I assumed TermMax was another Pendle fork. Then I divided two numbers on its DefiLlama page and got a result I didn't expect.
Active loans: $27.22m. TVL: $31.25m.
27.22 / 31.25 = 87.1% utilization.
That's high. Aave's stablecoin markets usually sit somewhere in the 50-70% band. My first thought was that I'd misread the metric - 87% on a protocol most people haven't heard of felt wrong.
So I rechecked what TermMax actually is, and the number stopped looking strange.
There's no utilization curve here. Each market mints FT (a zero-coupon bond, 1 FT redeems for 1 debt token at maturity) and XT, where FT + XT always equals 1. A borrower mints FT against collateral and sells it at a discount - that discount IS the fixed rate. Capital doesn't sit idle waiting for a curve to price it. It's matched by order makers setting range curves, or it isn't there at all.
Then I noticed something else on the same page.
Annualized fees: $315,653.62
Annualized revenue: $313,945.62
That's a $1,708 gap. 99.46% of fees convert straight to protocol revenue. DefiLlama's methodology says those fees come from three places: protocol fees on FT discounted to underlying, liquidation fees on GT collateral, and performance fees.
Now the part I'm not going to dress up. The docs price the 40M $TMX pre-mine on a $60M FDV.
60,000,000 / 315,653.62 = ~190x price-to-fees.
That is a very expensive multiple on a very small fee base. High utilization on $31m is still only $31m.
Two things are true at once: the mechanism is genuinely different from pooled lending, and the revenue is tiny. I'm posting both.
Screenshot is DefiLlama, Aug 17 2026. Verify it yourself.
@TermMax #TermMax
Active loans: $27.22m. TVL: $31.25m.
27.22 / 31.25 = 87.1% utilization.
That's high. Aave's stablecoin markets usually sit somewhere in the 50-70% band. My first thought was that I'd misread the metric - 87% on a protocol most people haven't heard of felt wrong.
So I rechecked what TermMax actually is, and the number stopped looking strange.
There's no utilization curve here. Each market mints FT (a zero-coupon bond, 1 FT redeems for 1 debt token at maturity) and XT, where FT + XT always equals 1. A borrower mints FT against collateral and sells it at a discount - that discount IS the fixed rate. Capital doesn't sit idle waiting for a curve to price it. It's matched by order makers setting range curves, or it isn't there at all.
Then I noticed something else on the same page.
Annualized fees: $315,653.62
Annualized revenue: $313,945.62
That's a $1,708 gap. 99.46% of fees convert straight to protocol revenue. DefiLlama's methodology says those fees come from three places: protocol fees on FT discounted to underlying, liquidation fees on GT collateral, and performance fees.
Now the part I'm not going to dress up. The docs price the 40M $TMX pre-mine on a $60M FDV.
60,000,000 / 315,653.62 = ~190x price-to-fees.
That is a very expensive multiple on a very small fee base. High utilization on $31m is still only $31m.
Two things are true at once: the mechanism is genuinely different from pooled lending, and the revenue is tiny. I'm posting both.
Screenshot is DefiLlama, Aug 17 2026. Verify it yourself.
@TermMax #TermMax
