In the crypto world, people shout every day: “Put assets on-chain.” But nobody asks: how should interest rates be priced?
I flipped through my project notes from the past three years and suddenly realized something a bit awkward: most of the labels I see are about “assets” and “returns,” while the “interest rate” column has only a handful of entries. In my view, that actually reveals an uneven development across the whole sector.
If you think about the path crypto finance has taken in recent years, it has quietly split into three layers. At the bottom is the asset layer—RWA, LST, stablecoins. Put simply, it’s about moving various kinds of value onto the chain. This layer has the most players and is the most fiercely competitive. Whoever has the prettiest APY numbers can pull in a wave of TVL. I guess this layer will become even more crowded and commoditized over time. Above that is the yield layer: lending and borrowing routes, aggregators, strategy vaults. Its job is to put the asset-layer stuff to work so it can generate returns. The technical barrier here is not low, but fundamentally it’s still about “splitting the pie,” not “pricing the pie.”
What really interests me is the top layer: the interest-rate layer. In traditional finance, the yield curve of government bonds is the anchor of the entire market. Without it, you can’t really talk about pricing, hedging, or duration management. On-chain, this has long been missing. Everyone would rather keep doing year after year of floating-rate, barebones trading, and nobody wants to tackle this tough bone. I’d say this is where the next round of real infrastructure battles will happen—not just another lending-pool skin-swap.
The thing that @TermMax is doing is exactly this hard work: building the on-chain yield curve piece by piece using a market structure with fixed tenors and fixed interest rates. It doesn’t aim to be the entry point for the asset layer, nor is it content to be just a yield aggregator. Instead, it wants “interest rates” themselves to become an independent asset that can be traded and hedged. To be honest, this positioning is pretty lonely. In the short term, it’s hard to expect explosive narrative upside, and the market may not necessarily buy in.
Of course, to be fair, the issue with on-chain yield curves is still that liquidity depth and the pricing efficiency of the long-tenor market are hard problems. Whether it can truly support institution-level duration trading depends on the real-world data from the next few quarters. But as for the direction, I personally agree: compared with yet another skin-swap lending protocol that fills a tiny gap by repackaging yield, filling the blank in the interest-rate layer feels clearly more solid in terms of value. Whether the market likes to trade it is one question. Whether the infrastructure is actually solid is another. #TermMax #BTC
I flipped through my project notes from the past three years and suddenly realized something a bit awkward: most of the labels I see are about “assets” and “returns,” while the “interest rate” column has only a handful of entries. In my view, that actually reveals an uneven development across the whole sector.
If you think about the path crypto finance has taken in recent years, it has quietly split into three layers. At the bottom is the asset layer—RWA, LST, stablecoins. Put simply, it’s about moving various kinds of value onto the chain. This layer has the most players and is the most fiercely competitive. Whoever has the prettiest APY numbers can pull in a wave of TVL. I guess this layer will become even more crowded and commoditized over time. Above that is the yield layer: lending and borrowing routes, aggregators, strategy vaults. Its job is to put the asset-layer stuff to work so it can generate returns. The technical barrier here is not low, but fundamentally it’s still about “splitting the pie,” not “pricing the pie.”
What really interests me is the top layer: the interest-rate layer. In traditional finance, the yield curve of government bonds is the anchor of the entire market. Without it, you can’t really talk about pricing, hedging, or duration management. On-chain, this has long been missing. Everyone would rather keep doing year after year of floating-rate, barebones trading, and nobody wants to tackle this tough bone. I’d say this is where the next round of real infrastructure battles will happen—not just another lending-pool skin-swap.
The thing that @TermMax is doing is exactly this hard work: building the on-chain yield curve piece by piece using a market structure with fixed tenors and fixed interest rates. It doesn’t aim to be the entry point for the asset layer, nor is it content to be just a yield aggregator. Instead, it wants “interest rates” themselves to become an independent asset that can be traded and hedged. To be honest, this positioning is pretty lonely. In the short term, it’s hard to expect explosive narrative upside, and the market may not necessarily buy in.
Of course, to be fair, the issue with on-chain yield curves is still that liquidity depth and the pricing efficiency of the long-tenor market are hard problems. Whether it can truly support institution-level duration trading depends on the real-world data from the next few quarters. But as for the direction, I personally agree: compared with yet another skin-swap lending protocol that fills a tiny gap by repackaging yield, filling the blank in the interest-rate layer feels clearly more solid in terms of value. Whether the market likes to trade it is one question. Whether the infrastructure is actually solid is another. #TermMax #BTC