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By the end of 2025, DeFi looked less like a single market and more like a layered financial system. More protocols adopted explicit value capture through revenue sharing, burns, buybacks, or staking-linked distribution. A smaller subset held meaningful stablecoin buffers and diversified reserves, enabling steadier operations and more credible institutional posture. A small set of DAOs held the bulk of observable onchain treasury capital, while the long tail operated with limited runway. Governance increasingly functioned as a control layer for risk management, value capture activation, and crisis response, rather than a forum for continuous iteration. Allocation design differentiates sharply between tiers, and claim timing has become a key lever that shapes how supply enters markets and how price discovery forms.

• The distinction reflects different priorities rather than execution quality.
• At the end of 2024, the platform was anchored almost entirely in USDe and blue-chip crypto assets.
• Solana was the only general-purpose chain to remain a top-five venue in 2025 with $424B in volume, supported by its high throughput, low fees, and single shared state.
• A growing share of protocol fees was finally redirected to tokenholders, and the market began rewarding those tokens whose economic design translated operating performance into actual financial return.
• A second tier of growth formed in high-velocity trading environments, where stablecoins increasingly behaved like working capital for issuance funnels, spot routing, and derivatives margin.

Yield markets continued to mature in 2025, with PT and YT instruments becoming core tools for treasuries, trading firms and structured-product protocols. Fee growth largely tracked borrowing activity and rate settings, but the dispersion across protocols highlights growing differences in capital efficiency. Its vault-based structure allows large allocators to tailor risk and yield more precisely, aligning with the broader move away from one-size-fits-all pooled markets.

A critical criterion is the degree to which risk assessment relies on off-chain information. LSTs, LRTs, and RWAs introduce very different forms of technical, operational, and legal risk, so suitability depends on how transparent and predictable those risks are, especially under stress. Conservative strategies should have explainable, observable, and controllable risk exposure, at least to a high degree of certainty. In that sense, the distinction is not the sophistication of the strategies, but rather the presence of an actual investment process behind them, one that looks more like portfolio management and less like yield farming. Governance becomes process-driven rather than reactive, enforced through automatic execution pipelines, and users are given visibility into asset allocation. Issuance captures attention, attention fuels trading, trading expands derivatives demand, and derivatives positioning shifts with event probabilities.

Credit, Yield, Staking, Restaking, And RWA Collateral

The expectation of instant exit liquidity forces protocols to reconcile user convenience with the reality that many yield sources are inherently term-based. These differences reflect not just market conditions but the underlying risk stack, and highlight exactly why a consistent rating framework is necessary before mixing these assets at scale. Permissionless lending markets like Aave and Morpho typically price senior stablecoin credit around the 4–7% range depending on utilization. Prediction markets complete the stack by acting as an information and catalyst layer. Activity rotates rapidly between issuance, spot markets and derivatives, but it does so within a coherent execution environment that is far more efficient than in previous cycles.

As costs continue to fall and innovation spreads, end users will benefit the most through better pricing, improved execution and higher reliability. The same dynamic is emerging across other verticals, where protocols are increasingly forced toward greater efficiency and more user-aligned models. With regulatory clarity improving across major jurisdictions, the conditions for sustainable growth are clearer than at any point since the sector emerged. Infrastructure has become cheaper, more efficient and more secure, creating an environment where applications can scale without being constrained by execution costs. Lido demonstrated this early by charging a fee on staking rewards, but for smaller protocols high infrastructure costs once made this approach difficult to sustain.

Despite the growth and diversification of activity in 2025, value capture within DeFi remained heavily concentrated. B2B settlements between exchanges, liquidity providers and fintech platforms 888 Starz are increasingly moving onchain, with early signs extending to trade finance, ecommerce payouts and treasury operations. As global interest-rate dynamics shift, competition between issuers and protocols around yield-bearing structures is likely to intensify.

