No verified build. On 9 October 2026 the OtterSec verification registry listed the Sharky program as not verified, so outsiders cannot confirm that the deployed code matches public source. Sharky's public GitHub repository holds client examples and documentation, not the program itself.
• Sparse documentation. The "bitepaper" link on Sharky's site led to a parked domain when we checked in October 2026.
• Default risk on both sides. Borrowers lose the NFT for missing a deadline by any margin. Lenders can be left with an NFT worth less than the SOL they lent.
• Token risk. SHARK has very little trading liquidity, so it can be hard to sell at the quoted price.

In August 2026 a user on X said they thought Sharky had shut down. Sharky replied: "The rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated, sharky is still here, providing liquidity for solana's jpegs."

Sharky alternatives: Citrus, Rain.fi and Banx

The main alternatives to Sharky for NFT loans on Solana are Citrus, Rain.fi and Banx. They differ mostly in loan terms and in what you can borrow against.

• Citrus is a peer-to-peer NFT lending platform from the Famous Fox Federation team. It is the closest like-for-like option.
• Rain.fi lends peer to peer against tokens as well as NFTs. Rain.fi says you can extend a loan or sell the collateral while the loan is open.
• Banx is a third Solana app for borrowing against NFTs.

Sharky's case is its simplicity and its record. In its LFG application of February 2024, Sharky said it had handled 95% of Solana NFT loan volume over the previous two years. That is the team's own figure, and it is now more than two years old. Compare live offers on your collection before choosing.

Sharky team and history

Sharky's co-founder and chief executive is Anton Vynogradenko, known online as Restuta. The LFG application also lists Biba, who runs marketing, and Jake, who runs day-to-day business. It names Big Brain Holdings, Token Ventures and Monke Ventures among the backers.

The key dates in Sharky's history:

• March 2022: Sharky is released on Solana, with a public launch in April 2022, per its website.
• 9 August 2023: Sharky announces it has acquired Honey, another NFT lending project, and says it plans to expand to EVM chains.
• February 2024: Sharky reports $1.2 million of revenue for 2023 in its LFG application.
• 16 April 2024: SHARK launches. A company press release that week says Sharky has issued over 1.4 million loans and plans to add lending against Bitcoin Ordinals and real-world assets.

By October 2026 the Sharky site listed Solana NFT lending only. We found no sign that the EVM, Ordinals or real-world asset plans had shipped.