For centuries, Austrian economists diagnosed the root cause of business cycles with remarkable precision: credit expansion untethered from real savings. Mises demonstrated it, Hayek formalized it, and history confirmed it repeatedly. Yet, despite that theoretical clarity, one question remained unanswered in practice: Is a credit system structurally incapable of artificial expansion even possible? The emergence of collateralized lending protocols in decentralized finance suggests, for the first time, that the answer might be yes. Fractional reserve banking allows commercial banks to lend more