Borro Proposes ERC-8472 Standard for On-Chain Stock Locates

Borro, a stock-lending market operating on Robinhood Chain, posted a draft Ethereum standard on October 29, 2026, proposing a common read interface so any contract can answer whether a tokenized stock can be borrowed right now, at what rate, and against what collateral. The proposal, titled ERC-8472: Stock Locates, was published to the Ethereum Magicians forum, the standard venue where draft Ethereum Request for Comment proposals are discussed before a formal pull request is opened against the ethereum/ERCs GitHub repository.

What the draft interface actually does

Per the thread's own summary, ERC-8472 defines a read interface for contracts that lend ERC-20 or similarly structured tokens, letting a caller query locate availability, borrow rate, and required collateral for a given asset without needing to understand the internals of each individual lending venue. Borro states the proposal does not yet carry a formal ERC number; the project says it intends to open a pull request to the ethereum/ERCs repository using this Ethereum Magicians thread as the designated "discussions-to" venue once that happens, which is the normal path an EIP or ERC author follows en route to formal numbering.

The thread also discloses a reference implementation already deployed on-chain, with Borro publishing the contract address and noting the source code has been verified. Borro clarifies in the post that it is not affiliated with Robinhood despite building on Robinhood Chain, an attribute worth noting given the proposal's subject matter overlaps with traditional equities infrastructure. The draft is explicitly framed as a work in progress: Borro is soliciting feedback on the interface's function names, units, and terminology before locking the specification ahead of a GitHub pull request.

Why a stock-locate standard matters for tokenized equities

A "locate" is market-structure terminology borrowed directly from traditional short-selling: before a trader can borrow a security to sell short, a broker must confirm shares are available to borrow, a process regulated in the US under Regulation SHO. Borro's proposal effectively ports that workflow on-chain, standardizing how any smart contract can ask a lending venue the same three questions a traditional locate answers — availability, price, and collateral terms — without custom integration work for each lending protocol.

This arrives as tokenized real-world assets, including equities, have become a more visible application layer for Ethereum and its scaling ecosystem. A shared locate interface would let aggregators, wallets, or other DeFi protocols check borrow terms across multiple tokenized-stock lending markets programmatically, rather than each needing a bespoke integration with Borro or any competing venue.

The proposal remains in its earliest public stage. It has not been assigned a formal ERC number, the pull request to ethereum/ERCs has not yet been opened as of this writing, and the specification's function names and units remain open to the community feedback Borro explicitly requested in its post. Readers tracking Ethereum standards development can follow the thread directly for updates as the proposal moves toward formal numbering.