I was lucky enough to meet with Hester Peirce and show her an early version of Axal back in October! Even back then, vaults were top of mind and I was pleasantly surprised by her excitement and curiosity.

When one of the most powerful financial authorities on Earth says something might go mainstream, you pay attention.

Here’s the rundown.

What’s a vault?

TLDR; “automated money managers” that live on a blockchain.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds! Just like how traditional financial advisors take your money and “manage it” by making a bunch of investments, vaults do the same thing but with automations and enhanced protections.

Each vault can be customized with specific rules, including what investments it is allowed to make, when it can modify strategies, and who is allowed to manage it.

In practice, the biggest vaults today diversify capital across overcollateralized lending markets, where the vault lends capital to those borrowing against their digital assets.

Think of it this way: banks take your money, lend it out, and pocket the interest. What if you could lend direct to borrowers and keep that interest for yourself? Vaults help you do that without all the technical complexity. Money into multiple markets, interest out.

“These strategies allow participants to deposit their assets into onchain systems that lend them for a fee to borrowers who can put those assets to use.”

- Commissioner Hester Peirce

Markets like this cbBTC/USDC market (folks borrowing dollars against their Bitcoin) are some of the most liquid and popular, with countless vaults using them and billions in deposits.

Lending markets themselves have been around for nearly a decade, with vaults coming on the scene and growing exponentially since around 2021. There are over $10B of deposits in Morpho today, one of the biggest protocols for vault deployment.

Popular Morpho Vaults

Why should I care?

A lot of reasons to care! Especially compared to traditional financial accounts.

• More interest than your bank account. My Chase account prominently mocks me with “0.00% APY” every time I open the app. Most lending markets and vaults as of writing are doing 1-2% above the risk free rate (around 3.5%). This past weekend, Axal’s blended yield was above 6% APY.

• Abstracts away the pain. Markets are always changing as supply and demand changes. Tracking rates, collateral types, borrower health, etc. yourself quickly becomes a full time job. Vaults, and apps like Axal that give you access to them, aim to abstract away this pain.

• Interest earned continuously. Every few seconds, your “vault share” appreciates in value, allowing you to withdraw whenever and cash out the interest earned since you first deposited. Totally different from most traditional accounts or CDs, which pay interest out every few weeks, if not months/years!

• No lockups/minimums. You could invest a dollar right now, change your mind in 30 seconds, and withdraw completely.

• Anyone can invest in them. No need to have a ton of money, live in a specific country, or “know a guy” - just an internet connection!

What risks should I be aware of?

As Hester Peirce notes in her statement, there isn’t a uniform definition of a vault. There’s a sliding scale from “immutable” to “total discretion of a manager”.

Those variations are super important when it comes to risk and responsibility! Here are some common risks to be aware of:

• Collateral type and health. Needless to say, not all assets are created equal. A low market cap, volatile memecoin used as collateral is likely to have far more volatile market rates and liquidity concerns than a bluechip market for a high market cap asset. As pointed out in Hester Peirce’s statement, vaults that involve securities (as collateral or loaned assets) will have to comply with traditional securities law/restrictions.

• Liquidation risk/bad debt. If a borrower accrues too much debt or their collateral drops in value too fast, lending markets automatically liquidate their collateral to make lenders whole. However, in extremely volatile market conditions, the borrowed amount might exceed the amount capable of being liquidated. Lenders could take a loss.

• Curators. This one mirrors traditional finance the most: if someone (or something) else is managing your money, you should know what they can and cannot do. If a vault allows a curator to upgrade contracts or edit underlying markets, lenders are at risk of them taking on excessive risk/not aligning with expectations. On the flipside, a vault that is totally fixed in its allocation may risk not adjusting allocations when strategies become risky/unprofitable. Regardless, these curators may be subject to investment advisor regulation.

• Smart contracts. Since lending markets and vaults live on blockchains, the code governing their rules is out in the open. This means that hacks, upgrades, and exploits at the code level make or break what’s possible.

How can I get started?

At Axal, we specialize in giving users access to proven vaults and underlying markets that have healthy collateral assets, liquidity, and a track record of staying strong during volatile market conditions.

You always have complete control over your funds - Axal just makes getting in and out of these yield positions easy with connections to your bank and multiple vaults/markets!

Axal is live on the App Store, Google Play, and desktop. It only takes a few minutes to start earning!

Subscribe now

For centuries, gold has proven to be the most universally accepted store of value. Everyone - kings and queens, sovereign powers, and individuals in every country - holds gold.

Globalization, market volatility, and geopolitical tensions have led to massive gold inflows in recent years.

The problem? Getting real, physical gold exposure is a nightmare. ETFs are just futures contracts under the hood, fees are absurdly high, the transaction process is archaic (online marketplaces for coins/bars are not that different from bazaars a thousand years ago), scams are rampant, and physically managing vaults/security is a full time job.

Axal changes all of this.

Gold exposure at your fingertips. 0 friction, without compromising the asset you set out to buy.

Tokenized gold backed by physical bars.

Move from your Axal Prime yield account or Bitcoin into gold. Instantly.

On our journey to be the best wealth app on Earth, adding tokenized gold was a must. We’re proud to work with Paxos to make this a reality, and excited for a major release soon: yield on gold.

No minimums, 0 management fees, 24/7 trading, and REAL exposure.

These tokens are fully regulated by the OCC with billions in circulation.

Yield and physical redemption coming soon. Stay tuned!

We built Axal because your savings deserve better than what most banks and wealth apps have to offer. Cut out the middlemen with blockchains, lend direct, and pocket the difference that typically goes to banks.

To do that, we created a cross-chain, fully abstracted USDC yield account that puts your money to work across various DeFi opportunities.

Today, we’re making it significantly better.

Axal is integrating Monad.

Wait, What’s Monad?

Monad is a Layer 1 blockchain that launched mainnet in November 2025, and it’s been quietly taking over the DeFi world ever since.

Most blockchains, like Ethereum, process transactions one at a time.

It’s like a single-lane highway. No matter how fast the cars are, you’re still stuck behind whoever’s in front of you. That’s why you get congestion, high fees, and a sluggishness that makes DeFi unusable at scale.

Monad replaces this single lane highway with a 10,000 lane one.

It’s designed to achieve 10,000 transactions per second using something called optimistic parallel execution. The outcome is sub-second finality (your transaction confirms in under a second), near-zero fees, and a network that stays fast even when everyone is using it.

It’s also compatible with major EVM upgrades like account abstraction, gas sponsorship and batched transactions, making your experience miles better than traditional finance.

So What Does This Mean for Me?

Here’s where it gets good.

Access to onchain lending markets depends in part on network availability and transaction efficiency.

Slow chains and expensive transactions can impact capital productivity. Every second of latency is an arbitrage window that closes before your capital can get there.

Monad changes the math.

Your Axal Prime account will now include pools on Monad and support routing across select Monad-based markets as part of its broader allocation framework.Specifically, Axal will include integrations with lending markets living on Morpho, Neverland, and Curvance - all proven, truly onchain markets.

The integration also means our smart routing can rebalance your position more frequently and more cheaply than ever before without incurring extra gas costs (don’t worry, Axal covers them).

The result: the potential for more competitive APY on your Axal Prime account.

Cross-Chain Just Got More Cross

Axal Prime was already designed to route your USDC across chains to support diversified, productive capital deployment across supported onchain markets.

Adding Monad means adding one of the fastest-growing, most efficient ecosystems in crypto to that blend.

Under the hood, your USDC remains your USDC. You don’t need to think about bridges or chain switching or gas tokens. Axal handles those operational processes in the background.

What Do I Need to Do?

Nothing. That’s the honest answer.

The integration rolls out automatically for all Axal Prime account holders.

