Three years ago, I borrowed 100 million VND from HSBC for 36 months, paying 3.49 million VND every month.

Then I lent it to a colleague for 30 months, hoping to earn some interest and use the extra money to accumulate BTC. Six months later, he told me he could no longer repay me. He asked me to lower the interest rate; otherwise, he simply would not pay. My plan fell apart within a few months.

Since then, I stopped lending money to anyone.

Recently, I came back to the market and happened to discover TermMax. It immediately caught my attention, so I started looking deeper.

The first thing that surprised me was the growth happening on-chain.

TermMax has now surpassed $90M in TVL, with more than 1.5M registered wallets and over 90K daily active users. It is also deployed across 10 EVM chains, showing that the protocol is moving beyond a small fixed-rate lending experiment. (KuCoin)

But numbers alone aren’t why I’m interested.

What really caught my attention is what they are building underneath.

TermMax separates fixed-term debt into different components through FT, XT and GT, making a loan more flexible than a simple “borrow and wait until maturity” position.

Then there is the Range Order AMM, which is designed around interest-rate ranges rather than token prices. Liquidity can therefore form around different rates and maturities.

V2 takes the idea further with Atomic Orders, Composable Base Yield, Smart Unwind and an Order Aggregator, all aimed at making fixed-rate capital more efficient and easier to move.

That’s what changed my perspective.

Years ago, I thought lending was simply about finding someone willing to pay me interest.

TermMax is trying to turn debt itself into something that can be priced, traded, managed and reused on-chain.

Maybe that’s the bigger opportunity behind fixed-rate DeFi.

#termmax @TermMax $BTW $HEMI $ACE