Tiger Research：DeFi狂欢已落幕 RWA带来真实价值

Author: Henry Kim, Ryan Yoon; Source: Tiger Research; Translation: Shaw, Golden Finance

Key Points

• The USDC deposit interest rate on Aave V3 is currently 2.7%, below the 4.3% yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond. The short-term gains driven by speculation in DeFi are fading.

• The market has not disappeared. Although overall yields are declining, the real-world assets (RWA) and stablecoin markets have grown into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar track, and the industry is entering a new development phase.

• The collapse of projects like Compound, Curve, and Olympus reveals a profound lesson: relying on tokens to back each other up—once external capital inflows dry up—causes the entire system to collapse instantly.

• Past DeFi was like a power strip without an external power source; RWAs are now connecting this circuit to a real external value grid.

• The industry is maturing: using RWAs as a value anchor, while gradually establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance and responsibility constraints. Industry initiatives like DeFi United exemplify this trend.

1. Declining Yields, Market Growth

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is no longer a high-yield product.

Since 2022, the yield spreads between DeFi and government bonds have narrowed to near zero, with some periods even experiencing inverted yields. As of April 2026, Aave V3’s USDC deposit rate is about 2.7%, lower than the Federal Funds Rate (3.5%) and the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield (4.3%).

In the past, users took risks with clear reward logic.

Back then, on-chain yields far exceeded bank deposits, with unmatched advantages. But now, the situation has reversed. When considering risks like hacking, stablecoin de-pegging, and other on-chain risks, if DeFi’s actual returns are lower than traditional financial products, retail investors’ motivation to participate actively will significantly weaken.

However, the entire industry continues to develop in a new direction. Although native DeFi yields are declining, the deep integration of real-world assets (RWA) and stablecoins with traditional finance has expanded to hundreds of billions of dollars. Institutional capital inflows are the core driver of this shift.

But institutions often overlook DeFi’s development history and native community ecology, blindly copying traditional finance rules and paradigms. Before large-scale institutional entry, DeFi was a market driven mainly by token incentives. Many protocols relied on incentive mechanisms to build market awareness and reshape operational logic. This model still profoundly influences DeFi today. Born during the DeFi summer, leading protocols like Aave now set the benchmark for industry-wide interest rates.

For new institutional participants, understanding the core market players who have persisted through cycles is essential before entering. This article will review the key protocols that have shaped the industry’s core narrative throughout DeFi’s development cycle and summarize lessons learned from the market.

2. DeFi’s History: From Experiment, Collapse to Rebuilding

DeFi was not initially built solely on token incentive promises. The starting point was simple: can we, on the blockchain, without intermediaries, independently complete asset lending, exchange, and collateralization?

Early industry efforts leaned more toward a financial experiment. The core value was in the model itself: lending without banks, asset exchange without centralized exchanges, and any user holding collateral assets can provide liquidity independently. But after 2020, market sentiment shifted rapidly, and token incentives became the main method to attract capital. A flood of protocols and innovative ideas emerged, but only a few projects survived the cycle. The industry learned lessons and continuously adjusted its development direction through narrative shifts.

Compound integrated its native token $COMP into its yield incentive system to attract liquidity on a large scale. But as similar projects copied this approach, new capital inflows dried up, exposing the structural fragility of this model.

Curve turned governance voting into a battleground for reward distribution among liquidity pools, transforming yield competition into a contest for protocol control. The market realized: DeFi governance could also become a tool for power and incentive monopolization.

OlympusDAO is an extreme case. It aimed to prove that DeFi could operate without external capital and control liquidity independently, offering extremely high annualized yields. But most of its returns were not from real cash flows but from token issuance and new deposits to sustain the system. When inflows slowed, the OHM token price collapsed by over 90%, shattering market confidence.

These three projects sounded alarm bells: if the core source of yield is the protocol’s native token, this business model cannot be sustained long-term. This history has reshaped the perceptions of ordinary users, developers, and institutional capital toward DeFi.

It was after this bubble burst that a new track emerged: EigenLayer, Pendle, YBS, and RWA.

2.1. Compound: A Bubble Built on Token Distribution

In June 2020, Compound began distributing governance tokens to users, rewarding both depositors and borrowers. During certain periods, COMP rewards even exceeded borrowing costs, creating a strange phenomenon where borrowing could be profitable.

This initiated a new industry paradigm. As users flooded in, Ethereum transaction fees soared, with single transactions costing dozens of dollars. Deposits and loans no longer were just financial operations but became tools for yield farming, with capital rapidly flowing between protocols chasing high returns.