Lending TVL grew from about $1.0B to $3.1B, its share of chain TVL nearly doubled, and fees jumped from $13.5M to $69.5M. Stablecoins could shift toward Bitcoin backed reserves or blended reserve structures that reduce reliance on a single collateral type. A meaningful increase in BTC participation would reshape collateral quality across the ecosystem. That means structured credit, term lending, conservative perps, real-yield vaults such as infrastructure, not reflexive incentives. Hemi provides this through auditable trust boundaries and settlement behavior rooted in Bitcoin rather than in a custodian, giving conservative holders a way to participate without sacrificing their risk profile. From a risk perspective, how should conservative BTC holders think about the step from custodial or ETF exposure into participation in BTC based DeFi, and what disclosures or tooling help them make that decision rationally?

These formats provided predictable onboarding, defined legal rights, and standardised reporting, which remained difficult to obtain from open onchain markets. The broader market reaction is visible when looking at how many protocols actually share revenue with tokenholders. Across the 20 largest onchain treasuries, the average asset mix is approximately 58% native tokens, 14% stablecoins, and 29% other cryptoassets such as ETH and BTC. It analyses how onchain treasuries are capitalised, how assets are allocated, and how liquidity is managed across leading ecosystems. For end users, this has translated into materially better execution outcomes on blue-chip assets and stablecoins.

This improves execution quality for users but concentrates pricing power and flow control into a narrow institutional layer. While public AMMs still serve retail and long-tail trading, the majority of high-value stablecoin, ETH and BTC flow now routes through a small set of solvers and RFQ market makers. Relative to 2024, the defining change in 2025 is that Solana’s MEV market expanded dramatically in activity while compressing in economic density. Validators capture the dominant observable share of MEV through tips, while searchers compete in a continuous real-time priority market for execution. This design produces a MEV economy that resembles high-frequency trading more than batch auction blockspace markets.

At the same time, stablecoins continued to serve as the reference asset for onchain finance. The growth of crypto cards, merchant onramps and direct checkout options made stablecoins far easier to spend. Users leaned toward safer fiat-backed assets, while institutions embraced yield-bearing models that turned digital dollars into productive capital. At the same time, a new class of networks is emerging that redefines settlement around stablecoins entirely.

How to Use the Unbound Finance Testnet?

The fund will expand indefinitely as a percentage of all minting fees are assigned. The most significant aspect of utilizing LPT tokens as collateral is calculating the impermanent or divergence loss that could decrease the collateral’s value. The platform provides liquidity to AMM LPTs and issues a Stablecoin (UND) in the form of a minted token.

Third, prediction markets unlocked a new form of event-driven user behaviour. Three developments in 2025 demonstrated why prediction markets are no longer a curiosity but a structural information engine. This maturation positions onchain perps to attract institutional participation in a way that was not realistic in 2021–2023. For the first time, professional market makers and funds can participate meaningfully onchain at scale.

Hyperliquid Layer 1 nearly doubled its stablecoin supply from $1.9 billion to $3.8 billion, while Plasma entered the top ten shortly after its September launch with $3.8 billion in average balances. New execution-focused entrants continued to reach meaningful scale. Among DeFi-native networks, Solana recorded the fastest expansion in stablecoin supply. Ethereum continues to function as the primary DeFi-native monetary layer. Stablecoin supply remains the clearest proxy for persistent economic activity in DeFi, but the distribution across chains reflects two distinct usage patterns.

Automation and agent based systems are increasingly used for monitoring and execution; what new categories of risk or misconfiguration do you think the industry underestimates when it delegates day to day management to agents? Meanwhile, short-duration RWA Treasury products have recently been yielding 3–5% on fully collateralized U.S. Goldfinch; Maple often offer 9–13% yields for diversified senior or senior-secured pools, with higher rates for mezzanine or emerging-market exposure. We can already see meaningful dispersion in onchain credit yields. We’re seeing this happening already in our curated vaults, where most of their supply/borrow liquidity is coming from yield aggregator vaults and liquid funds.