YouTube Apps on Google Play

By 2025, the largest position was Janus Henderson’s Anemoy AAA CLO Fund (JAAA), which went from zero to $1.01B and owning 36.0% market share of the top ten Funds. The top ten assets grew from $3.82B to $8.04B over the same period, while their share of sector TVL declined from 98.6% to 88.2%. As base AVS fees remain relatively thin, the added risk of slashing is likely to weigh further on marginal restaking capital. Its TVL fell from $14.91B to $12.12B as incentive-driven capital exited, yet its share of the top ten increased from 62.0% to 66.0%, showing that capital consolidated into the most established ETH restaking venue.

RWA and Tokenised Credit

• They gravitate instead toward environments offering high throughput and predictable execution.
• Primary issuance rails became one of the defining narratives of 2025.
• This introduces operational concentration risk and shifts market power away from public liquidity venues toward a narrow set of private intermediaries.
• Watch whether the space compresses into a small set of credible vehicles, and whether yield-enabled ETH treasury models can sustain premiums without becoming fragile financial engineering.

Recent charts have shown the values reaching all-time highs in terms of liquidity kept on these protocols. In 2026, the winners are likely to be the protocols and rails that can handle that shift without losing the properties that made DeFi compelling in the first place. Watch whether the space compresses into a small set of credible vehicles, and whether yield-enabled ETH treasury models can sustain premiums without becoming fragile financial engineering.

The implementation of the GENIUS Act and MiCA brings standardised rules for issuance, reserve requirements and supervision, creating the first coordinated global framework for stablecoins. If 2025 was the year stablecoins regained scale and credibility, 2026 is set to mark their entry into mainstream finance. Yield-bearing stablecoins have also expanded rapidly, growing from $9.5 billion at the start of 2025 to more than $20 billion today. As corporates and financial institutions deepen their use of digital dollars for settlement and liquidity management, this preference for safety has become a structural feature of the market. In Ukraine, stablecoins provide reliable access to funds amid ongoing disruptions. This broader usability naturally reinforces stablecoins’ role in remittances, one of their most persistent and necessity-driven use cases.

The rise of staked, restaked, and tranched stable assets demonstrates that onchain participants increasingly seek predictable duration exposure and capital-efficient hedging tools. Viewed holistically, Pendle’s 2025 market shows a platform transitioning from a collateral pool driven by opportunistic carry trades to one dominated by stablecoin-native fixed income. By late 2025, this structure had shifted decisively toward a multi-layered, stablecoin-centric market. This mix reflected a yield landscape defined by simple stablecoin carry and straightforward basis trades, where traders monetised predictable funding spreads rather than engaging with more complex structured products.

From Japan to the US, new treasuries were birthed nearly every day, garnering the attention — and capital — of both retail and institutional investors. Companies would raise capital through equity offerings, convertible debt, or preferred shares, then deploy the funds into Bitcoin en masse. Digital asset treasuries became one of 2025’s defining narratives, evolving from an experimental capital allocation strategy into a globally recognised financial phenomenon.

USDe alone represented nearly half of all collateral, with BTC and ETH wrappers making up most of the remainder. At the end of 2024, the platform was anchored almost entirely in USDe and blue-chip crypto assets. Taken together, the sector evolved from a Pendle-centric market into a broader fixed-income ecosystem. Newer protocols such as Aster, Strata Tranches, InfiniFi and Exponent moved into the top tier and displaced earlier incumbents like Coinwind, Equilibria, Spectra V2 and Elixir.

This decoupling of participation from voting power provides direct evidence that governance influence has increasingly migrated toward a smaller set of highly active and well-capitalised delegates. Proposal volume declined across all major DAOs in the sample, indicating a structural shift away from high-frequency onchain governance toward more bundled, council-driven, and operationally abstracted decision-making. Governance activity contracted sharply across the DeFi sector in 2025 relative to 2024. While 2024 represented a high-water mark for DAO proposal activity and experimental governance frameworks, 2025 marked a clear transition toward consolidation, professionalisation, and delegate-driven control. In practice, 202,5 airdrops prioritised rewarding high-intensity users, capital providers, and other strategically important participants, while broad eligibility mainly served to expand awareness and bootstrap network effects.