This period is known as “DeFi Summer.” Projects like Uniswap, Aave, Yearn Finance rose rapidly, establishing on-chain finance as a standalone sector. But the core of Compound’s model was relying on token incentives to attract funds, which then pushed up token prices in a positive feedback loop. Today’s DeFi behaviors—high sensitivity to yields, liquidity, and rewards—were gradually formed during this phase.

2.2. Curve and veCRV: The Beginning of the Curve Wars

Curve initially was just a stablecoin exchange platform, but the emergence of veCRV changed its fundamental logic. The longer users lock CRV, the more veCRV they get; veCRV grants voting power, which determines the reward distribution among liquidity pools.

From then on, the core of industry competition shifted from yield levels to control over reward distribution. Holders of large amounts of veCRV could steer more token rewards to their own pools. Protocols began hoarding veCRV, engaging in fierce battles—thus the Curve Wars.

Initially, this mechanism attracted retail and project participants: longer lock-up periods meant higher yields for users; projects could reduce circulating supply and direct liquidity to targeted pools. This lock-up governance model quickly spread within the ecosystem, exemplified by Balancer’s veBAL and Frax’s veFXS.

But over time, governance power was no longer in the hands of ordinary users. Protocols like Convex started aggregating and locking CRV on behalf of users, offering higher yields to concentrate veCRV voting power. The Curve Wars escalated further, with the main battleground shifting to Convex.

veCRV proved a key insight: control over yield distribution is more attractive than yield itself. Users no longer held governance directly but delegated it to efficient intermediaries like Convex. Curve also revealed that governance rights can become yield-bearing assets, and such power tends toward centralization and monopoly.

2.3. OlympusDAO: The Golden Age Built on Game Theory

Even after veToken mechanisms like veCRV appeared, liquidity remained the biggest challenge in DeFi. External liquidity, once attracted by higher incentives elsewhere, would immediately withdraw. Such capital was mainly profit-seeking speculation.

OlympusDAO, born in late 2021, was seen as a potential solution. Its core design included three elements: protocol-owned liquidity (POL), where the protocol directly held its liquidity; (3,3) game theory models advocating that all users stake to achieve global optimality; and initially offering over 200,000% annualized yield.

But this model was unsustainable. OHM’s yields depended heavily on token issuance rather than real cash flows. Its bond mechanism spawned many clone projects, and OHM’s price plummeted over 90%. This event shifted the mindset of developers and users: before chasing “how high the yield can go,” they began scrutinizing the true source of returns.

2.4. EigenLayer and Pendle: From Horizontal Yield Mining to Vertical Leverage

This collapse changed retail behavior profoundly. From 2020 to 2022, the approach was simple: mine incentives first, then cash out. Users spread funds across multiple protocols, engaging in horizontal arbitrage: capital rapidly moved between protocols chasing higher annualized yields.

After 2022, this efficiency declined sharply. Token incentives proved unsustainable, and airdrop competitions intensified. Merely depositing across multiple platforms yielded diminishing returns. The market shifted toward seeking layered yields on a single asset: staking ETH (stETH) for re-staking, reinvesting liquidity derivatives (LRT) into DeFi, splitting yield ownership to capture points and future returns.

EigenLayer and Pendle became key players in this transition. Starting in 2024, EigenLayer introduced re-staking, allowing staked ETH and liquid staking tokens (LST) to earn additional rewards. Within about six months, total value locked (TVL) surged from under $400 million to $18.8 billion, clearly showing capital shifting from simple deposits to re-staking.

Pendle split yield-bearing assets into Principal Tokens (PT) and Yield Tokens (YT). PT represent near-principal value; YT encompass all interest, mining rewards, and points during the period. YT’s value drops to zero at maturity, but during holding, they maximize points and yield capture. Even without understanding the underlying mechanics, buying YT became a mainstream strategy leveraging time and capital.

Industry strategies thus shifted from widespread, multi-protocol deployment to focusing on single assets with layered, compounded yields.

3. Business Model Rebuilding: RWA and YBS

In the past, projects heavily relied on token incentives to boost TVL. Higher TVL seemed to indicate growth, and token prices rose accordingly. But the core problem remained: external liquidity flows in and out quickly, making long-term accumulation difficult.

