Fixed-rate lending has always been one of the most challenging and scarce pieces of on-chain infrastructure, and TermMax has made it work: fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing has been extended to 10 chains and 60 markets, locking in deposits and liquidity worth tens of millions of dollars. Using the same mechanism, tokenized US equities now have access to fixed-rate financing and an on-chain options market for the first time, filling a long-standing gap.
On August 26, the fixed-rate lending protocol TermMax (parent company Term Structure Labs) announced a strategic investment from YZi Labs, with the amount undisclosed. TermMax is a selected project of YZi Labs' incubation program EASY Residency Season 3, raising over $8 million to date. Previous investors include Cumberland DRW, the lead investor of the 2023 seed round, as well as HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital, MZ Web3 Fund, and other institutions.
The protocol launched on the mainnet in April 2025 and is currently operating on 10 EVM-compatible chains, offering 60 fixed-rate markets and 40 strategy vaults, with a total value locked (TVL) of tens of millions of dollars, over 1.5 million registered wallets. The $TMX token completed its TGE on August 25.
Co-founder and CEO Jerry Li has 25 years of experience in global financial markets, having previously served as Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, overseeing Fixed Income and Foreign Exchange business in Greater China. After retiring from the bank in 2022, he founded Term Structure. To him, this is not a technological issue but rather something that should have been done long ago.
"When I left the bank, I saw a 'multibillion-dollar' market 'on-chain' without even a readily observable interest rate curve—something unimaginable in traditional markets—which made me determined to build on-chain infrastructure."
— Jerry Li, Co-founder and CEO of TermMax
Now, the public statements of investors seem to converge on the same gap. On August 14, YZi Labs stated in the application documents for EASY Residency Season 5: while tokenized blue-chip stocks have seen meaningful trading volumes, the broader financial application layer—credit, collateral management, risk transfer, structured products—still lags behind; especially options and other risk transfer products remain a clear gap for tokenized assets.
YZi Labs' strategic foresight has precisely targeted its investment in TermMax, filling this gap.
1. Borrowed On-Chain for Six Years, Yet Never Knew Tomorrow's Interest Rate
The true backbone of modern finance is not money, but the value of time. The global fixed income market has a size of $160.7 trillion, and the notional amount of interest rate derivatives is $668 trillion. The sole reason for the existence of these markets is to help institutions determine the value of money three months, one year, or five years later.
However, on-chain is different. Over 95% of outstanding loans have floating interest rates and no fixed maturity date. When you lend money today, the cost tomorrow could double or halve, and there is no market pricing in this answer.
There are three reasons for this. Fixed interest rates add another dimension of maturity and rate compared to floating rates, causing inherent liquidity fragmentation; market makers are continuously negatively selected in a passive curve, unable to make money, and naturally unwilling to participate; and DeFi borrowers have mainly been leverage traders, focusing on immediate liquidity, making the cost three months later irrelevant to them. With all three factors combined, interest rates and maturity dates have become the two most uncertain variables on-chain.
The solution provided by TermMax is to break down the debt itself. A loan is split into three tradable tokens:
1. FT (Fixed-rate Token, hereinafter referred to as "FT"): Zero-coupon bonds, bought at a discount, redeemed at face value upon maturity, with the difference being fixed income.
2. XT (Interest Token, hereinafter referred to as "XT"): Carries interest or option value, with the sum of XT and FT equaling one unit of debt.
3. GT (Gearing Token, hereinafter referred to as "GT"): ERC-721 voucher that bundles collateral from a leveraged position with the debt record, to be destroyed upon repayment.
This untangles the most criticized aspect of fixed interest rates—what is locked is the interest rate, not liquidity, as positions can be bought and sold on the secondary market at any time.
As for the two architectural challenges, the answer lies in the market-making layer. When TermMax's Curator manages liquidity in the treasury, the same funds can simultaneously place valid quotes in multiple markets, multiple orders—here, mirrored orders of equal amounts are placed, rather than dividing the funds into ten portions used in ten different markets. Once an order in a market is filled, the amounts of the remaining mirrored orders are atomically deducted, maximizing capital efficiency.