No migration, no new wallet setup, no bridging. Your account will begin routing to Monad-based opportunities as Axal’s rebalancer takes these markets into account. You can read more about the rebalancer here.

More to come in the next few weeks (hint: it may have to do with Bitcoin on Monad)! Your money’s just getting started.

It’s extremely rare to see a new asset class emerge at a global scale. Wars, century-long nation state development, and physical human resource demand are almost always necessary.

Gold. Oil. Sovereign bonds. Loans. Land. Index funds.

All require tremendous effort to secure and protect. Modern markets abstract this away during times of peace; times of uncertainty make it painfully obvious. No individual or nation is immune.

Bitcoin changes this.

A digitally native asset whose value is derived from monetary policy guarantees. Supply cannot be changed at the whim of a sovereign power. There are no innate restrictions on who can or cannot access it. Credibly decentralized and nearing 20 years. Owned by every major institution on Earth.

It’s no secret that we at Axal are huge fans of credible systems with guarantees. The future of wealth generation necessitates it - own your wealth all the time. No barriers to asset classes you can hold, no greedy middlemen, no opaque counterparties.

What you see is what you get.

Bitcoin needs to be a part of everyone’s wealth building plan.

Unlike fiat currencies that undergo constant devaluation to fund budget deficits, Bitcoin is the only asset in existence that contains perfect scarcity, is tamper-proof, and is digitally native. It’s not a hedge against short-term inflation necessarily, but a hedge against the structural inefficiencies of our monetary system.

Even longtime Bitcoin bears are bending the knee: Jamie Dimon, Ray Dalio, and Larry Fink to name a few.

But there’s a problem for the average retail investor. Gatekeepers.

Online stock brokerage accounts charge $0 for U.S. listed stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs or a flat $0.65 per options trade.

But the cost of entry to Bitcoin is exorbitant.

Cost

Here’s a basic cost breakdown on how much it costs to buy $1,000 worth of Bitcoin. Cashapp and Bitcoin-specific platforms like Strike and Swan Bitcoin are leading the charge on modest trading fees. But Coinbase, Kraken, and Paypal will take over $2 on every $100.

Axal has a flat fee of 0.89% on spot Bitcoin transactions.

We are the cheapest place on Earth to buy Bitcoin. Period.

We are also self-custodial, no KYC (when transferring existing crypto), and give all users the option to earn on your Bitcoin.

Yield

Axal users can earn up to 2% on their Bitcoin. How?

The same overcollateralized and programmatic lending markets that are the foundation of Axal Prime and the strategy Axal has been working on since 2024.

Users earn Bitcoin for simply owning Bitcoin.

Conclusion

The vision is simple. Axal is en route to become the world’s premiere wealth app through tokenization and rebalancing.

Tokenization allows immediate access to every asset class in the world with no barriers and no time delays. Rebalancing means an RIA, wealth advisor, or quant in your pocket depending on your risk tolerance and strategy preference.

With this goal in mind, we asked ourselves, “what is the next best wealth generating asset to add?”

And the answer was obvious. Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is coming to Axal with the lowest fees on earth and the ability to earn Bitcoin on what you own.

Earning money, for the sake of money, is useless.

The moments we remember most are a good time, with good people, doing something special. Wealth can be a tool to create more of these moments.

We’re excited to roll out Axal experiences: every month, we’ll bring once-in-a-lifetime experiences to Axal users.

Let this be a nudge.

To kick things off: 2 tickets to the March Madness finals on April 6th.

The biggest game in the world every spring - a truly once in a lifetime experience.

All you have to do is deposit over $1,000 in the next week (by April 1st) and share on socials. We’ll randomly select a winner.

That $1,000 isn’t an expense - it’s actively earning. 100% liquid with no lockups. There’s no downside.

Want a guaranteed ticket? Deposit over $20,000 to Axal (or $35,000 for two tickets) this week. Contact hello@axal.com with any questions regarding wire transfers and additional incentives for larger deposits!

Growing wealth is not about more dollars in an account. It’s about more experiences at your fingertips.

We’re excited to kickstart Axal experience campaigns, and stay tuned for more unique rewards.

The Axal team went to SXSW in Austin, Texas this past week to chat yield + give out free money.

I’m completely serious.

Download the app. Grab some cash. Earn on whatever you grab.

~1 minute from stopping by the booth --> earning.

It was eye catchy. Punchy. Broke the ice.

And actually cost way less + was more effective than some other GTM efforts we’ve tried!

Some takeaways:

Connect in the first 10 seconds

The thing about pitching something in person is that you only get a few seconds to make an impact. I mean that literally - if they haven’t been hooked to ask a follow up question or stop walking by, they are moving on.

This really hit home at SXSW - as a conference filled with folks far outside the tech space (let alone web3), you need to make the value prop clear without buzzwords.

What I landed on was pretty simple:

Banks take your money. Lend it out. Pocket the interest. What if you could lend direct?

Notice that there’s so much NOT mentioned in here. Who is borrowing? How sustainable is the yield? There’s no mention of stablecoins or digital assets even.

But there’s so much important information conveyed right off the bat. How does this differ from where I park my money today? Where does the yield come from exactly? How do you get such a competitive rate (above U.S. treasury bills)?

The info we choose to emphasize when explaining Axal is packed in there. No middlemen, just you owning your yield by lending directly.

We usually follow this up with answering follow up questions or diving into how these (today) are overcollateralized loans.

But we’ve successfully built some trust and connected Axal to something people know (and most don’t like): the traditional banking system.

A lot of people DON’T want free money

This was one of our funnier realizations.

“How’s it going sir, would you like some free money?”

*laughs awkwardly and avoids eye contact*

I’d say about a third of all folks who walked by the booth had this reaction! When we pushed them on why, many got sensitive, slightly annoyed, or asked “what’s the catch?“

This reveals some interesting truths about money:

• It’s an awkward subject for many.

• Being so direct and “unrefined” (free money?!) catches folks off guard.

• There’s a lot of skepticism with anything tied to money (for good reason). This makes money-related services pretty sticky, even the bad ones.

We’re big believers in packing a punch and being memorable. As an early stage startup, especially one trying to disrupt one of the sleepiest and most “boring” industries (wealth management), this is essential.

By grabbing attention right off the bat, we open up a discussion that almost always leads to a download.

And a lot of the times, folks didn’t even want the money! They were intrigued and made a small deposit themselves to try things out.

Make EVERYTHING fun

If you zoom out, most successful apps - regardless of industry - is just straight up fun to their core.

Robinhood gives you a little dopamine hit and burst of excitement when you swipe up to deposit and the screen turns green.

Duolingo’s owl is cute and fun - SO DIFFERENT from the boring school language classes most folks are used to. It appears all over their marketing materials and app.

Even outside product features, everything from names (”Tiktok”) to marketing (funny super bowl ads) convey a sense of amusement.

Especially for in-person activations, we’ve found that just having a ton of fun with people is the best way to get them excited about Axal!

We’ve had kids in the booth, robot dogs, multiple musicians, and all sorts of other folks.

People would stop by to laugh and watch any time someone was in the cash grab.

That’s a clear way to make a good first impression for Axal!

Get out of the bubble

This is my biggest takeaway from SXSW. The market for better wealth apps is unbelievably greenfield.

We met retired football coaches, families with young children working in Austin, musicians, tenured elementary school teachers, and so many other folks who resonated with Axal’s mission.

Spoiler: not a single one of them had heard of stablecoins. All of them knew how their banks worked (and made money off of their deposits). All of them resonated with Axal’s goal and were willing to try it out.

There is so much opportunity if you get outside the bubble, and you almost certainly aren’t doing it enough.

Wealth management - putting capital to work via longterm investments - is broken.

Finding investments, tracking market dynamics, and accessing new opportunities is a full time job.

