#termmax @TermMax Have you ever had this kind of experience? You want to save money to earn a fixed interest rate, you open the page and find the pool is cold and empty—there’s simply no way to borrow. You want to borrow money to lock in your costs, but you discover there isn’t actually enough capital available to borrow. This awkward “waiting for the other side to come first” is, in fact, the real reason fixed-rate products have been calling for years on-chain but still haven’t worked in a true sense—it's not the technology that’s the bottleneck; it’s the cold start. $TUT
The fixed-income market is inherently a two-sided market, and a deadlock-style two-sided market at that: borrowers want to lock in their costs, lenders want to lock in their returns, but neither side is willing to take the first step. Without sufficient borrowing demand, lenders don’t dare to lock in their funds—afraid they won’t be borrowed, afraid the market won’t have enough depth. Without sufficient lending capital, borrowers can’t borrow, or can’t borrow at a good price. Both sides are waiting for the other to get busy first, so it stays cold forever. $RED
@TermMax is exactly what makes me want to think: its way of handling this deadlock. Its “solution” is to make the thing happen that people need to believe in first—using several layers of design: let the price be posted there first, even if no trades happen right away; let scattered funds come together first, even if the scale is still small; spread a piece of liquidity depth across more places, even if any single market is still thin. In short, it’s about using one side’s certainty to pull the other side into the market.
This matters far more than the four words “fixed interest rate.” Anyone can calculate an interest rate, and anyone can set a term. What truly blocks most fixed-income projects is that initial period—there simply isn’t enough two-sided volume to match properly. Only once you get past the cold-start hurdle does it make sense to talk about an interest rate curve or a term structure.
So I’ll focus on three things: whether real two-sided trading volume has actually grown; whether the price spread between borrowing and lending is narrowing; and whether that cold-start period is being propped up by subsidies. Once I can see these clearly, I’ll dare to judge whether @TermMax has truly broken the deadlock—or whether it’s just packaging the emptiness as “busyness.” #termMax
The fixed-income market is inherently a two-sided market, and a deadlock-style two-sided market at that: borrowers want to lock in their costs, lenders want to lock in their returns, but neither side is willing to take the first step. Without sufficient borrowing demand, lenders don’t dare to lock in their funds—afraid they won’t be borrowed, afraid the market won’t have enough depth. Without sufficient lending capital, borrowers can’t borrow, or can’t borrow at a good price. Both sides are waiting for the other to get busy first, so it stays cold forever. $RED
@TermMax is exactly what makes me want to think: its way of handling this deadlock. Its “solution” is to make the thing happen that people need to believe in first—using several layers of design: let the price be posted there first, even if no trades happen right away; let scattered funds come together first, even if the scale is still small; spread a piece of liquidity depth across more places, even if any single market is still thin. In short, it’s about using one side’s certainty to pull the other side into the market.
This matters far more than the four words “fixed interest rate.” Anyone can calculate an interest rate, and anyone can set a term. What truly blocks most fixed-income projects is that initial period—there simply isn’t enough two-sided volume to match properly. Only once you get past the cold-start hurdle does it make sense to talk about an interest rate curve or a term structure.
So I’ll focus on three things: whether real two-sided trading volume has actually grown; whether the price spread between borrowing and lending is narrowing; and whether that cold-start period is being propped up by subsidies. Once I can see these clearly, I’ll dare to judge whether @TermMax has truly broken the deadlock—or whether it’s just packaging the emptiness as “busyness.” #termMax