This step has broken down the fragmented multiplicative relationship. Fixed-rate assets naturally have to open up a significant market in the three dimensions of "Asset × Maturity Date × Rate". If each market has to pre-allocate dedicated funds, liquidity is destined to be spread thin— the previous generation of protocols could not overcome this liquidity dilemma. Mirror orders allow markets to share quotes, and the increase in the number of markets no longer dilutes the depth of a single market, with the turnover rate of the same capital also increased by an order of magnitude.
Today, TermMax can run 60 markets simultaneously on 10 chains, relying on exactly this. Professional institutions such as Keyrock, Hard Core Lab Capital, Edge Capital, and Origami are willing to serve as Curators on TermMax, managing their own strategic treasuries, which is validation of this structure in itself.
Settlement is done through physical delivery: collateral is directly delivered to the borrower without entering the market for sale. Traditional settlement relies on the assumption that the collateral can be sold on the open market at a fair price, which holds for assets with abundant liquidity such as ETH, but not for tokenized stocks with on-chain depths of only a few million US dollars. Physical delivery is the true prerequisite for tokenized assets to become eligible collateral for financing.
After resolving these issues, on-chain assets finally have a bond market of their own for the first time. And what TermMax aims to do goes far beyond that.
II. Tokenized US Stocks: Financeable and Hedgeable
Tokenized stocks have been the fastest-growing asset class in the past year, with an on-chain scale of $24.8 billion and a 165% increase in the number of holders in the last thirty days.
Since the end of last year, TermMax has been integrating these assets into the fixed-rate market: in January 2026, it integrated Ondo Global Markets, launching the first fixed-rate lending market with tokenized US stocks as collateral; it then integrated bStock, an equity token issued by Binance; on August 12, it officially launched the Robinhood Chain, supporting borrowing USDG using tokenized stocks such as QQQ, SPY, and NVDA as collateral.
However, financing is only half of how these assets are truly utilized. The other half is hedging, which is still missing to this day.
On the traditional market side, the US options market has been setting records for the sixth consecutive year: 2025 saw a trading volume of 15.26 billion contracts, a year-on-year increase of 24.3%; from 2026 to date, the average daily trading volume is 71.1 million contracts. Zero-day expiration options have accounted for 65% of the S&P 500 index options volume, a number that was only 22% four years ago; in terms of client daily trading volume, retail traders contribute two-thirds. Options are no longer the exclusive domain of Wall Street institutions; they have become a native tool for retail traders.
However, what has been built this year for tokenized stocks is almost exclusively perpetual contract platforms. Ondo's stock perpetual platform went live in July, achieving a total trading volume of $80 billion in five weeks, while Kraken and Crypto.com have each introduced their own versions. The demand has been adequately validated by the market. Yet, to this day, there is still no on-chain options market for tokenized stocks.
TermMax has extended the capabilities of the cryptocurrency options market to tokenized stocks, filling precisely this gap. The protocol's launch of TermMax Alpha provides an options market with no settlement before expiry: the strike price is fixed at the opening of the position and does not fluctuate with the market price. Therefore, positions are not subject to liquidation due to mid-trade price swings, only settling in kind at the strike price upon expiry. For an asset class that has just been tokenized and still has thin on-chain liquidity, this is particularly crucial—it ensures that users will not be liquidated from a position that was initially correct due to a few minutes of liquidity gap.
Same underlying mechanism, same set of collaterals, pricing time on one side, volatility on the other.
III. The Institutional Side: Public Prices and Private Counterparties
In addition to retail-oriented products, TermMax has also presented its solution to the institutional side. The institutional platform, TermPrime, operated by the same team, completed its first live trade on the Canton Network at the end of June this year: BitSafe and HashKey Cloud acted as counterparties, borrowing Canton Coin with CBTC as collateral, executing a seven-day borrowing-lending-repayment cycle, and repaying in advance before the expiry. The matching takes place on TermPrime's public order book, with settlement handled by the Canton native synchronizer, with assets remaining throughout in each institution's custody wallets. Currently, TermPrime's counterparty network has expanded to nine institutions, including digital asset market makers, private credit funds, tokenized security issuers, and credit platforms.