There are two options:

• Basic management, yourself - the only easy to use options are general purpose roboadvisor apps, 0% APY banking products (maybe MM funds/HYSAs), and public stocks/ETFs. Most folks are left earning nothing, or risk their principle by “setting and forgetting” the latest trends. Fixed income options are non-existent.

• Outsource it - to private wealth advisors, hedge funds, venture capitalists, and other financial firms. The logistics to access and setup are a nightmare (need $250K+ at your disposal, if not more), managers charge high fees, and oftentimes barely beat what you would do yourself. You can access new asset classes though - private investment deals, alternative assets, startups, etc. Even then, you are at the mercy of the advisor - geographic constraints, a lack of input, lockups, and delays in reactions to market conditions.

What if there was a way to access competitive wealth management strategies without sacrificing time, trusting third parties, or being incredibly wealthy?

We’re excited to announce the launch of Axal’s rebalancer, rolling out in production to select users today and everyone shortly.

The rebalancer takes advantage of two major trends:

• Tokenization - every asset class, for everyone. We’re heading towards a world where there are no walled gardens - you can invest in gold, DeFi lending, leveraged strategies, sovereign bonds, and even small business loans on a blockchain. BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, put it well in his shareholder letter over a year ago:

  “It can democratize yield. Some investments produce much higher returns than others, but only big investors can get into them. One reason? Friction. Legal, operational, bureaucratic. Tokenization strips that away, allowing more people access to potentially higher returns.”

• Cryptographic Permissions - via physical hardware and onchain guardrails. It is now possible to delegate granular permissions that cannot be violated. Axal makes use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) - the same secure enclave technology used in iPhone’s for facial recognition - to handle transaction signing. Axal’s TEE maintains an open sourced, immutable list of permissions, including the specific onchain contracts transactions can interact with. This allows the rebalancer to optimize yield within a sandbox of vetted, bluechip strategies - nothing else. These underlying strategies have their own permission set enforced by smart contracts on blockchains.

What this means in practice is as rates change, Axal is automatically closing some positions and allocating more to others. For stablecoin lending markets alone, you can see factors like APY, TVL, borrow demand, etc. change day to day. Staying in the same positions for months almost certainly loses you money for the same risk profile as rebalancing.

Now extend this beyond stablecoin lending to any investment opportunity, and beyond APY/TVL to any metric (social media sentiment, federal reserve rate announcements, prediction market data feeds, personal preferences even). You’ve cloned a wealth advisor.

One phrase we’ve been using internally for the rebalancer has stuck with me: a quant in your pocket. I think this gets at the power, yet accessibility, that the rebalancer brings about. Internet connection and a dollar? That’s it.

Automate without giving up control. Have peace of mind that your money is working for you, secured by permissions you agree to. Access new asset classes without moving your money or setting up new accounts.

The holy grail of wealth management - passive, competitive, user-owned - is here.

Hey everyone! This is Ash - founder of Axal. If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably heard about stablecoins and blockchain regulation in Washington. As with most issues in U.S. politics, things have been slow moving with a ton of drama - the banking lobby, major companies like Coinbase, and key senators have all voiced strong opinions about the CLARITY Act.

After reading the full 278 page draft, I wanted to break down what’s going on, implications for blockchain-based yield, and what it means for us here at Axal.

TLDR; platforms with transparency that give users custody of funds will thrive, digital assets are here to stay, and banks are scared of a run.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act is a bill that aims to create a clear market structure for digital assets. This means defining key terms (everything from “decentralized finance trading protocol” to “vaults”), regulating bad actors (sanctions checks, counter-terrorism efforts), and implementing rules for new asset classes (NFTs, Real World Assets, and stablecoins).

Some cool parts of the act include an innovation sandbox for startups (ran jointly by the SEC and CFTC), truly non-custodial apps don’t need money transmitter licenses, and traditional financial institutions can do almost anything with digital assets (including lending/tokenizing their assets)!

These all sound pretty standard, so why’s there so much drama? Most of it centers on one key part of the act: stablecoin yield. A lot of folks in the crypto industry want anyone who holds a stablecoin to automatically earn yield, while the current act requires some “activity” with the stablecoin in order to earn yield (payments, account opening, etc). Since stablecoin issuers have to maintain reserves of cash and (primarily) U.S. treasury bills, people believe that the interest earned on those treasury bills should be passed on straight to consumers. This is a major difference from today, where issuers like Circle (USDC) just pocket the yield as revenue with holders getting nothing.

Banks in particular are getting worried because this would completely upend their business model - the “risk free rate” of U.S. government debt, along with lending out consumer deposits, contributes to their bottom line. If users can just hold stablecoins and earn yield, as opposed to getting ~0% from a bank account, why won’t they just move funds out of the bank? Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has warned of a major deposit run and a decline in American lending activity.

On the flipside, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong thinks the current draft makes it nearly impossible for stablecoins to compete with banks. The act adds legal friction for Coinbase, which lives in the intermediary world between traditional finance and blockchains as a centralized exchange.

I won’t dive into all the weeds and carveouts but some key aspects to flag:

• The whole “yield” debate is all about passing on treasury bill rates from the stablecoin itself. This is completely different from blockchain lending market yield and other onchain yield sources.

• Apps like Axal that put stablecoins to work in DeFi to earn yield by “providing liquidity or collateral” are explicitly allowed in section 404(b)(2)(e). This is distinct from actors like Coinbase, who are not fully non-custodial and thus require further regulation.

• Section 404(b)(2)(b) and (c) - “the use of a wallet, account, platform” and “membership in a loyalty program” means yield can be passed on. In my opinion, this language is so vague that nearly any platform capable of holding digital assets would qualify.

At Axal, we’ve been lucky enough to speak directly with politicians (Senator Lummis’ team and Senator Mark Warner), industry leaders, and even Commissioner Hester-Peirce of the SEC. We’ve been impressed by how mature the regulatory environment is getting - I never could have imagined federal legislation that namedrops DeFi vaults and decentralized yield protocols!

We’re at a pivotal moment for the industry - Axal will continue to work with key leaders while innovating on accessible, sustainable yield opportunities. Longterm, high conviction work has gotten us this far, and will continue to propel us forward.

2025 was an incredible year for Axal across the board. We owe this to one thing above all else: our users.

To wrap up the year, our founder Ash sat down with J, one of Axal’s first users who has seriously shaped our product vision, cares deeply about user owned finances.

What stands out to us is how J truly owns his life - he owns his time, his money, and devotes his resources into what matters most to him.

He’s also an extremely caring and generous individual, volunteering abroad at a school in Thailand (and helping fund school supplies for the students)!

Transcript below - this conversation took place while J was in Thailand on his phone (with the most gorgeous background of all time, yes it’s real) and Ash was in a noisy NYC crypto holiday party on his phone. Ash frantically typed notes from the convo in a corner!

Ash: So J, you’ve been using Axal for a few months now - how’s it been?

J: When I first met you, I asked “can your mom use it?” That’s the bar we need. Since then I’ve used the site a ton. A friend who’s a school teacher signed up for Axal after I showed him.

I also got to beta test the app - I really loved the format as I spend more time on my phone than laptop (on phone today because it’s better for signal).

Since starting I’ve deposited more funds - should tell you as a company and organization that I trust you more and more.

Ash: Yep, Jacob on the team fully uses Axal as his savings platform now.

J: It’s a really intelligent place to park your stablecoins - when you do a comparison across other CEXs and locations.

It makes zero sense to sit on zero yield. With inflation and cost of goods and the depreciation of the US dollar.

I’ve noticed the returns. I’ve seen yield growing.

That’s what drove it home for me for Axal - there’s no BS, I literally see my money working for me.

Ash: What’s the state of savings in Thailand?

