TermMax Secures Strategic Investment from YZi Labs to bring proper rate discovery, credit rails, and collateral tooling to tokenized assets, especially tokenized equities.
- Fresh backing: YZi Labs invested in TermMax; terms were not disclosed.
- Big thesis: tokenized equities need credit, collateral, risk transfer, and options.
- Real traction: mainnet is live, with 60 fixed-rate markets, 40 strategy vaults, and more than 1.5 million registered wallets.
- Institutional angle: TermPrime has already completed a live trade on Canton Network.
TermMax is not trying to be another DeFi lending app with a new coat of paint and the same tired yield pitch. Its bet is narrower and more ambitious: tokenized equities only become useful financial assets if the on-chain market around them has fixed-rate credit, collateral management, risk transfer, and eventually options.
That is the part crypto often skips. Everyone loves the trading screen. Fewer people care about the plumbing underneath. But if tokenized stocks are going to be more than a novelty wrapper around traditional assets, they need market structure, not just price charts and leverage buttons.
According to the announcement on August 26, YZi Labs selected TermMax for its EASY Residency Season 3 and made a strategic investment in the protocol. The size of the investment was not disclosed. TermMax says it has now raised more than $8 million, with earlier backing from Cumberland DRW, HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital, and MZ Web3 Fund. Cumberland DRW led the seed round in 2023.
TermMax launched mainnet in April 2025 and says it now runs on 10 EVM-compatible chains, meaning blockchains that can execute Ethereum-style smart contracts. It reports 60 fixed-rate markets, 40 strategy vaults, tens of millions of dollars in total value locked, and more than 1.5 million registered wallets. Those are self-reported protocol metrics, so they should be read as the project’s own scoreboard, not some sacred tablet handed down by the market gods.
The strategy vaults matter here. Vaults are pooled structures that automate or curate strategies on behalf of users, while curators are the professional actors setting parameters and managing those strategies. In other words, the protocol is not presenting itself as a free-for-all liquidity arcade. It is trying to look more like a managed market with defined rails and roles.
Jerry Li, TermMax’s co-founder and CEO, says the problem he saw was bigger than lending itself.
“When I left banking, there were a few hundred billion dollars of assets sitting on-chain without a single directly observable interest rate curve between them. In traditional markets, that would be unheard of. That is what made me decide to build this infrastructure on-chain.”
Li’s background helps explain the mindset. He previously worked at Deutsche Bank as Managing Director running fixed income and FX for Greater China. This is a TradFi-trained builder trying to import fixed-income logic into crypto, not a founder who discovered markets last Tuesday and decided to call it institutional because the pitch deck used a serif font.
That perspective shows up most clearly in TermPrime, TermMax’s institutional product. At the end of June, TermPrime completed its first live trade on Canton Network, and the protocol says the counterparty network has since expanded to nine institutions. The source does not spell out a recurring flow or a full trading venue, so the safest way to read this is as a live institutional transaction and an early counterparty network, not some grand overnight conquest of Wall Street.
Canton Network is an institutional blockchain environment, which makes sense for this lane of the business. TermMax is clearly trying to build a separate institutional path alongside its DeFi-facing markets instead of pretending retail speculation alone can carry the whole project. Spoiler: it cannot. The broader push is part of a larger shift in tokenization, and the debate around Tokenized Equities: Infrastructure Evolution or gimmick is exactly the kind of question the market still has to answer.
YZi Labs’ own August 14 public position sharpened the thesis further. The firm argued that tokenized blue-chip equities are already seeing meaningful activity on-chain, but the surrounding infrastructure is still incomplete. In its view, the missing layers are credit, collateral management, risk transfer, structured products, and especially options.
That gap is exactly where the current crypto derivatives stack starts to wobble. Perpetual futures dominate much of crypto trading, but perps are designed for highly liquid assets like BTC and ETH. They are a much rougher fit for tokenized equities, where the underlying can be thinner, more fragmented, and more prone to ugly liquidation cascades if the wrong product design is slapped on top.
TermMax’s answer is to lean into fixed-term borrowing and lending, with settlement built around physical delivery. Physical delivery means the underlying asset is actually delivered at expiry, rather than simply settling gains and losses in cash. In practice, that can reduce the chance of forced selling into a thin market, but it also brings more custody, compliance, and operational complexity. Nothing says “innovation” quite like discovering that paperwork still exists. For a closer look at the mechanics, see Fixed Borrowing Costs in DeFi: Lock Your Rate and Amplify.
The protocol says that design is already being applied to tokenized assets. It integrated Ondo Global Markets in January 2026, added Binance’s bStock, and went live on Robinhood Chain in August with tokenized U.S. equities including QQQ, SPY, and NVDA posted against USDG. TermMax also says it launched the first fixed-rate borrowing market to accept tokenized U.S. equities as collateral. That “first” claim comes from the company and should be treated as such unless independently verified.