TermPrime's decision to enter from the institutional side was not accidental. As an early validator on Canton, the team saw an already operational market: in July alone, Franklin Templeton and Tradeweb conducted on-chain transactions of tens of billions in government bonds on Canton, showcasing the real and ongoing fixed-rate financing demand between institutions. TermPrime isn't creating demand from scratch but is instead efficiently capturing this demand—allowing institutions to transact with counterparties they are already familiar with, leveraging existing protocols and approved credit limits, where price discovery is public, but the identity and transaction size of the counterparties are only visible to the transacting parties.
This is not a technical preference, but whether institutions can really move their business onto the chain. Institutions can accept the market knowing the price of a seven-day term fund, but cannot accept the market knowing who is borrowing and how much.
Security is another concern for institutions. TermPrime has partnered with Immunefi to squarely address this concern; on the other hand, TermMax Protocol has completed the Cantina/Spearbit public audit competition, featuring Immunefi bug bounties and Hypernative 24/7 monitoring, a DeFiSafety process quality score of 93%, on par with Aave V3.
Connecting these dots, TermMax's complete blueprint points in three directions:
1. Yield Curve: Allowing the same asset to have a tradable quote for 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, and 180 days simultaneously, growing a market-driven on-chain yield curve rather than a protocol-defined one;
2. TermMax: Bridging fixed-rate financing with a non-custodial options market, applicable to tokenized equities;
3. TermPrime: Under the premises of privacy and security, enabling institutions to use the same tools on-chain as they do in the traditional rate market.
These three directions point to the same goal: enabling the on-chain presence of an observable, tradable, and hedgable time price. Once this curve is established, traditional financial actions such as forwards, hedges, and forex swaps that are common in traditional financial institutions can be implemented on-chain. TermMax aims not to be another lending protocol but the interest rate curve of on-chain assets itself — completing the final piece of the puzzle missing in DeFi.
“What we aim to do is not to teach traditional financial institutions about DeFi but to make DeFi more professional, to truly serve finance.”
— Jerry Li, Co-Founder and CEO of TermMax
IV. TGE Day 1: Bringing This Matter to the Forefront
$TMX completed its Token Generation Event on August 25, listing on platforms such as Binance Alpha, Kraken, Bitget, KuCoin, and MEXC on the first day. Concurrently, TermMax ranked 2nd on RootData's DeFi Heat Ranking, received an A transparency rating, and entered the top 5 on CoinMarketCap's 24-hour trending list.
However, the launch was just the beginning. The real test lies ahead: a market-clearing interest rate curve that requires sufficient tenors, deep enough quotes, and real enough trades to stand up, something that cannot be achieved with just one release. But at least the problem has been put in the right place for the first time—not to teach DeFi to borrow faster, but to teach it to answer "how much is the money worth in three months."
About TermMax
TermMax is a fixed-rate, fixed-term lending market developed by Term Structure Labs, which went live on the mainnet in April 2025 and is currently deployed on 10 EVM-compatible chains, running 60 fixed-rate markets and 40 strategic vaults. The protocol splits debt into tradable FT (Principal), XT (Interest and Option Value), and GT (Leveraged Position Certificate) tokens. Professional Curators set target rate ranges in isolated markets and manage strategic vaults, with settlement done through physical delivery. Co-founder and CEO Jerry Li has 25 years of experience in global financial markets, having previously served as Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, overseeing Fixed Income and FX business in Greater China.
Website: ts.finance
About YZi Labs
YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Their investment philosophy emphasizes "impact-first" and believes that meaningful returns will follow. YZi Labs invests in projects at various stages, focusing on teams with solid fundamentals in the Web3, AI, and biotech sectors. Their portfolio spans over 300 projects in more than 25 countries across six continents, with key investments including Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, SafePal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, and XAI, among others. Over 65 portfolio companies have participated in their incubation program.
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