J: Thailand just announced zero capital gains on crypto.

On the weekends I’ll head to the city (I’m in a village south of Chiang Mai right now). I have a motorbike but I also use car services and tuktuks.

I’ve asked drivers “do you take payment in stablecoins, are you even aware that anyone in the world can now hold USD”? Axal account with USD based yields.

Not one person knows what any of this is at all. The market is completely untapped.

I saw a stat the other day - 7-10% of the world holds digital assets - 0.07% have a significant holding.

Across the board it’s a very small and new market upside.

At the same time, people in Thailand are super skeptical of crypto. they run on a digital banking system (funny right) BUT there are lots of scams and extortion tactics surrounding this. Also, a lot of people are so impoverished, the digital system has created more of a “gap” due to some people’s inaccessibility.

The main on ramp for crypto is BitKub… this is the exchange they can directly link to their digital banking system .

In essence… here you pay with cash OR QR code at the local merchants.

Ash: What’s the path to win regular people? Arguably, these are folks who could benefit the most from access to yield sources from their phone. So much of life out there already revolves around mobile experiences, right?

J: Grab and Line are the social apps - not WhatsApp. If it was possible to integrate stablecoins to these apps you’d have a ton of users

One of the things with currency conversion - Thailand is QR code payments, for Thai Bhat - if there was a way that the QR code was tied to USDC it could hit. I think Thailand is piloting this for tourists to go and pay - then wow.

The average Thai citizen right now is earning nothing on their savings.

Singapore right across, Indonesia Cambodia Vietnam - crypto trading is very popular in the area bc ppl can make money. Just need a place to just park your stables.

Ash: What do you want to see next for Axal!

J: The ability to directly onboard people from their bank - creating the ability to bring funds with trust onto a high yield platform is going to make a lot of sense to people as they understand it and it grows.

We’re at the precipice of a financial revolution, and banking/fintech will look so different in the future vs. today.

I was able to objectively look at Axal because I looked at so many other platforms on how to earn yield safely - I understand the backend technicalities and I can use my assets to get wrapped tokens and gain ultra high yield.

But the risk associated with that and manual steps involved are not worth the yield.

With what Axal’s doing and lending pools and being a safe place for people to drop money and self custody the USDC - it’s a matter of time before the world is using this.

I think self custody itself is the best guarantee/form of insurance I could get - the ability for it to be self custody with my keys. If the insurance adds some piece of mind to that part for larger investors then it makes sense from a biz perspective but as an individual who got into this because of self custody - I’m 90% in digital assets and stablecoins.

The only way I did that safely securely is knowing self custody - if something happens it’s mine.

I call it my freedom money - freedom from predatory lending, those banks with terrible rates - if we earn 20-25% then I’m even happier.

I see you Axal guys as builders and developers at heart, fundamentally different from a banker or hedge fund manager - we’re helping people gain an advantage while advantaging ourselves.

Ash: That’s why I love talking with you man! You get the goal here and why this is such an unlock.

J: At some point this changes enough of the system - become your own bank, access your own yield.

It’s a beautiful thing - not everyone will get it at first.

However for those who don’t have the bigger vision other stuff then sure - it’s still a better way to earn something on the money you have.

Ash: Tell me more about what you’re up to in Thailand man, you were in the states last we spoke.

J: Im a full volunteer teacher man, not paid at all - I love it and the children, just want them to do well.

I believe a core part of that is learning English and access to the internet.

Savings is also a tool for any young person - before I leave here I’ll try and make an Axal treasury for the school. Around 40-45 students out here.

Axal is excited to announce its second official partner in its treasury management program: the Rari Foundation, The RARI Foundation is the organization supporting the growth and decentralization of the broader Rarible ecosystem, including the RARI DAO and Rari Chain.

As part of this collaboration, the Rari Foundation will leverage Axal’s white-glove treasury management service to diversify its holdings and earn sustainable, risk-adjusted yield on USDC, putting idle capital to productive use while maintaining transparency, security, and control.

All Rari DAO members are also eligible for a 2% APY boost for their first three months if they sign-up to Axal through a unique Rari referral code.

The Problem
Treasuries across the blockchain ecosystem increasingly want to hold USDC instead of volatile assets to preserve liquidity. However, they face a slew of tough decisions:

• They can earn nothing by simply holding stablecoins in a multi-signature wallet.

• They can take on excessive risk by depositing everything into a single vault and forgetting about it.

• Or they can waste valuable time manually spreading funds across multiple protocols and tracking performance and safety on their own.

Axal Provides Sustainable, Risk-Adjusted Yield
At the heart of Axal’s offering is Axal Prime, a non-custodial USDC strategy that generates returns through over-collateralized lending markets. Axal employs robust risk frameworks and integrates with only blue-chip, well-established DeFi protocols like Morpho and Euler. Axal aims to deliver an annual percentage yield (APY) of approximately 6–10%. This gives organizations like the Rari Foundation a reliable way to grow their treasury assets without compromising on safety or oversight.

Learn more about how Axal curates risk: Verifiability: Where Does the Yield Come From

Supporting the Rari Foundation’s Mission
The Rari Foundation empowers creators and developers to explore new NFT use cases via community-governed tools. Through the Rarible Protocol, an open-source cross-chain protocol, developers can build multi-chain NFT applications efficiently, while RARI Chain ensures creators are fairly compensated via node-level royalties on a secure, low-cost Layer 3 blockchain powered by Arbitrum.Through grants, partnerships, and infrastructure support, the Foundation works to expand the opportunities available to the global creator community in Web3.

“At the Rari Foundation, we’re continuously evolving our treasury strategy to ensure long-term resilience and value creation for Rari DAO. Partnering with Axal adds another layer of expertise to our diversification efforts, reinforcing a more sustainable foundation for creators and builders” said Anna Riabokon, Head of Operations & Governance at the Rari Foundation.

A New Standard for Onchain Treasury Management
Together, Axal and the Rari Foundation are setting a benchmark for secure, transparent, and sustainable on-chain capital management.

Learn more about how Axal can streamline and safeguard your treasury earning by contacting us: hello@getaxal.com.

Go to rari.foundation to learn more about the Rari ecosystem, Creator Fund, and more.

Go to Rarible.com to access the fastest multichain NFT marketplace.

Download Axal: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/axal-high-yield-savings/id6752484843

Yield, or interest, in Web3 is one of the clearest frontiers for mass adoption.

For a confluence of factors, ranging from the growth nature of crypto to the technological advances here that allow for people to generate safe, competitive yield.

The digital version of stuffing money under your bed.

For years, there have been great efforts by the Web3 community to build out great yield sources. Creative geniuses like our partner teams at Gauntlet, Morpho, Yo, and Spark have built vaults that have excellent offerings.

However, the world of competitive yield has been fragmented. The process of gaining competitive yield has become either

1) A cumbersome process. 2) Not worth making an effort.

The latter point is where most sit. Right now, the vast majority of stables sit idle. A whopping 92% are sitting in wallets not being put to work.

Even though very powerful means to grow your wealth while it is sitting idle exist, people are opting to just sit on their money.

A digital version of stuffing it under your bed.

Keep in mind, this is happening during a time where we all know that one of the main sources of revenue for the Starbucks app is its ability to function as a bank. The purpose of DeFi is to bring the tools that only siloed institutions had to the masses.

On the other side, crypto elites for long have had the ability to pay people to privately curate, monitor, and rebalance their funds.

Axal: A quant in your pocket

Axal stepped into this world to create three specific realities:

1) Yield needs to be accessible for people of all backgrounds. In the words of Robinhood, one button per page. Onramping the way you would to any other fintech app.

