Proud to announce our $5.5m Strategic Round led by @electriccapital with participation from @MaelstromFund, @Arete_xyz, @Deltabc_fund, @_inceptioncap, @BlizzardFund and others.

In a fixed-rate lending vault, what’s a share worth before the loans backing it mature? If someone withdraws today, should they get none of the unrealized interest? All of it? Or somewhere in between? Every on-chain fixed-rate portfolio eventually has to answer this question. We answered it last year: Term Strategy Vaults have been live in production since February 2025, and as fixed-rate adoption grows, the problem they solve is about to become everyone's problem. So it's worth explaining what they are. The Term Strategy Vault is tokenized fixed-income portfolio whose NAV, maturity profile, credit eligibility, and concentration limits are calculated and enforced by the smart contracts themselves. While this logic was first implemented in an ERC-4626 vault, the portfolio management logic is not limited to ERC-4626 and can be ported more generally. Why is this complexity needed? Fixed-rate portfolios are more complex than floating-rate loans carried at par. Because capital is locked for a defined term and the interest rate is fixed, portfolio construction requires explicit parameters and constraints around maturity, credit, and concentration. And once liquidity is committed, positions cannot be easily rebalanced back toward target allocations. Curators therefore need to answer—and have a mechanism for enforcing—a set of fundamental portfolio management questions: * How far out am i willing to extend liquidity, on average, across the book? * Do we have enough short-term liquidity to handle sudden withdrawals? * What kinds of collateral do I accept, and what haircuts do I require for each of them? * What level of diversification do I want to maintian across loans in the book? * How do I enforce these constraints in permissionless markets? On the depositor side there is also a unique question to be answered when making withdrawal: * What is the "fair" valuation of a share backed by loans that are yet to mature? Should depositors receive none of the unrealized interest, all of it, or somewhere in between? The answers to these questions are well-trodden in TradFi and the math is mostly not difficult in isolation. Portfolios are generally marked at NAV, with assets valued based on market price where available, or discounted to present value using an estimated interest rate curve where market prices are unavailable. While the math for calculating present value (PV) given an interest rate is trivial, determining what curve represents fair value, interpolating maturities, handling stale or missing oracle observations, and dealing with precision and rounding is where it gets tricky. That implementation complexity is the part we think is most interesting. To our knowledge, Term Strategy Vaults are the first onchain implementation of this kind of fixed-income portfolio management framework: marking fixed-rate loans to NAV while enforcing maturity, collateral, margin, and concentration constraints directly in smart contracts. The contracts are fully open source here: github.com/term-finance/year… Over coming days, I’ll dig into some of the individual pieces, starting with how we built the interest-rate oracles used to value loans before maturity.

Three years of building fixed-rate markets taught us that matching borrowers and lenders is only part of the problem. Capital must remain productive until terms align—and become reachable when it is time to execute. That is the architecture behind Term V2. Today, it is live.

Great chat with @0xJChang and the @Aptos team. At @term_labs we've been locked in to bringing usable and scalable fixed-rate lending to DeFi since the beginning and will continue to push that vision: Terminal 1 (soon) is the next evolution of that promise -- open markets + robust loan management tools so liquidity can actually move where it's needed.

The biggest names in DeFi lending are launching fixed-rate products. Good — it's where credit markets were always going. But matching a fixed-rate order is the easy part. Getting liquidity to actually show up — and routing collateral from wherever it already lives — is the hard part. That's the part we built. Terminal 1 beta is live. Come test 👇 beta.term.finance/order-mark…

Fixed-rate lending is ultimately about commitment. If users are locking capital into a rate and a term, the market structure should be inspectable end-to-end: contracts, risk assumptions, settlement mechanics, and audits. Readable infrastructure is how DeFi earns trust.

Vitalik’s options-based stablecoin framing is interesting because it doesn’t eliminate liquidation risk so much as move the responsibility. Instead of an oracle/liquidation engine protecting the system in real time, P holders have to manage downside, maturity, and roll risk themselves. If ETH tanks and the “stablecoin” holder is not quick to react or rebalance, they are the one left holding the bag. Different failure mode. Not no failure mode. ethresear.ch/t/building-inde…

USDC borrow rates averaged 4.77% over 30 days. Intraday spikes hit 13%. That's not a rate. That's a range. Institutions building around financing cost need a number, not a distribution. Weekly recap → open.substack.com/pub/termfi…

Everyone's excited about RWAs coming onchain. Here's what nobody's saying: RWAs are fixed-rate instruments. Treasuries, bonds, credit facilities — defined terms, defined yields. You're importing fixed-rate assets into a variable-rate lending environment. That's not a solution. That's a mismatch.

Digital Assets Week starts in New York today. One theme I’ll be watching: as more yield-bearing assets move onchain, fixed-rate rails become harder to ignore. Borrowers do not just need liquidity against those assets. They need predictable financing costs. If you’re in town, would be great to connect.

Just got back from Consensus Miami. One theme that repeatedly surfaced across institutional, RWA, and DeFi conversations: fixed-rate infrastructure is increasingly being viewed as a necessary layer for DeFi’s next stage of maturity. Over the past cycle, most onchain users have operated in an environment of constantly shifting rates, unstable carry, and strategies that can break simply due to utilization volatility. As tokenized yield-bearing assets, private credit, and real-world yield products continue to grow, that model becomes increasingly difficult to scale. Fixed-rate structures solve a different problem than simply “higher yield.” They introduce: • clarity around financing costs • defined maturity outcomes • more stable liability management • and the beginnings of a unified benchmark curve for onchain credit markets In many ways, this mirrors the role fixed income markets play in TradFi: creating predictability that allows larger pools of capital to actually plan around the system. The broader takeaway from Miami was that DeFi is slowly shifting from purely maximizing yield toward building durable financial infrastructure.

Seeing repeat inbound for USDC borrows against yield-bearing collateral. ~$4M vs @infiniFi's siUSD is just one recent example. Consistent theme: borrowers can't plan around variable rates. Fixed-term demand is growing.

With Aave markets now effectively frozen on rsETH exposure and liquidity evaporating, we’re seeing the textbook failure mode of open-ended variable-rate pools play out in real time. 1. Shared collateral pools socialize risk across unrelated positions — one compromised LST quickly becomes bad debt that contaminates the entire market. 2. 100% utilization triggers violent rate spikes that punish legitimate borrowers exactly when they need stability most. 3. Without hard maturity dates, bad debt lingers indefinitely, distorting pricing and trapping liquidity. Term was built around fixed-term loans and fully isolated collateral pools, designed precisely to avoid this class of contagion. Maturity enforces clean resolution: repay or liquidate, no zombie positions, no cross-position spill-over. Worth keeping in mind for anyone actively borrowing or lending against yield-bearing assets right now.

Great update. This is the way Term has been since Day 1. Good to see the market catching up.