Vault still shows my eth, card declines, and the app is saying something about position health

Need somebody who use this to tell me what i am looking at.

ether.fi Cash, i use Borrow Mode since may, eth as collateral, spend usdc against it. Work fine, no problem, i like that the eth keep earning while i spend.

Saturday card decline at petrol station. I look in app, the safe still show the eth, everything is there, i can see it. But the credit line show zero available and there is a message about position health that i not see before.

So is this a freeze or is this something else. Balance is there, card is dead, and nobody is holding anything as far as i can see. Support say nothing yet.

That is not a freeze, that is a margin call. eth moved and your line closed.

borrow mode means borrowed. the card stopped because the loan did

To be precise about what you are seeing, because the distinction matters for what you do next.

ether.fi Cash keeps your assets in a Safe until authorisation, and in Borrow Mode the card spends against a credit line collateralised by that ETH. Nobody has frozen you. The collateral value fell relative to what you had drawn, the available line went to zero, and the card had nothing to authorise against. The ETH is still yours and still visible because it was never theirs.

What to do: either repay part of the drawn balance or add collateral, and the line reopens. What not to do is wait, because if it keeps moving the protocol liquidates a portion to bring the ratio back and you will have sold ETH at the worst possible moment without ever deciding to.

Direct Pay mode does not have this failure at all — you spend the stablecoins you hold and there is no ratio. Borrow Mode is a leveraged position that happens to have a card attached, and it is worth being clear with yourself that that is what you signed up for.

is this the same as being frozen or no

Ok this make sense and i feel stupid. I add collateral now.

The thing is the app not say margin call, it say something about position health, which for me is not the same words. Anyway is my fault for not reading, but i think many people will land in this thread thinking they are frozen and they are not.

Half the freeze threads on this board are this. Worth saying out loud.

Self-custody moves the failure, it does not remove it. Nobody can take this from you and nobody can help you either — there is no desk to call when the ratio moves at 3am in your timezone.

That is the trade and it is a good one for some threat models. But a card that stops working because of a price move is a card that stops working, and the reason being mathematical rather than administrative does not help you at the till.

If this card is the only way you can spend, you have built a single point of failure that the market gets to trigger.

So the 3% ETHFI cashback is still fine through all this?

FWIW the operational fix here is monitoring, not understanding. You will not catch this by checking the app, because the thing that breaks it happens while you are asleep.

What I run for anything collateralised is a job that pulls the position and shouts at me well above the liquidation threshold, not at it:

*/15 * * * * /opt/health/check-ratio.sh --warn-at 1.9 --page-at 1.6

The numbers are mine and mean nothing for your position — set the warn level where you would still have time to move funds, not where the protocol starts caring. IME everyone sets the alert at the liquidation number the first time and learns why that is useless exactly once.

Also: the card declining is the last symptom, not the first. By the time the till says no you had been in trouble for hours.

Cashback on a credit line you cannot draw. Enjoy.

Update for who find this later. I add collateral saturday, line come back in maybe ten minute, card work same day. Nothing was frozen, nothing was held, i was just wrong about what i am using.

I not set up the monitoring yet, PipelineRat is right and i will do it. Anyway if you come here searching for ether.fi frozen, read post four first, probably you are not frozen.