📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to the second issue in OurNetwork’s two part series on lending protocols. After covering some of the largest players in the DeFi subsector in the first issue, we’re trending slightly down the stack to up-and-comers.

These projects were born in the wake of DeFi mainstays like Aave and Compound, and are exploring alternative models around isolated lending pools, token buyback strategies, order book-based lending, among other initiatives. While it may not be as easy to keep up in DeFi as it once was, we hope this issue serves to show a little bit about what’s happening in the space, enough to follow your own proverbial rabbitholes. 

Let’s get into it. 

– ON Editorial Team

Fluid | Silo | Yei Finance | Moonwell | Gearbox | Loopscale

• Fluid is a non-custodial lending, vaults, and decentralized exchange protocol developed by Instadapp, the DeFi platform. Since the launch of its decentralized exchange in late 2024, the protocol has experienced a significant surge in key performance metrics. Over the past months, Fluid has seen its monthly active users grow exponentially, reaching a peak of over 60,000 users in March 2025. This growth aligns with the sharp increase in total value locked (TVL), which surpassed $1.8B.

• Ethereum has maintained over 85% of Fluid's TVL, serving as the primary blockchain for the protocol. The Layer 2 Arbitrum accounts for 7.5%, while Base holds 3.7%, reflecting their smaller roles. Polygon, integrated in March 2025, represents 2.67% of TVL, showing early adoption of Fluid across multiple chains.

• In the past 30 days, Fluid's top lending pools show a yield-capital allocation divergence. High yields are seen in mid-sized pools like USDT on Polygon (7.99%) and Arbitrum (7.35%), and USDC on Polygon (6.67%). Larger pools on Ethereum —USDT and USDC— offer lower yields but attract most liquidity.

• Silo v2 markets launched on the Layer 1 Sonic in late January 2025. Silo v2 offers high-yield, isolated lending markets for any ERC20 tokens with immutable risk assumptions, eliminating changes from risk managers or governance that could alter risk profiles. Unlike other isolated lending markets such as Morpho, Silo markets are two-sided, allowing borrowers to earn interest on their deposits, which enhances borrowing efficiency.

• Silo's North Star metric is active loans. Active loans reached an all-time high (ATH) of $290M. We attribute this growth to Silo v2’s fully flexible market creation, high efficiency for borrowers due to interest-earning collateral, and the absence of centralized control (no admin keys or risk managers).

• With risk isolation central to its design and both assets in a market generating yield, Silo v2 lending markets have achieved one of the highest utilization rates among lending protocols, peaking at 61%.

• Monthly active users on Sonic peaked at approximately 12,500. With the launch of Silo Vaults this month, we anticipate a significant increase in user numbers.

Yei Finance is a secure and reliable lending platform built on the Sei blockchain, originating as a fork of Aave. It's the largest lending protocol on Sei, leading in TVL. Since early 2025, active wallets holding balances on Yei increased by over 88%, while wallets interacting with the protocol rose by 66%, reaching 181k, highlighting strong user adoption and platform growth.

• After an outstanding netflow in March 2025—$47M, 30 times higher than February and a ATH record for Yei Finance—utilization hit an all-time low of 35%, now slightly recovered to 38%. This shift was due to a rapid increase in TVL combined with a drop in borrowing activity, signaling growth challenges.

• April hit an ATH record of 55k monthly active users (MAU), which is a +226% clip month-over-month, yet churn rate rose, revealing “one-touch” users—wallets interact once, then disappear. Growth looks incentive-driven; without stickier utility the spike risks fading fast.

• Moonwell, a lending protocol, is pushing the envelope in onchain lending by pioneering protocol-owned revenue mechanisms like Oracle Extracted Value (OEV) auctions and buyback strategies for WELL, Moonwell's native token. These buybacks help to recapture maximally extracted value (MEV) for the protocol and recycle surplus revenue into tokenholder-aligned incentives. Moonwell’s monthly fees grew nearly by a factor of 20 in 2024, climbing from $100k in January to $1.99M in December, making it one of the highest revenue generating protocols on the Base and OP Mainnet networks.

• Moonwell recently surpassed 100,000 unique WELL tokenholders on Base—a key milestone in protocol decentralization. This rapid growth reflects rising global interest in onchain lending and Moonwell’s expanding community footprint.

• Moonwell’s TVL grew by a multiple of 14 in 2024—from $38.75M to $554.7M—driven by deep liquidity and rising demand for Base-native markets like cbBTC, MORPHO, AERO, and VVV. This growth underscores Moonwell’s emergence as a trusted, foundational layer for onchain lending on the Optimism Superchain.

• Gearbox's TVL, denominated in ETH, grew 144% year-to-date, from 32k ETH to 78k ETH. The largest contributor to TVL growth were dedicated institutional instances deployed by the liquid staking protocol Lido and K3 Capital, contributing 24.5k ETH to Gearbox's TVL. During the same period, Gearbox onboarded seven new integrations which further added 10.5k ETH to TVL. The institutional instances are a key part of Gearbox's upcoming permissionless transition.

• With the new integrations and institutions onboarded, Gearbox Protocol has generated $2.4M in fees. The protocol earned $490k while lenders earned $1.9M year-to-date. During the same period, the protocol's DAO approved a buyback of GEAR, the lender's token, using 25% of its revenue.

• The increased activity and network effects aided Gearbox in adding 1.2k new users (both borrowers and lenders), increasing the user base by 15%. Owing to the protocol's composability, these users delivered $300M+ in transaction volume across decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

• Loopscale is a modular, order book–based lending protocol on Solana. By replacing pooled liquidity and algorithmic rates with order book matching, Loopscale improves capital efficiency, enables precise risk management, and supports new types of markets that are difficult to achieve with traditional DeFi architectures. Since its launch earlier this month, the number of active loans on Loopscale has grown to 3,600+, driven by demand for novel borrowing products like fixed-rate and fixed-yield loops.

• Loopscale's average USDC fixed borrow rate is 3.60%, 57.5% less than the 30-day market average of 7.77%. This efficiency stems from market-determined rates and per-asset pricing. Eliminating the idle liquidity requirements of pool-based models means better rates for both borrowers and lenders.

• Loopscale Vaults simplify order books, solving for liquidity and complexity without breaking composability. Since the launch of Vaults, active lender count has grown to 4,800, marking 7,000+ total active users & demonstrating how modularity and abstraction primitives enable order book scalability.