Today, TVL remains an important metric, but the industry’s focus has shifted to: fee revenue, backing by real assets, and compliance capabilities. The key variable is institutional capital inflow. Institutions scrutinize yield sources and the quality of underlying collateral assets. New products are iterating to meet both retail and institutional compliance needs.

3.1. Real-World Assets (RWA): Institutional Mass Entry

Since 2024, traditional financial giants like BlackRock, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and J.P. Morgan have entered the on-chain market via RWAs. Their approach involves tokenizing off-chain assets such as U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, private credit, gold, and real estate, then issuing and circulating these tokens on blockchain.

The RWA market on-chain has grown from a few billion dollars in 2022 to hundreds of billions by April 2026. The main drivers are tokenized Treasuries and private credit.

Leading institutional products include BlackRock’s BUIDL and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s BENJI. Both involve similar underlying assets but differ in operation: BUIDL targets institutional investors strictly, while BENJI has a minimum entry of just $20 and is open to retail investors in the U.S.

Additionally, asset managers like Apollo, Hamilton Lane, and KKR are partnering with platforms like Securitize to accelerate tokenization of private funds and private credit.

For traditional institutions, the on-chain market is not unfamiliar but a new distribution channel. Protocols serving institutional clients are improving compliance systems: building KYC/AML, custody infrastructure, legal jurisdiction adaptation, and risk management frameworks.

3.2. Yield-Bearing Stablecoins (YBS): Stable Assets with Income Attributes

The most promising niche today is yield-bearing stablecoins (YBS). These are stablecoins with embedded yield mechanisms. Ondo USDY, Sky sUSDS, Ethena sUSDe, and the aforementioned BUIDL and BENJI are all in this category.

Holding these assets automatically accrues yields generated by underlying assets like U.S. Treasuries, funding rate gains, staking interest, and money market funds. The architecture is essentially a blockchain version of traditional money market funds (MMFs).

According to StableWatch’s accumulated yield output (YPO), Ethena sUSDe, Sky sUSDS, BlackRock BUIDL, and Sky sDAI rank among the top in total accrued interest. Data varies slightly under different metrics, but it’s clear: yield-bearing stablecoins have moved beyond niche experiments into a mature sector capable of consistently paying real interest.

However, simply migrating money market funds onto the chain does not create a significant competitive advantage. The real edge lies in composability. For example, BUIDL holds 90% of its USD reserves in Ethena’s USDt collateral, which can be used as collateral in Aave’s lending ecosystem.

In other words, financial products originally based on real-world assets are now becoming stable foundational components of on-chain finance. DeFi is no longer relying on limited “built-in batteries” to operate; it is connecting to external real value energy.

4. Building an RWA Value Grid: Learning from Past Failures

Previously, DeFi was always doing one thing: layering, nesting, and creating self-reinforcing loops, euphemistically called growth flywheels.

Leverage and derivatives stacked layer upon layer, all in a closed loop. The fatal flaw: energy comes from the future external sources, and most yields are artificially created by protocol-issued tokens. Compound relied on native tokens to back loans; Curve used its own tokens to retain liquidity providers.

On the surface, all parties seem to be mutually feeding and circulating, but in reality, the entire system shares a limited common battery. When shocks occur, the underlying value first collapses, transmitting upward, causing derivative products at the end to stall and fail. This self-reinforcing, self-backed model has inherent capacity limits.

RWA introduces real external value into this system for the first time. Cash flows from bonds, rental income, trade receivables, and other real economy assets become stable power sources for on-chain finance. Interest rates are no longer manipulated by internal token incentives but are determined by external market supply and demand, macro rates, and credit risk.

When stable cash flows circulate continuously, various financial modules—issuance, custody, collateralization, lending, settlement—can be layered into this grid. Many complex financial products that were difficult to implement in traditional DeFi are now feasible with RWA infrastructure. The core question shifts from endlessly stacking loops to how to access long-term, stable value currents.

This is the essence of on-chain RWA: bringing real, underlying assets onto the chain, using their ongoing cash flows as a foundation, and layering financial services on top. If old DeFi relied on token incentives as temporary batteries for liquidity, the new RWA track depends on assets’ intrinsic cash flows for sustainable liquidity accumulation.

Leading players in this space are building this new financial grid from different angles:

• Theo is responsible for selecting on-chain eligible assets, determining which real-world assets to connect as energy sources.

• Plume develops the underlying infrastructure for asset issuance and circulation, laying transmission lines and dispatch hubs to ensure smooth value flow.

• Morpho uses circulating real-world assets as collateral to build lending and collateral markets, becoming the first real financial endpoints to consume and utilize this value on the new grid.

