ON–176: RWA Mega Issue 🌍 💥
Coverage on Tokenized US Treasuries, Goldfinch, Maple Finance, Centrifuge, Polygon RWAs, and Clearpool.
Jul 21, 2023
About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor & onchain analyst.
Editor’s note 📝 : OurNetwork is looking for its first newsletter sponsor in 2 ½ years. Those interested should DM me on Telegram or shoot me an email: s@ournetwork.xyz.
- This tokenized asset sector is having its debut year. From $1T+ asset managers like Franklin Templeton (FT) to startups like Ondo Finance, companies have issued over $600M in tokenized US treasuries. Looking at the chart below, we see large deposits into FT’s Tokenized Treasury Product (aka $BENJI; see green area below). Ondo (purple) is steadily rising to over $100M in deposits; and Maple (orange) is also emerging.
- Almost 50% of all tokenized treasury products are issued on Stellar, with the other half issued on Ethereum. Traditional financial institutions such as Franklin Templeton and Wisdom Tree chose Stellar for their projects, while most startups chose Ethereum as their base chain.
- From a tokenized treasuries “yield curve” plot, we see that most treasuries are of a short duration—around 0.25 years. Two outliers exist farther out on the curve at almost 2 years. The distribution of these dots is expected to mirror the US Treasuries yield curve, discounted by some blockchain risk.
- 🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This transaction represents the power of DeFi composability. Here we see a deposit of Matrixdock's short term tokenized treasury into a Curve pool. It is a landmark interaction between a purely DeFi-native primitive with one of the oldest financial assets—treasuries.
- Goldfinch is a private credit platform using the blockchain to enhance deals for investors and borrowers. Its mission is to connect the world's capital to the world's growth. Goldfinch has over $100M of active loans and retains 10% of interest earned. Cumulatively, the Goldfinch DAO earned $2.14M of revenue.
- The 30-day trailing APY sits at 12.5% USDC. This APY represents a composite of investing in all Goldfinch deals. The yield comes from real economic activity across borrowers in over 20 countries with US, Kenya, and Mexico being the top three countries by value of active loans.
- Beyond the returns, Goldfinch has maintained a 0% default rate.
- 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is a first-time user depositing into Goldfinch’s latest pool with Fazz Financial. The pool with Fazz is a “callable” deal (i.e. investors can "call back" full principal every quarter, thus greatly increasing liquidity). This type of deal is uniquely enabled by the blockchain, because smart contracts handle all disbursements to an unlimited number of investors anywhere, making it much cheaper and easier for Fazz to handle compared to TradFi.
- Introduced back in May, Maple's USDC Cash Management Pool is designed to cater to non-US DAOs, offshore companies , and HWNIs who want exposure to the 1-month T-bill rate. Since launching, more than $27M in deposits have flowed in, with nearly 60% of lenders having increased their initial positions with an average increase of more than 3x. Within the USDC pool, key stats include 41 loans originated, $113.7M in total value of loans originated, and $92.5M in principal repaid to date.
- Looking at wallets that have exited the pool without opening new deposits, roughly 13,000 USDC was accrued cumulatively across all addresses with a total of nearly 4.5M USDC in deposits. This represents an annualized APR of about 4.5%. The positions were open for an average of around 29 days.
- Maple's USDC pool has seen significant user stickiness since its launch. Follow-on deposits account for 17M of the total USDC deposited into the pool. Furthermore, initial amount deposited is 8.4M, meaning that total deposits have increased by more than 3x versus the initial transaction amounts.
- 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This transaction is of particular noteworthiness because it is UXD Protocol entering into Maple’s pool. UXD Twitter account confirmed that they had deployed 5M USDC from their insurance fund into Maple. It also appears that about two weeks ago UXD deposited 5M USDC into Maple again. UXD’s total deposit amount of 10M USDC makes UXD the largest depositor in the pool to date. This shows the intended use of the pool by a target user.
- Centrifuge is an onchain ecosystem for structured credit. In December 2022, Centrifuge onboarded BlockTower Credit, the first institutional credit fund to bring their collateralized lending operations onchain. Seven months later, over $126M in RWAs has been originated on Centrifuge for institutional loans — over 1/4th of Centrifuge's all-time originations. This signifies concrete institutional involvement in DeFi through Centrifuge.
- Centrifuge TVL has increasing from $86M to $230M YTD despite volatile market conditions. Real-world use cases allowed Centrifuge to grow despite crypto market cycles.
- Despite a decrease in the number of assets tokenized YoY (42 in June 2022 down to 28 today) Centrifuge’s TVL has nearly quadrupled in that period. Long-standing pools like New Silver and ConsolFreight tokenize singular assets—a home or trade receivable. Newer pools like BlockTower tokenize asset-backed securities—a bundle of assets.
- 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: A little history lesson: In this transaction dated Apr 2021, MakerDAO minted its first 35,913 DAI backed by real-world assets—NS2DRP token, which represents a share in the senior tranche of New Silver’s Centrifuge pool. New Silver is a company that finances fix and flip home loans. In this transaction, NS2DRP is minted followed by the respected DAI amount minted (backed by the NS2DRP). This DAI is then transferred to the issuer New Silver for them to use it to finance real-world home loans. Today, Centrifuge Prime is bringing RWAs to more protocols and stablecoins, just like Centrifuge did with Maker.
👥 Peter
- Polygon PoS hosts more than USD$100M worth of real world assets from TradFi institutions. Polygon provides institutions the benefits of an onchain environment with cheap gas fees. Currently, in just 8 months since the launch of RWAs on Polygon, seven companies (including Franklin Templeton and Ondo Finance) are offering 13 different types of institutional assets worth USD$100M + in asset value.
- The biggest known institutional players with real world assets on Polygon include Siemens, which accounts for 63% of Polygon’s RWA share at USD$64.3M, as well as Ondo Finance, which boasts $18M worth of Short-Term U.S. Government Bond Fund in treasury on Polygon.
- In total, there have been 233 RWA transfers on Polygon totaling just over USD$1M. These transactions appear to suggest that institutions and other users are leveraging Polygon PoS to transfer RWAs to other counterparties.
- Clearpool is a decentralized credit marketplace in which lenders provide liquidity to KYC’d borrowers of their choice and are compensated with risk-adjusted yields. A separate permissioned platform further meets the KYC & AML compliance needs of institutional market participants. Clearpool currently boasts more than $30M TVL earning an average APR of 10.08%, with liquidity increasing by 219% in Q2 2023. The marketplace has also originated over $400M in loans to date (source).
- CPOOL is the utility and governance token for Clearpool. Its current utilities include borrower fee, delegated staking, LP rewards, and governance. The number of unique wallet addresses (currently 2,234) holding CPOOL tokens has been steadily increasing.
- By staking CPOOL to the Oracles, CPOOL holders both earn yields and secure the interest rate pricing mechanism for the permissionless pools. Currently, over 210M CPOOL tokens are staked on the mainnet, which represents around 50% of the circulating supply.
- 💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is one of the three transactions that marks Wintermute's initial loan repayments after a $160M hack on 20th Sep. Lenders hurriedly withdrew $7M from Wintermute borrower pools (total pool size was $50M), pushing utilization to 99%, and APR to 30%. Clearpool allowed Wintermute 5 days to repay below 85% utilization to avoid default. On 21st Sep, despite having $200M in loans across DeFi, Wintermute repaid its loan on Clearpool, settling at a $25M pool size. Clearpool's dynamic interest mechanism derisked $25M in 1 day, rewarding lenders with a threefold interest rate increase during high utilization.