Solving the Cold-Start Problem in Fixed-Rate Lending
This excerpt is from our research on Fixed-Rate Lending: Market Structure and Protocol Design, highlighting new and emerging designs in the category.
DeFi & Onchain Finance
DeFi is becoming the operating layer for digital asset finance: vaults, lending markets, stablecoins, tokenised collateral, and structured yield products. Castle Labs tracks the infrastructure making that transition real, from Morpho and Aave to the curator model, RWA collateral, and the products that connect offchain capital to onchain execution. The reader question is practical: which systems are becoming durable financial infrastructure, and which are still yield theatre?
$35.2B
tracked vault stack TVL
$11.0B
Morpho TVL
13
core protocols tracked
Sources: DeFiLlama protocol data (2026-11-01).
Latest DeFi Research
Showing 1-12 of 38 articles
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·Deep DivesTrading
Metric: The Next-Gen DEX
Liquidity Providers (LPs) on Decentralised Exchanges (DEXs) have long faced a structural problem during market movements: as prices move on Centralised Exchanges (CEXs), which are hubs for spot liquidity and perform price discovery, DEXs still quote prices before the market moves, giving arbitrageur
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·RWAsDeFi
Re and the Case for Reinsurance Yield Onchain
Most onchain RWA yield today comes from short-dated US Treasuries (T-bills), wrapped in over 100 tokenised treasury products, including BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, Ondo’s OUSG, and Franklin’s BENJI. Cumulatively, they represent $14.7 billion, or 38% of total onchain RWAs, and are among the mos
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·DeFiMarkets
M0: Building the Internet Dollar with Laert Skreli
Stablecoins are becoming app-specific dollars.
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·Deep DivesOptions
Mapping Onchain Options: Exchanges, Binaries and Yield Products
Onchain options in three families: Derive and Paradex order books, binary markets on Polymarket, Kalshi and HIP-4, and option yield products from Rysk and Hegic.
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·DeFiMarkets
Inside EtherFi: Growing a Neobank with Mike Silagadze
EtherFi has been one of the fastest-growing neobanks for both crypto natives and retail users.
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·DeFiMarkets
Fixed Rate Lending is coming to DeFi with Bitwise, KPK and Tenor Finance
Today, the lending category has $28.5 billion in active loans, and almost all of that demand comes from variable-rate lending.
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·RWAsDeFi
Putting RWAs to work in DeFi
The growth of RWAs has led to over $32 billion of assets flowing onchain.
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·RWAsDeFi
Composable TradFi: RWAs in DeFi
Only about $3 billion of the $28 billion RWA market is used in DeFi. How Pendle, Morpho, Aave, Kamino and Fluid use RWAs, and the new redemption tools.
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·RWAsDeep Dives
RWAs: A Blueprint for the Future of Mantle
Tokenised stocks are among the fastest-growing RWAs, with $1.6 billion distributed. How Mantle and Bybit built issuance, trading and redemption onchain.
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·Deep DivesDeFi
Vaults: The Infrastructure Layer for Institutional Finance Onchain
Eight onchain vault categories, TVL by curator, and how lending, restaking, RWA and options vaults held up through the Stream, Resolv and Kelp blowups.
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·DeFiMarkets
From Neobanks to Onchain Banks
How crypto cards and onchain banks work, from Visa's $3.5B stablecoin card run rate to ether.fi Cash, Tria, Superform and Plasma One, and the regulatory gaps.
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·RWAsDeFi
69 Trillion: The Tokenisation Opportunity
How tokenised stocks work across Ondo Global Markets, Kraken's xStocks and Hyperliquid perps, chasing a $69 trillion US equity market. Ondo holds $2.47b in TVL.
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