There is a broader point buried under the product language: tokenized equities may be the shiny new object, but the financial stack around them is still underbuilt. Trading is easy to advertise. Building usable credit, hedging, and collateral rails is the boring, necessary part. Boring, of course, is usually where the money and the durability are.
The protocol is also pushing structured products. Its materials describe an approach that includes physical-delivery options and no liquidation before expiry. For readers less steeped in derivatives jargon, options give the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an asset at a set price. “No liquidation before expiry” is meant to avoid the usual crypto habit of nuking a position mid-flight just because volatility got cheeky.
That is a sensible design choice for illiquid or semi-liquid collateral. It does not solve every problem, but it does acknowledge one of the biggest ones: if an underlying asset cannot absorb fast forced selling, then liquidation mechanics can do more harm than good.
TermMax’s security posture also looks more serious than the average yield-chasing side quest. The protocol says it received a DeFiSafety Process Quality Review score of 93%, matching Aave V3. That is a useful signal, though not a force field. Security reviews help. They do not eliminate smart contract risk, market risk, custody risk, or the occasional spectacular human mistake.
One of the more attention-grabbing claims in the release is the state of tokenized equities themselves. The materials cite a $2.48 billion market size and say holder count has grown 165% in 30 days. Those figures help explain why infrastructure builders are piling in, but they should still be treated as market claims from the release unless independently cross-checked with the underlying data source. The logic is also showing up in the broader tokenization push, including Digital Asset Raises $355M for Canton Network as Wall Street Bets on Tokenization, which underscores how much capital is now chasing the same underlying theme.
The bullish case is straightforward. If tokenized equities keep growing, they will need financing, hedging, and settlement tools that look more like real market structure and less like improvised crypto cosplay. Fixed-rate markets and physical delivery could make these assets more usable for both DeFi-native users and institutions.
The skeptical case is just as real. Tokenized U.S. equities are not all the same. Custody and legal enforceability still matter. Redemption rights matter. The exact structure of the underlying share exposure matters. And “on-chain” does not magically erase jurisdictional headaches or turn a compliance maze into a clean hallway. A protocol can build elegant mechanics and still run headfirst into regulation, fragmented liquidity, or market demand that never matures fast enough to justify the hype.
YZi Labs is not a tiny backer either. It says it manages over $10 billion in assets globally and has backed more than 300 projects across over 25 countries and six continents. More than 65 portfolio companies have gone through EASY Residency. That does not make the thesis correct by default, but it does mean the capital behind this bet is serious. The firm’s earlier coverage in YZi Labs Backs TermMax to Advance On-Chain Bond Market and the follow-up on YZi Labs Backs TermMax to Advance On-Chain Bond show how quickly the deal has been picked up across crypto and market news channels.
The core idea here is bigger than one funding announcement. TermMax is trying to build fixed-rate infrastructure for tokenized assets, starting with tokenized equities and extending into institutional markets. If it works, it fills a real gap: not just the ability to trade on-chain, but the ability to borrow, lend, hedge, and transfer risk in a way that actually resembles a functioning financial system.
Jerry Li’s ambition is blunt enough to be useful: build the missing on-chain interest rate curve instead of pretending tokenized assets can thrive on trading alone. That is the right target. Tokenized markets do not need more noise. They need rates, credit, collateral, and sane risk transfer. Everything else is decoration. For readers trying to make sense of the protocol’s moving pieces, What Is TermMax: TGE, TMX Tokenomics and Fixed-Rate covers the basics, while the institution-facing angle is reinforced by the broader Canton ecosystem, including HSBC, Lloyds and JPMorgan Bring Tokenized Deposits to Canton Network and Wavbridge Debuts South Korea’s First Canton Network Custody.
Key questions and takeaways
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Why did YZi Labs back TermMax?
YZi Labs sees a gap in the tokenized equities stack: credit, collateral management, risk transfer, structured products, and especially options. TermMax is building fixed-rate infrastructure to fill that gap.
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What does TermMax actually do?
It is a fixed-rate lending and borrowing protocol built around tokenized assets. It also supports strategy vaults, curated markets, and institutional products like TermPrime.
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Why not just use perpetual futures?
Perps work better on deep, highly liquid assets like BTC and ETH. Tokenized equities can be thinner and more fragmented, so liquidation-heavy products can amplify volatility instead of managing it.
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What does physical delivery mean?
It means the underlying asset is delivered at expiry rather than settling in cash. That can be better for thinly traded collateral, but it also adds custody and operational complexity.
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Is TermMax already live?
Yes. It launched mainnet in April 2025, runs on 10 EVM-compatible chains, and says it has more than 1.5 million registered wallets. TermPrime also completed a live trade on Canton Network at the end of June.
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Should the “first” and market-size claims be taken at face value?
Not blindly. They come from the project’s own announcement and should be treated as company claims unless independently verified. The bigger takeaway is that tokenized equities now need real financial plumbing, not just wrappers and trading venues.
