Browse All Research Publications

Customer balances are shifting toward on-chain dollar returns due to competitive deposit rates and easier accessibility. These customers prefer to stay with their existing providers, so product owners are now facing a retention challenge. Here’s how they can turn that to their advantage.

Open USD launched at the end of September as a new stablecoin standard backed by major payment companies. Today, Sentora is launching a Morpho OUSD vault on Tempo that lends OUSD against cbBTC collateral in an isolated market.

Over the next two decades, approximately $124 trillion in United States wealth will pass to beneficiaries who already favor non-traditional financial products. Banks holding these assets risk losing them unless they offer the services next-generation account holders prefer.

Chainlink launched CCIP Vault Adapters on October 8, announcing access to vaults from more than 80 supported blockchains. Deposits can reach a vault on its home chain without requiring users to bridge and deposit separately. The model separates a strategy's operating location from its depositor base, with Aave, Lombard, and RockawayX among the announced adopters. In this issue, we examine how the adapters work and what wider distribution does, and does not, change.

This report explores the architecture, execution strategies, and operational risk controls behind Sentora Smart Vaults on Fordefi, detailing how institutional-grade DeFi yield is systematically monitored and managed.

Tokenization gives decentralized finance markets a source of yield and collateral from outside digital assets. Here’s how they expand on-chain credit, and how markets and risk frameworks adapt.

Tokenized real-world assets are one of the fastest-growing areas of crypto, but only a small share of them is used as collateral in DeFi lending. On 1 October, Morpho, Kamino and Aave held $2.2 billion of RWA collateral, with $1.66 billion borrowed against it. Most of that collateral is credit. Loans to off-chain borrowers and crypto-linked credit, led by Maple's syrup tokens, make up about a third each, while tokenized Treasuries are barely 1%. Morpho holds half the total, and almost all borrowing is in dollar stablecoins. The average position runs at a 75% loan-to-value ratio, and syrup token loops run at 85–90%, a few points from liquidation. Leveraged positions net roughly 10–12% on the borrower's own capital. Those returns depend on thin gaps between collateral yields and borrow rates, and in some markets on incentives.

Behind every tokenized asset sits one of four core legal structures, each defining precisely what the holder owns. Understanding these differences enables treasury and product teams to evaluate positions according to their institutional risk policies rather than relying on the asset's title alone.

Kamino’s xStocks Market on Solana enables 24/7 overcollateralized stablecoin borrowing and yield generation without selling underlying stock positions.

The Eurosystem's Pontes service connects distributed ledger platforms to TARGET Services, so the cash side of a tokenized securities trade settles in central bank money.

This week's issue looks at Arc, the Layer-1 blockchain Circle launched on September 16 as what CEO Jeremy Allaire called "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself". We cover four angles: what Arc actually is and how it's designed, the DeFi liquidity that has landed there in its first ten days, the stablecoin and tokenized-asset story Circle is building around it, and the open questions that will determine whether Arc becomes real onchain infrastructure or stays a well-funded TVL magnet.

Recent market data confirms that tokenized private credit faces severe structural limitations as DeFi collateral. Empirical evidence validates how stale NAV marks, illiquid redemption machinery, and procyclical correlation make private credit ill-suited for on-chain leverage.

Spark's stablecoin FX layer has traded billions across its Uniswap v4 pools since it opened on June 25, and it now quotes three issuers against USDS. The design behind it is DualPool, an open-source Uniswap v4 hook that holds pool inventory in lending vaults between trades and withdraws it only for the length of a swap.

On rwa.xyz, tokenized real-world assets excluding stablecoins first closed above $39 billion on September 4 and sat at $39.15 billion as of September 8, with 3.58M unique holders, up 108.93% in 30 days. Distributed value over that same window rose 1.54%. On the other hand, Hyperliquid put HIP-3* on testnet: an optional flag, set when a builder-deployed perp venue is created, that adds an onchain wallet allowlist and a short list of proxied operator actions. Existing HIP-3 markets stay open.

EURR has distribution. What it needs now is demand. The next challenge for Revolut is turning euro balances into productive market infrastructure through lending, settlement, and carefully governed deployment.

Aave Horizon is one of the largest dedicated RWA lending markets onchain, with roughly $390M in TVL and $134M in active loans. It lets qualified investors supply permissioned tokenized assets as collateral, while stablecoin liquidity remains permissionless.