2) To provide tools of sourcing high quality, battle tested yield, monitoring those sources consistently, and rebalancing autonomously so that you, the user, don’t have to worry about exploits or risks while also knowing that you are getting a very competitive rate.

3) To be as radically transparent as we can with how we are sourcing yield, and to showcase the depth and breadth of how each one of our yield protocol partners are generating yield.

Why Axal

Axal stands unique in the market for a few reasons.

Firstly, we diversify users holdings between separate battle tested protocols.

As anyone who’s been around the block with investing will tell you, diversification matters, and it matters greatly when things get testy.

Having all of your funds tied to one pool, which is the common approach of consumer facing DeFi products, centralizes threats of exploitation and introduces honeypot risk.

The masses will start to look to DeFi to earn on their dollars (and, likely soon, earn on the stablecoins).

That’s where Axal comes in.

So why Axal? Well, we spoke to users and non-users alike. What’s keeping people out of DeFi markets is risk. So we didn’t focus on chasing the highest yield. We focused on mitigating risk.

That’s why we diversify, why we don’t introduce new smart contracts, why we have an open-sourced TEE so you can verify everything Axal does, why we have a stringent diligence process for new pools, and why we have built-in circuit breakers for when DeFi markets get too volatile for a users’ liking.

And we’re now on mobile. Download the app today and reach out if you have any questions on why Axal is the best place to earn on stablecoins.

Link:

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/axal-high-yield-savings/id6752484843

Axal is proud to announce its first official partner in its treasury management program: IoTeX, one of the leading protocols operating at the intersection of AI and Web3.

This partnership marks an important milestone for both teams. As part of the program, IoTeX will receive Axal’s white-glove treasury management service, designed to help innovative Web3 organizations manage their on-chain capital with transparency, efficiency, and security. IoTeX will begin allocating a portion of its treasury to be managed through Axal’s infrastructure.

Axal Provides Sustainable, Risk-Adjusted Yield

At the core of Axal’s approach is Axal Yield, a non-custodial platform that provides users with sustainable, risk-adjusted returns derived primarily from over-collateralized lending markets. By leveraging well-established DeFi protocols and robust risk frameworks, Axal targets an annual percentage yield (APY) of approximately 6–10%, giving organizations a reliable way to put idle treasury assets to productive use without sacrificing security or control.

Learn more about how Axal curates risk: https://axaleng.substack.com/p/verifiability-where-does-the-yield

Axal’s Track Record

The relationship between Axal and IoTeX runs deep. Axal was the inaugural winner of IoTeX’s “Crypto’s Got Talent” program, an initiative aimed at identifying and supporting the next generation of builders at the frontier of blockchain innovation.

This collaboration represents a full-circle moment—transforming an early recognition into a long-term strategic partnership.

Learn more about Axal on CGT here: https://axal.substack.com/p/axal-wins-cryptos-got-talent

Learn more about partnering with Axal

Together, Axal and IoTeX are setting a new standard for how decentralized organizations manage their treasuries: securely, transparently, and sustainably. As the AI-Web3 ecosystem continues to mature, partnerships like this highlight the growing importance of smart, risk-aware financial infrastructure for the next wave of builders.

Learn more about how Axal can streamline and safeguard your treasury earning by shooting us a note: hello@getaxal.com

These Terms and Conditions (“Terms”) govern the Grand Seiko Watch Giveaway (“Promotion”) offered by [Axal]. By participating, entrants agree to these Terms.

1. Eligibility

• Promotion is open to individuals who are at least 18 years old and legally permitted to participate in their jurisdiction of residence.
  
  

• Employees, officers, directors, and immediate family members of the Company are not eligible.
  
  

• Void where prohibited by law.
  
  

2. Promotion Period

• The Promotion begins on [9/16/25] and ends on [11/16/25] (“Promotion Period”).
  
  

• Deposits must be made and maintained within the Promotion Period of 3 months in the platform to qualify
  
  

3. How to Participate

• To qualify, participants must deposit a minimum of USD 50,000 into a [Axal] savings account and maintain the deposit for a continuous period of 3 months from the date of deposit.
  
  

• Only one entry per eligible participant. Multiple qualifying deposits will not increase chances of winning.
  
  

4. Prize

• Eligible participants will be entered into a drawing to win one (1) Grand Seiko watch (model subject to availability).
  
  

• Approximate retail value: [$500-$1000].
  
  

• The prize is non-transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash or other alternatives.

5. Winner Selection and Notification

• Eligible winners will be selected from all participants who maintain a balance of above $50,000 in Axal Yield for three months after deposit.
  
  

• The winner will be notified via email and must respond within 7 days. Failure to respond within the time frame may result in forfeiture and selection of an alternate winner.
  
  

6. General Conditions

• Participants must maintain the qualifying deposit for the full 3-month period. Early withdrawal or account closure will result in disqualification.
  
  

• The Company reserves the right to verify eligibility and disqualify any participant who tampers with the Promotion or violates these Terms.
  
  

• The Company reserves the right to modify, suspend, or terminate the Promotion at any time, for any reason, without prior notice.

7. Liability Release

By participating, entrants release the Company, its affiliates, and their respective officers, directors, employees, and agents from any liability, loss, or damages arising from participation in the Promotion or acceptance/use of the prize.

8. Governing Law

This Promotion and these Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of The United States.

9. Privacy

Information collected in connection with this Promotion will be used solely for the purpose of administering the giveaway and in accordance with the Company’s Privacy Policy.

Disclaimer: The Grand Seiko brand is not a sponsor of or affiliated with this Promotion.

Axal participated in MoonPay’s Shipyard program earlier this year.

To say that it was impactful would be an understatement.

Here’s our testimony about how we found out about the program and why it made such a big difference to Axal.

Serendipitous Circumstances

It took a while for us to get in touch with the MoonPay team.

Kozy from our team was a reporter in a different life, and had interviewed Ivan from MoonPay in 2021, so this relationship has actually been a lot longer than you’d expect.

We reached out to the comms team at MoonPay primarily expecting them to help with comarketing.

However, that all changed when we actually got a chance to sit down with Halsey, the first employee at MoonPay who now leads the Head of Strategic Partnerships, and talk about who we are.

He immediately started to give us sage advice, sharing advice about how companies in Web3 actually close business deals (spoiler: it is almost ALL interpersonal relationship management), and invited us to meet up in Toronto at Consensus.

Flash forward two weeks and Ash/Kozy from the team are trying to get into the very exclusive MoonPay event. Sadly, Ash wasn’t approved, but Kozy was → though this minor inconvenience ended up being an extreme value add!

At that event, Kozy ran up to Andres, probably one of the best BDs (if not the best) in crypto → and he helped with getting the Axal team in.

After a great day of partying, it was time for business.

After a few conversations, including an early one where Ivan + Keith from the MoonPay team swung by, we realized that there were a ton of synergies between our teams.

In particular, MoonPay had just acquired Iron, who built Virtual Accounts, and it turned out to be a near-perfect fit for what Axal needed.

Axal aims to be the best place to earn on the dollar. Part of our flow for doing this is to spin up a Privy wallet (this is to ensure that we at 0 point are custodying user assets/allows for us to have smart wallets that can automate tasks for users).

With MoonPay Virtual Accounts powered by Iron, users on Axal are able to completely abstract away ALL crypto knowledge from their DeFi experience → which is going to be vital towards onboarding normal people into crypto.

A Supportive Incubation

Once we realized it made sense to cooperate, we were ready to start getting down and dirty and build.

The MoonPay team created a weekly check in with us.

These checkins covered several verticals related to shipping a solid product: Marketing, Design, Branding, Engineering and Partnerships.

Beyond lending their expertise in each discipline, the MoonPay team often went out of their way to make useful connections for us.

MoonPay was a seminal support layer at this stage → helping us stay accountable and understand what to prioritize when considering Go To Market initiatives .

