Disclaimer: The below article is sponsored, and the views in it do not represent those of ZyCrypto. Readers should conduct independent research before taking any actions related to the project mentioned in this piece. This article should not be regarded as investment advice.
TermMax, a fixed-rate lending protocol built by Term Structure Labs, has announced a strategic investment from YZi Labs. Terms were not disclosed.
A Track Record Behind the Raise
TermMax was selected for YZi Labs’ EASY Residency Season 3 and has raised more than $8 million to date. Earlier backers include Cumberland DRW — which led the 2023 seed round — alongside HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital, and MZ Web3 Fund.
Live on mainnet since April 2025, the protocol now runs across 10 EVM-compatible chains, with 60 fixed-rate markets, 40 strategy vaults, tens of millions of dollars in total value locked, and more than 1.5 million registered wallets. Keyrock, Hardcore Labs, Edge Capital, and Origami serve as Curators, managing strategy vaults on the protocol. The $TMX token completed its TGE on August 25.
The Gap This Investment Aims to Fill
YZi Labs’ own public position points directly to the opportunity behind the investment. In an August 14 post describing what it wants to see built, the firm noted that tokenized blue-chip equities have reached meaningful volume—but the financial application layer around them, spanning credit, collateral management, risk transfer, and structured products, remains underdeveloped. Options and other risk-transfer products, in particular, remain conspicuously absent.
 
TermMax is building precisely into that gap.
YZi Labs placed this investment squarely in that gap.
“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.” – Jerry Li, Co-founder and CEO, TermMax.
Why Tokenized Equities Need More Than Financing
Tokenized equities are the fastest-growing asset class on-chain, now at $2.48 billion, with holder count up 165% in 30 days.
TermMax has moved early to serve them. It integrated Ondo Global Markets in January 2026 to launch the first fixed-rate borrowing market accepting tokenized U.S. equities as collateral, then added Binance’s bStock. In August, it went live on Robinhood Chain, where QQQ, SPY, and NVDA can be posted against USDG.
But financing is only half of what tokenized equities need. Nearly all of this year’s tokenized-equity infrastructure has gone into perpetual futures — and almost none into options.
TermMax Alpha Changes That
TermMax Alpha introduces physical delivery options with no liquidation before expiry. The conversion price is fixed when the position is opened, and the position settles by physical delivery at expiry. A directionally correct position therefore can’t be knocked out by a few minutes of volatile trading in thin liquidity — the exact failure mode that makes perpetuals unsuitable at the illiquid end of tokenized equities.
This no-liquidation design rests on a choice that runs through the entire protocol: when liquidation does occur, it settles by physical delivery, with collateral delivered directly to the lender rather than sold into the market. The usual assumption — that collateral can be sold at fair value on demand — holds for ETH but fails for a tokenized equity with only a few million dollars of depth.
Serving Institutions Through TermPrime
On the institutional side, TermPrime completed its first live trade on Canton Network at the end of June and has since grown its counterparty network to nine institutions. TermMax runs an early validator node on Canton, and TermPrime is ready to support institutional lending there through open markets.
The protocol holds a DeFiSafety Process Quality Review score of 93% — matching Aave V3.
“What we set out to do is not to teach traditional institutions DeFi. It is to let DeFi grow into something professional enough to genuinely serve finance,” said Jerry Li, Co-founder and CEO of TermMax.
Ultimately, TermMax doesn’t want to be another lending protocol —it wants to be the on-chain interest rate curve itself.
Be the first to comment