Unbound will be launching its stablecoin UND on the Avalanche blockchain. The partnership will also effectively lead to inter-blockchain operability and profitability through the use of UND, the protocol’s decentralized, cross-chain stablecoin. Users can now use the minted UND to provide liquidity to the UND/KNC and UND/USDC pools at Kyber DMM and earn additional incentives. KyberSwap will be the only venue on Ethereum to add liquidity for the UND token and farm $1 million rewards in $KNC and $UNB. Unbound uses the Collateralization Ratio (CR) to calculate the amount of collateral to be unlocked proportionally to the UNDs being paid back. We can also earn incentives for providing liquidity to the UND pools.

Solver Networks and Competitive Execution

When blockspace becomes cheap, protocols can experiment freely with how they launch, monetise and distribute products. Major protocols such as Aave and Uniswap, which historically avoided explicit value distribution, are now moving in this direction. While only around 5% of protocol revenue was redistributed to holders before 2025, this number has tripled to roughly 15%. Dencun’s introduction of cheaper blobspace in March 2024 dramatically lowered settlement costs for Layer 2s and moved many of them into positive revenue territory.

Primary issuance rails became one of the defining narratives of 2025. Onchain derivatives are evolving into a credible, operationally reliable market that competes directly with centralised exchanges. The question is no longer whether onchain perpetuals can function, but whether their microstructure is comparable to CeFi. In short, the trading environment has become the key differentiator. Taken together, these architectural upgrades have reshaped liquidity behaviour. These changes allow platforms to support larger positions and more professional liquidity provision with more predictable liquidation pathways.

Despite this rapid expansion, the market remains highly concentrated. This 52% increase in BTC-denominated TVL confirms that growth was driven by real increases in deployed Bitcoin rather than by price appreciation alone. Ethereum is likely to retain dominance in value-weighted DA due to its unmatched economic security and institutional trust profile. The DA market entering 2026 is best characterised as structurally multi-polar but economically hierarchical.

In 2025, Ethereum regained the dominant share of total data posted, while EigenDA emerged as a third major contributor alongside Celestia. In the second half of 2024, Celestia captured a large share of marginal DA demand as modular rollups such as Eclipse and Manta Pacific scaled. Despite this diversification, Ethereum remains the systemic core of the DA market, securing an https://ssaac.org/ order of magnitude more value than all competitors combined.

Fee capture in these markets now reflects execution quality rather than network limitations, making the model sustainably profitable for the first time. With lower operating expenses and rising activity on the application layer, Layer 2s now have both the margin and the incentive to reinvest aggressively into growth. At the same time, growth increasingly came from curated credit markets.

Unlike 2024 and early 2025, when growth was driven by aggressive points programs and speculative AVS positioning, capital in 2025 rotated out as forward-looking yields became less compelling. Overall, liquid staking in 2025 remained a large and durable market, with capital gradually rotating away from early incumbents toward exchange-linked and institutional-grade wrappers. Staking remained a core source of yield and collateral in DeFi throughout 2024 and 2025, but the balance between liquid staking and restaking shifted meaningfully as risk was repriced. In 2025, fee capture increasingly reflected not just scale, but the ability to keep capital actively deployed through market design, risk calibration, and borrower demand. Aave benefited from serving as DeFi’s default balance sheet, offering deep liquidity, conservative risk settings, and a long history of successful liquidations that appealed to both retail and institutional borrowers. Over time, I expect protocols to explicitly segregate exposures into distinct risk classes, where liquidity becomes recognized as just another core dimension alongside duration, counterparty exposure, and strategy complexity.

A second theme that defined 2025 is the growing recognition that buybacks on their own are not enough. It is that the most economically successful protocols of 2025 adopted high-distribution models. The important shift from 2024 is not simply that more protocols activated value capture. At the other end of the spectrum, about 40% distributed at least half of their revenue. The protocols that grew most rapidly in 2025, particularly in derivatives and CDP-style lending, adopted explicit value capture as part of their design. Meanwhile, other categories, including lending, liquid staking, and trading interfaces, still sit much closer to the zero-payout model that dominated 2020 through 2023.