A really useful part of this collaboration is the access we had to MoonPay’s Otherlife Design studio (who BTW helped design GitHub).

Otherlife played a dramatic role in helping us change our UI to feel friendlier to normies and with finding our catchphrase “Earn More.”

Launch Week

Launch week is a scary time for all early stage companies.

We actually had launched our original trading platform earlier in the year to a relatively lukewarm reaction (We regrettably launched shortly after memecoin mania had ended, so people were nervous about where the macro tailwinds were heading.

Long story short, it was a nightmare.

This was actually quite useful for us. It was during this initial iteration stage that we realized that we wanted to hyper fixate on yield, rather than build just another everything trading app.

This time was different.

This time we had MoonPay.

From helping us with reaching out to reporters, to being a true tag team partner with amplifying positive posts about Axal, MoonPay led to us having a material difference in exposure.

As per Halsey, one of the main perks of being part of the Shipyard program is that no two teams will coincide with each other on launch dates.

It is worth mentioning that the support does NOT end after launch week.

A long-term partnership

We actually did a super viral video with Rama on the MoonPay team, where Ash accidentally put $1 million into Axal instead of $100,000.

As we continue on our journey, we know that MoonPay will be in our corner as we think of partnerships, go-to-market, design and engineering support!

We encourage everyone reading this post to apply to the program! It is truly game changing.

The Axal team recently returned from a packed ETH CC in Cannes.

It was a truly beautiful time, as Cannes is one of the world’s most gorgeous cities.

The week was filled with different breakfasts, brunches, and dinners with all different kinds of builders.

Oh and we competed in Crypto’s Got Talent (spoiler alert: The Axal team walked away as a winner).

This industry’s greatest strength is its ability to attract great minds from diverse backgrounds, and that was present writ large in Cannes.

We met with totally different people ranging from Believe coin degens, Hyperliquid maxis, or the most prestigious of TradFi people.

All these people – while very separate in their nature – are unified in the sense that they’re looking to build something new. Something special. A new financial system from the ground up.

That’s the value of events like Cannes, because it brings people from around the decentralized crypto world to one place to share ideas, pitch collaboration opportunities, and – not to forget – have fun with each other as we rebuild the internet.

Crypto’s Got Talent

Obviously, one of the major highlights of the event was Crypto’s Got Talent.

Run by our friends at IOTEX, we were able to participate in this competition starting in New York.

Ash and Kozy showed up to the first round in their midtown office (which looked like a recording studio) on a rainy day.

There we sat on high chairs and pitched Axal for yield and our thoughts on intents.

A few weeks pass and we find out we’re on to the finals!

While there was a ton of nerves when the tournament finals started, Ash and Kozy gave their best effort and had a great time talking to the judges.

It was a short while later that we found out that we had won!!

We were going to Cannes to collect the award AND to give a final pitch to other judges at the event.

So without further ado, the Axal team shipped it to Cannes.

In Cannes, we had a ton of fun going to both side events and speaking with different people in the crypto sphere.

Taking the prize

Finally it was the day of the finals.

Ash and Kozy started by doing PR convos with different orgs about the tournament.

Finally, it was time for the actual finals.

As we got up to present, we saw a ton of familiar faces in the crowd → and we began our pitch.

We emphasized the importance of making crypto and stablecoins useful, explained how Axal does that, and then spoke about our next steps on timeline.

Things seemed to go well, but we all sent it over to the Privy event.

We then get a call → WE HAD WON AGAIN!

Kozy ran back and we collected our prize. It was an insane win which gave us a ton of validation about our idea/future.

All in all, this was a great trip and we’re so grateful to the IOTEX team for including us in this tournament and encourage everyone to check them out!

Let's be honest, being on-chain today feels like trying to send an email in 1995. It's a nightmare of technical hurdles, confusing interfaces, and constant fear that one wrong click will send your entire wallet balance into the digital void.

This isn't an accident. It's the inevitable result of what we at Axal call the great custody-UX gap (UX = user experience). The fundamental tension between keeping your crypto safe and actually being able to use it without wanting to throw your computer out the window.

What Is Self-Custody, Really?

Self-custody sounds fancy, but it's actually pretty simple: you hold your own keys, you control your own money. No banks, no middlemen, no "customer service" representatives who put you on hold for hours only to tell you they can't help (Coinbase).

When you have a self-custodial wallet, those private keys aren't just random strings of characters, they're your financial identity. Every transaction you make, every smart contract you interact with, every DeFi protocol you use requires your digital signature. Your private key is also what generates your public key. This public key is your on-chain identity, identifying what assets you own, what transactions you have made in the past and your wallet balance.

Why Self-Custody Actually Matters

Remember FTX? Mt. Gox? The dozens of other exchanges that promised to keep your crypto safe and then... didn't? That's what happens when you let someone else hold your keys. You're basically crossing your fingers and hoping they won't lose your money, get hacked, or simply just run away with your assets.

With self-custody, your crypto can't get caught up in someone else's bankruptcy. It can't be frozen because the regulator had a bad day. It can't disappear because some CEO decided to gamble with customer funds. It's simple, not your keys, not your money.

Apart from just safety, self custody is also a philosophical goal of crypto. The goal that the early adopters and cypherpunks dreamt of. A world where anybody is empowered to have control over their own finances, without middlemen, a million forms and approvals.

The UX Nightmare Nobody Talks About

Here's where things get real. All that beautiful philosophy about financial sovereignty crashes headfirst into the reality of actually trying to use DeFi. Every single interaction requires a signature. Want to swap some tokens? Sign here. Move money between protocols? Hope you like signing things, because you'll be doing it all day.

This friction isn't a bug, it's a feature. Every signature request is the system asking "Are you really, truly, absolutely sure you want to do this?" And when you sign, you have given cryptographically provable consent that you wish to do an action.

This in itself is a user experience nightmare, scaring away even the most tech savvy people from ever using any Web3 products. This is a major reason centralised exchanges, and most recently telegram bots, have been some of the most popular applications in crypto - they have a great UX simply because they hold your keys. They abstract away signing and make using crypto seamless. Of course, as we discussed earlier, this comes at the cost of custody.

Algorithms on a Leash

This problem gets absolutely bonkers when you try to build anything automated. At Axal, we're building yield strategies that work around the clock, automatically moving money to wherever it can earn the best returns while managing risk. These aren't simple buy-and-hold strategies. They're dynamic, responsive systems that need to react quickly when market conditions change.

But here's the thing: "quickly" and "wait for user signature" don't play well together. Our algorithms might detect that a liquidity pool is about to blow up and needs immediate attention, or find a better pool to maximise yield. In traditional finance, automated systems handle this stuff without breaking a sweat. In DeFi? We'd have to spam users with transaction requests and hope they're sitting at their computer, wallet ready, fingers poised to click "approve."

Picture this: it's 3 AM, market conditions shift dramatically, our system detects that users need to exit a position immediately to avoid significant losses, and... we send everyone a push notification asking them to wake up and sign some transactions. It's not just impractical—it defeats the entire purpose of automation.

The TEE Revolution

This is where Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) come in. Think of a TEE as a tiny, unhackable computer inside your regular computer. It's like having a security guard who lives inside your processor and whose job is to handle sensitive stuff without letting anyone else—including you—peek over their shoulder. It's a game changer for privacy and security.

In fact, Apple has already started using this technology in their biometric scanning software to ensure privacy for the user. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have built these secure enclaves directly into their cloud, showing their belief in its potential.

When code runs inside a TEE, it's protected by hardware-level security that even the operating system can't breach. The TEE can handle private keys, execute complex logic, and make decisions, all while providing cryptographic proof (attestations) that it's doing exactly what it claims to be doing and nothing else.

