To be honest, when I woke up and saw that round of financing for TermMax, I didn’t feel much at first. Now in this market, any infrastructure project can easily scrape together a multi-million-dollar round—$6.8 million? That’s peanuts.
How is the big dream project? Why is BTC going up so slowly?
But once you think about it carefully, the lead investor being Cumberland DRW changes the flavor.
If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you have to understand one logic: the money from market makers is never given for free—it carries the “resource-stock” attribute. What is Cumberland connected to behind the scenes? It’s a liquidity entry point for traditional Tier 1 institutions—guys who monitor traditional assets every day, want to get into crypto, but think the slippage is too high. If they personally step in to lead the round, I don’t think it’s just to earn the small amount of token-unlocking money. It feels more like buying a “VIP entrance ticket” into a fixed-interest-rate track.
Why do I say that? Look at TermMax’s mainnet running for a year: TVL reached 90 million, spanning 10 chains, and daily active users exceeded 170,000. Those numbers are impressive even in a bear market—but what I care about more is the “turnover test” after the TGE. The brothers who farm those points during the points period—are they truly real users or just locusts? After August 25th, within a week or so, they mostly show their true colors.
Back to the product itself. This fixed interest rate thing—I’ve always believed in DeFi it’s a “must-have within must-haves.” If you let an institution hold tens of millions of dollars in Aave to earn floating interest every year, can they really sleep at night? For those finance elites who need capital planning, locking in the yield in advance matters more than gaining a couple extra percentage points.
But the problem is also clear: Pendle really has grabbed user mindshare tightly. If TermMax wants to seize some of that opportunity, telling stories alone won’t be enough. It depends on whether Cumberland can directly connect market-making depth to TermMax’s pools. If they can, this isn’t just a simple investment relationship—it’s a bundled “full family bucket” at the business level: liquidity, institutional channels, and risk-control models all provided together. The leverage effect of that $6.8 million would be multiplied many times over.
So my strategy is very simple: during the first three days after the launch, I’m not going to join the commotion. Once gas fees come down and the first wave of selling pressure has been digested, I’ll check whether the protocol’s real revenue can actually cover the incentive costs.
There are plenty of projects that can hype up big dreams, but only those that can tie market makers onto the battlefield and successfully run the real-yield engine are worth my heavy bet.
#termmax @TermMax
How is the big dream project? Why is BTC going up so slowly?
But once you think about it carefully, the lead investor being Cumberland DRW changes the flavor.
If you’ve been in this industry long enough, you have to understand one logic: the money from market makers is never given for free—it carries the “resource-stock” attribute. What is Cumberland connected to behind the scenes? It’s a liquidity entry point for traditional Tier 1 institutions—guys who monitor traditional assets every day, want to get into crypto, but think the slippage is too high. If they personally step in to lead the round, I don’t think it’s just to earn the small amount of token-unlocking money. It feels more like buying a “VIP entrance ticket” into a fixed-interest-rate track.
Why do I say that? Look at TermMax’s mainnet running for a year: TVL reached 90 million, spanning 10 chains, and daily active users exceeded 170,000. Those numbers are impressive even in a bear market—but what I care about more is the “turnover test” after the TGE. The brothers who farm those points during the points period—are they truly real users or just locusts? After August 25th, within a week or so, they mostly show their true colors.
Back to the product itself. This fixed interest rate thing—I’ve always believed in DeFi it’s a “must-have within must-haves.” If you let an institution hold tens of millions of dollars in Aave to earn floating interest every year, can they really sleep at night? For those finance elites who need capital planning, locking in the yield in advance matters more than gaining a couple extra percentage points.
But the problem is also clear: Pendle really has grabbed user mindshare tightly. If TermMax wants to seize some of that opportunity, telling stories alone won’t be enough. It depends on whether Cumberland can directly connect market-making depth to TermMax’s pools. If they can, this isn’t just a simple investment relationship—it’s a bundled “full family bucket” at the business level: liquidity, institutional channels, and risk-control models all provided together. The leverage effect of that $6.8 million would be multiplied many times over.
So my strategy is very simple: during the first three days after the launch, I’m not going to join the commotion. Once gas fees come down and the first wave of selling pressure has been digested, I’ll check whether the protocol’s real revenue can actually cover the incentive costs.
There are plenty of projects that can hype up big dreams, but only those that can tie market makers onto the battlefield and successfully run the real-yield engine are worth my heavy bet.
#termmax @TermMax