No single institution can monopolize this entire grid. The complete on-chain RWA financial loop requires the integration of energy sources—transmission networks—application endpoints to form a full closed loop.

4.1. Theo: A Case of Strategic Rebuilding of User Communities

Theo exemplifies a typical case: starting from asset selection, it has thoroughly reshaped its customer base and undergone a comprehensive transformation.

Initially, Theo’s flagship product was a strategic treasury. But as market dynamics changed, retail and institutional needs diverged sharply. Theo proactively responded to industry trends, reorienting its target customer segments.

The current core product is thBILL, a tokenized U.S. short-term Treasury portfolio issued by a compliant issuer, serving as the core underlying asset of the Theo ecosystem, generating steady returns. The roadmap now includes thGOLD (tokenized gold), and a yield-bearing stablecoin thUSD, collateralized by thGOLD, is about to launch.

This transformation is not just product iteration but also a validation: projects originating from retail incentive tracks can completely reconstruct their underlying architecture to meet and connect with institutional compliance and business needs.

4.2. Plume: Building the Infrastructure for RWA Implementation

Plume is another typical example, integrating asset circulation infrastructure with upper-layer market demands into a cohesive system.

For institutions, simply bringing assets on-chain is not enough; they also need comprehensive infrastructure covering issuance, compliance, distribution, and yield products. For on-chain users, investing in assets like Treasuries and funds requires a supporting product ecosystem.

Nest is a yield protocol built on Plume’s infrastructure. Users deposit stablecoins to easily earn yields generated by institutional-grade RWAs. Its product suite includes nBASIS, nTBILL, nWisdom, each backed by different real-world assets; these tokens can be freely transferred and circulated within DeFi.

WisdomTree has issued 14 tokenized funds on Plume; Apollo Global Management has launched a $50 million credit strategy; Invesco has migrated a $6.3 billion senior loan strategy onto Plume. Nest serves as a key entry point for retail users to access these institutional assets.

Beyond its own ecosystem, Plume provides a comprehensive integrated infrastructure, establishing standardized distribution channels between institutional assets and on-chain capital needs.

4.3. Morpho: Adding Complete Financial Functions to Institutional Assets

Morpho is another typical case, demonstrating how to turn assets into collateral, lending tools, and liquidity sources.

For institutions, simply registering assets on-chain is just the beginning. The key is whether these assets can serve as collateral and generate liquidity. Lending terms and risk parameters must be clearly defined, and all operations must comply with custody and legal frameworks.

A representative example is Apollo’s ACRED product. Apollo deploys credit strategies on Plume and allows ACRED to be used as collateral in Morpho, enabling holders to borrow stablecoins while maintaining their fund positions. ACRED is a tokenized private credit fund based on Apollo’s diversified credit securitization, issued on-chain via Securitize.

Only when institutional assets can serve as collateral, support lending, and generate liquidity do they truly become usable on-chain financial raw materials.

5. The Post-Dopamine Era: What Remains in the Industry

Looking back, the golden age of DeFi was more like a mirage built on token incentives and leverage stacking.

Despite some voices pessimistic about DeFi’s recovery, citing hacking incidents as reasons, recent developments tell a different story. The aftermath of the Kelp DAO rsETH incident and the formation of DeFi United show a positive industry trend. As of April 28, 2026, Aave and DeFi United have successfully raised over $300 million, far exceeding the $190 million lost in the recent hack.

This indicates that the industry is gradually building trust infrastructure, and a more mature collective accountability mechanism is emerging.

Reviewing DeFi’s history, it’s clear that early on, the industry was chaotic and unaccountable. Users aimed solely at quickly grabbing high-yield tokens; projects designed high-yield mechanisms and often exited after reaching fundraising goals.

Now, the industry is shifting toward: institutional accountability being actively embedded into system design. While a complete, mature financial system is not yet in place, a consensus has formed: to face common risks, share losses reasonably, and clarify responsibilities.

Many who are bearish on the market cite frequent security breaches, but the root cause also lies in the disappearance of short-term high yields and the lack of new narratives and growth catalysts.

The broad concept of “DeFi” is gradually weakening in influence. The market has segmented into more precise vertical tracks: lending, stablecoins, RWAs, re-staking, on-chain credit, etc.

Concept names are no longer crucial. The early innovative experiments from DeFi are steadily maturing into sustainable underlying architectures, enabling more assets to enter the real economy and generate tangible value.