What This Actually Means for you and me

TEEs let us thread the needle between security and usability. Instead of choosing between "sign everything manually" and "trust us with everything," we can meet in the middle and say "I will let you sign stuff if it meets certain criteria, and I want verification that you followed the criteria”.

By putting your keys and a verification software in the TEE, we can show everyone that we verify that the transaction meets certain criteria before we use your keys. You can check the code yourself, in fact we’d prefer if you did.

Furthermore, we don't ever actually get to look at your private keys, since all the data within the TEE is fully hidden, even from us. We simply send the TEE the transaction request and it verifies if the transaction is valid or not. If there's an emergency, or if we find a better opportunity, the TEE can verify it against on-chain data and make the signing decision, while still keeping the users best interest in mind. The best part, this verification will be made open source, so you as the user can check that we do verify every transaction.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

We're still early in figuring this out, but TEEs represent something genuinely exciting: the possibility that Web3 doesn't have to suck to use. We don't have to choose between the extremes of security and convenience. We don't have to make users feel like they're operating a nuclear reactor every time they want to earn a yield on their savings.

The great custody-UX gap has been Web3's biggest obstacle to mainstream adoption. Most people don't want to become cryptography experts just to use better financial services. They want those services to work intuitively, safely, and without constant hand-holding.

We at Axal are extremely excited to utilise this game changing technology to give users a great experience while being held to the highest standards of security.

The U.S. dollar remains the world's de facto currency -nearly 60% of foreign reserves and trade invoices are dollar-based. Stablecoins - with a $238B+ market cap, favorable policy from Washington, and support for settlement via major web2 payment merchants like Mastercard and Visa in just the past week - are poised to further expand access and usage of the dollar.

Beyond the dollar's role as a medium of exchange and unit of account, it is a store of value (in cash, digital bank accounts, and now onchain addresses) capable of earning yield.

From financing the American Revolution to being the bedrock of modern portfolios, the ways we "earn on the dollar" have changed tremendously.

This article explores the evolution of yield and what the next era of yield generation will look like. Stablecoins, novel DeFi primitives, and automation via personalized, verifiable agents will bring an endless stream of yield opportunities to all.

A History of Dollar-Based Yield

ChatGPT table summarizing the history of yield opportunities for the dollar

Earning "yield" on the dollar - income generated from putting dollars to work - has been practiced since America's inception. And while we think today's yield opportunities (particularly those in crypto) can get insane, yield has always had a crazy history.

Some particularly interesting examples:

• Dutch loans + loans from France and Spain financed much of the American Revolution. American revolutionaries pretended that some loans were actually gifts, pissing off France and contributing to some future conflict. Future payments were quite messy post-war, with the U.S. defaulting, a calculated choice to pay back the Dutch before other countries because they were the most likely to provide future loans to America (correct bet), and a "haircut" on 6% domestic loans to ~4% (because Hamilton realized 6% was "too high" to pay).

• Liberty Loans, used to finance WWI, worked because Americans reduced consumption by ~10% to finance bonds paying 3-5%. This was driven by one of history's largest advertising campaigns, with celebrities doing bond shows,

  pilots doing stunts above towns where people had never seen an airplane, and the government hiring Freud's nephew to devise advertisements rooted in mass psychology ("My daddy bought a bond. Did yours?"). Even here, the government defaulted by refusing promised gold payouts on the 4th Liberty Bond, making their value decline by 41% of the principal.

• Regulation Q (v1 in the 1930s until 2011) prevented banks from paying interest on checking accounts (demand deposits). Resulted in the rise of Eurodollars, money market funds, and alternative investment strategies.

• Eurodollars, or dollars held outside of U.S. bank accounts, were all the rage in the second half of the 20th century. They were attractive because they allowed for dollar access without cumbersome regulation, and offered higher rates. The Soviet Union, a major holder of Eurodollars, ran a pretty complex trade in the 1950s using Italian banks to get higher interest rates by circumventing U.S. banking caps via Regulation Q.

Recurring themes are government defaults and a lack of guarantees for everyone involved.

The State of Web2/TradFi Yield

1 year treasury rates over the last 60+ years (https://www.macrotrends.net/2492/1-year-treasury-rate-yield-chart) - surprisingly volatile!

We'll divide yield today into a few broad categories - government securities, corporate securities, MMFs, CDs, and high-yield savings accounts.

• Government Securities - Treasury bills (currently ~4%), bonds, and notes are all sold by the government to finance government operations.

• Money Market Funds (MMFs) - actively managed mutual funds (fund pooling and investing money from many investors) that invest in cash/cash equivalents and liquid short-term securities. Governed strictly (Rule 2A-7 from 1940) and yield similar to government securities (~4%).

• Corporate Bonds - companies in need of financing operations can offer loans, with varying levels of risk/interest rates depending on the creditworthiness of the company. Can range from AAA "safe" bonds to high yield "junk" bonds for risky companies. Moody's AAA corporate bond rate is currently ~5.5%.

• CDs (Certificate of Deposit) - a type of savings account with fixed commitment/lock-up periods during which investors cannot withdraw, resulting in higher rates (~4.4%).

• High-Yield Savings Accounts (HYSAs) - similar to CDs but without the lock-ups (~4% currently), taking a spread on profits from loans/other investments. Apps like Robinhood also offer similar rates for deposits (4% with Robinhood Gold).

These yield sources are accessed via the government directly (Treasury Direct), banks (Chase, BofA, etc.), banking services (Vanguard, Fidelity), and increasingly external fintech companies that combine and remix yield opportunities (PayPal, Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment, Meow, Mercury).

My personal finance/banking/yield stack (entirely mobile-based)

For most individuals, interactions with these yield sources are confined to a bank account and a few fintech apps on their phone; most don't have funds directly in government securities, MMFs or corporate bonds, and many don't have CDs or HYSAs.

Of course, there are many other investments/asset classes out there (less popular ones like commercial paper and municipal bonds, riskier ones like venture, private equity, hedge funds, real estate, etc.). The above are generally more risk-averse (dollar-based, government backed/insured in some capacity) and potentially less liquid.

Overall, there exist a fairly limited set of options to earn yield in traditional finance/web2 rails, with nearly all rates heavily correlated to federal interest rates/government securities. Heavy regulation gives stronger guarantees than centuries ago, but a few institutions dominate usage and determine yield.

The State of Web3/DeFi Yield

DeFi yield has taken off.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of some popular ways to generate yield, notable platforms, and challenges:

• Lending - Aave, Compound, Morpho, Euler, Solend, Kamino and more protocols operate by having borrowers lock up collateral (greater than loan amount), programmatically stream interest payments to lenders (no credit score needed), and check utilization and liquidation thresholds (all done onchain). Users can also earn yield by fulfilling liquidations in exchange for earning collateral. While down from a peak of ~$64B in Q4 2024,onchain DeFi lending has ~$37B of assets across Ethereum mainnet, L2s, and Solana (~$2B). Rates vary tremendously depending on the asset, protocol, TVL in pools, LTV (loan-to-value) ratios, and utilization rate. As of writing, rates for USDC in major lending markets on Aave and Morpho are between 3-6%, ETH is 2-4%, and cbBTC is 0-2% (higher rates for Morpho vault strategies with lower TVL). Challenges include monitoring these stats, cashing out/looping reward tokens, and automating custom strategies across protocols.

• Liquidity Provisioning (LPs) - Providing liquidity to DEXs like Uniswap and DEX-adjacent protocols like Kamino offers users trading fees, which can vary significantly by pool size and underlying assets. Generally, rates for dominant stablecoin-only pools are quite low (~0-1% base APR, sometimes subsidized like

  this Unichain USDC/USDT pool at ~10% APR). Challenges include managing LP positions based on underlying asset prices, avoiding impermanent loss, setting optimal price ranges to provide liquidity, and timely redemptions of accrued fees.

