#termmax @TermMax
I was looking at TermMax vaults today and realized I might have been starting with the wrong number.
APY is the easiest thing to notice, but it doesn’t really tell me what I’m getting into.
Take USDC Vault V2. It shows around $5.82M TVL, 4.36% APY and 75.7% utilization, which means roughly 24.3% of the capital is currently idle.
Then I looked deeper at the allocation.
Around 68.98% is concentrated in a single market, with 92% LLTV.
For me, those numbers say much more about the vault than the APY does. They tell me where the capital is actually going and what kind of risk sits underneath the yield.
That also made me look at how TermMax structures the underlying positions.
A loan isn’t just one big position here. Collateral gets locked and the borrower receives a Gearing Token (GT), while the debt side is separated into a Fixed-Rate Token (FT) and an X Token (XT).
That separation is actually important to me because it makes the exposure easier to understand and trade. Someone who wants fixed-income exposure can hold the FT without taking the whole borrowing position themselves.
Then the vault layer sits on top of that structure.
Curators like MEV Capital and Keyrock can allocate deposits across different term markets, so users don’t have to manually pick every maturity and rate. Even capital waiting to be matched can earn a base yield.
So the more I look at it, the less I want to start with APY.
My checklist is becoming:
Utilization → allocation concentration → LLTV → vault cap → timelock → APY
Because a $50M cap, 24-hour timelock, or concentrated allocation can matter a lot more than whether the APY says 4% or 6%.
I’m starting to think APY should be the last number I use to judge a vault, not the first.
First understand where the capital goes.
Then understand how the position is structured.
Then decide if the yield is actually worth it.
I was looking at TermMax vaults today and realized I might have been starting with the wrong number.
APY is the easiest thing to notice, but it doesn’t really tell me what I’m getting into.
Take USDC Vault V2. It shows around $5.82M TVL, 4.36% APY and 75.7% utilization, which means roughly 24.3% of the capital is currently idle.
Then I looked deeper at the allocation.
Around 68.98% is concentrated in a single market, with 92% LLTV.
For me, those numbers say much more about the vault than the APY does. They tell me where the capital is actually going and what kind of risk sits underneath the yield.
That also made me look at how TermMax structures the underlying positions.
A loan isn’t just one big position here. Collateral gets locked and the borrower receives a Gearing Token (GT), while the debt side is separated into a Fixed-Rate Token (FT) and an X Token (XT).
That separation is actually important to me because it makes the exposure easier to understand and trade. Someone who wants fixed-income exposure can hold the FT without taking the whole borrowing position themselves.
Then the vault layer sits on top of that structure.
Curators like MEV Capital and Keyrock can allocate deposits across different term markets, so users don’t have to manually pick every maturity and rate. Even capital waiting to be matched can earn a base yield.
So the more I look at it, the less I want to start with APY.
My checklist is becoming:
Utilization → allocation concentration → LLTV → vault cap → timelock → APY
Because a $50M cap, 24-hour timelock, or concentrated allocation can matter a lot more than whether the APY says 4% or 6%.
I’m starting to think APY should be the last number I use to judge a vault, not the first.
First understand where the capital goes.
Then understand how the position is structured.
Then decide if the yield is actually worth it.