Risks
Locked In involves real money on a real blockchain. Here is the honest list of what can go wrong. (The in-app risk disclosure you accept before depositing covers the same ground.)
Smart-contract risk
Your USDC is held by our on-chain program and deposited into Kamino. A bug or exploit in either could result in loss of funds. Mitigations, not guarantees: the program is deliberately small, beta caps limit total exposure ($50/lock, $1,000 platform-wide), and the 180-day force return bounds how long funds can be stuck — but smart-contract risk is never zero.
Strategy (yield) risk
Yield comes from lending USDC on Kamino. Lending rates float, and in an extreme event (bad debt, depeg-related losses in the market) the position could be worth less than deposited. In that case the shortfall is borne by the depositor — the Community Pot receives nothing, and Locked In does not cover losses.
“Principal is never slashed” means Locked In never takes principal as a penalty. It is not insurance against the underlying market. These are different promises — we make the first, no one can honestly make the second.
Stablecoin risk
USDC is a fiat-backed stablecoin issued by Circle. If USDC depegs, your deposit’s dollar value moves with it.
Behavioral risk (the intended one)
The product’s entire premise is that missing days costs you yield. If you lock in and don’t learn, you will earn nothing on your deposit and the yield goes to others. Only lock what you’re genuinely committing to learn against — and never money you can’t afford to have illiquid until course completion (or the 180-day force return at the outside).
Platform risk
Our backend grades lessons and judges streaks. If it were down, lessons couldn’t be completed during the outage. Your funds, however, never depend on our uptime: custody, settlement, and force return live on-chain.