• Collateralized Debt Position (CDPs) - Popularized by Maker (now Sky) and being used by Reservoir Protocol and Felix Protocol, collateral is locked in a contract and backs a stablecoin. Yield is earned from collateral generating cashflows, yield on the stablecoin, and rewards for token holders. For Sky, the rewards rate and savings rate on USDS (the stablecoin) is ~5%. Challenges include ensuring collateral health and managing yield strategies.

• Basis Trading - Protocols like Ethena (currently ~5% APY),Resolv and funds like

  Superstate have delta-neutral/hedging derivative strategies on dominant crypto assets (BTC, ETH, SOL) to earn yield for holders of a corresponding stablecoin built on the strategy. Challenges include risk of the underlying strategy itself, depegging, manually staking/unstaking, and cashing out of rewards.

• Points/Incentives Farming - Far less straightforward compared to other strategies, this involves moving funds between protocols to earn points, incentives, airdrops, token allocation, etc. Notable examples include Hyperliquid's (well-received) points program or Arbitrum's airdrop. Returns vary significantly, and are usually correlated with "useful" activity done on a protocol. Challenges include the logistics of using the new protocol/testnet version (bridging/swapping to it) and being active frequently enough to earn worthwhile rewards.

• Real World Assets (RWAs) - An emerging source of yield has been from real world assets, where tokenized versions of popular web2/TradFi instruments (bonds, treasuries, private credit, etc.) have now surpassed $21.61B in size. Stablecoins via Ondo, Mountain Protocol, and others earn T-bill rates for holders. Platforms like Securitize tokenize TradFi funds (notably BlackRock's BUIDL, Apollo, and some venture funds). Rates vary by asset class, and notable challenges include proper offchain data feeds via oracles, liquid markets for onchain trading, and regulatory approval.

• Staking - While not directly applicable to stablecoins, staking assets like ETH, SOL or BTC earn fees in exchange for securing blockchain networks. Popular platforms include Lido, Jito, and Rocket Pool for liquid staking (delegating assets to validators) and etherfi for restaking (using already staked tokens to secure additional networks). Rates are ~3% for ETH and ~8% for SOL. Challenges include monitoring underlying asset price and staking yields and validator risk.

Some more complex products aggregate yield strategies (Beefy Finance/Yearn/Hyperliquid vaults), support trading tokenized yield (Pendle), or leverage/loop strategies (Kamino Multiply, Contango). Centralized platforms like Coinbase are also offering boosted APYs on deposits to attract individuals, while also launching their own Bitcoin fund for institutional investors (opaque strategies, targeting 4-8%). CeFi lending via prime brokerages, OTC, and private credit is also a sizable source of yield.

For consumers, more intuitive products are popping up that use these primitives under the hood. Notable ones include directly via wallet interfaces, mobile apps like Lemon, and neobanks like Nubank (4% APY on USDC).

The Morpho Dashboard for yield opportunities on Base.

Navigating and managing web3 yield is a nightmare. Monitoring risk, discovering strategies, and simply moving funds between all the different protocols, chains and assets involved (even specialized yield tokens) is painful even for the most crypto-native users (who are the majority of users today). Nothing is easily customizable, automated, or powerful.

Gone are the web2/TradFi days of a few dominant assets and platforms (treasury bills via the U.S. federal government). Web3/DeFi yield has the potential to explode the number of possible ways to earn with interesting primitives, but we are a long way from truly global, autonomous yield.

What Global, Autonomous Yield Looks Like

A better yield solution that solves shortcomings in both TradFi and DeFi needs:

• Automated - No matter your risk profile, managing a yield strategy is tedious. At best, you manage all of this manually, using external or internal tools, tracking rates and protocol health, etc. At worst (and for most people), you "miss out" on key events that change risk and fail to adapt in time. Automation solves all of this, but thus far has been limited and rigid (not tailored at all to user preferences).

• Accessible + Informative UX - Knowing where yield is coming from and how it is earned is essential for all users. For both DeFi and TradFi yield, UX is generally bad - we absolve ourselves of knowledge to blackbox third parties and fine print with zero flexibility (bank accounts, funds, Robinhood earning through a mix of lending, bonds, and bills; sketchy complex DeFi vault websites with limited details on underlying strategies). Tokenization of assets and onchain verification of strategies, combined with streamlined "one-click" flows that automate actions, solves UX and makes earning accessible to all (BlackRock agrees).

• Diversified - No matter your risk tolerance, diversifying helps protect you from underlying asset risk, "primitive" risk (lending, government backed, protocol rewards, etc.), and protocol risk (small vs. large DeFi pools). While conservative web2/TradFi risks are limited to the government, getting further uncorrelated exposure from primitives like DeFi lending, even sticking to stablecoins (let alone BTC or other truly independent assets), improves portfolio health.

• Verifiable + Transparent - From the U.S. government defaulting on interest payments (many cases mentioned above) to DeFi yield protocols going under (Terra Luna depegging or Celsius bank run), a lack of guarantees on strategies and where user funds are at any point in time erodes confidence and hurts users. Especially as strategies get more complex, transparency is left to the wayside.

• Global, autonomous yield is catered to a user's risk profile, earning from diversified venues, managed autonomously and verifiably, and accessible from any channel of importance (mobile app, website, APIs, LLMs, blockchains directly).

Larry Fink's annual letter - tokenization of all assets democratizes yield.

Let's look at a few different user personas, exploring their current situation and what a "dream yield" solution would be:

• Recent grad, limited savings, low salary, most income spent on rent/food/transport (me) - current savings/yield stack is a bank checking account (~0% APY), Robinhood and some other mobile apps handling a Roth IRA and stocks/ETFs/crypto (longer term investments or bets, not really yield). I know I should be putting my money in treasuries (at a bare minimum), but having liquid cash is a priority to fund expenses, so I keep everything in the checking account. I know crypto (DeFi lending markets and LP pools) have higher rates and I'm comfortable with their risks, so long as they remain competitive, liquid, and safe (pool TVL doesn't get too volatile, auto reward token cash outs, always in a pool with high APY, leave those that fall, etc.). When onboarding, DCA rules are set up so a portion of my paycheck goes into yield earning strategies each month.

• Small business owner in a non-US/European country, operates a shop earning a few tens of thousands of dollars a year - keeps all earnings in cash, local currency doesn't have great yield opportunities and is pretty volatile relative to the dollar, needs liquid access. A mobile-first app (or direct bank integration) with easy ramping to get USD stablecoins, a chat interface to understand strategies and setup automations, and instant liquidity would help protect savings while maximizing passive yield. Huge step up from the status quo, earning a few thousand dollars more a year.

• Crypto-savvy investors - in the trenches with all the DeFi primitives mentioned above, burned a few times due to protocols going under, crashing pool TVLs, or a lack of diversification. Most stablecoins are sitting idle before making spot or perpetual trades. A one-click interface for parking these stablecoins into a conservative yield strategy earning 5-10% APY, along with a one-click "get out in seconds" button, would help them earn on idle assets without additional risk.

• Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) - today, getting exposure to digital assets for LPs is isolated to spot exposure, ETFs, or liquid/private venture; yield has not really been tapped. Offering a stablecoin yield product catered to specific client needs and strategies and uncorrelated from treasuries/alternative asset yield sources would help diversify while tapping into web3 opportunities. An intuitive dashboard with automations would protect clients from manual oversight and get exposure to intelligent strategies.

• Large organization managing a variety of assets, payroll and business expenses across different currencies around the world. Companies like SpaceX

  already use stablecoins

  to mitigate FX risk, and could be earning yield on their balance sheet assets by parking them in RWAs earning from treasuries (extremely risk averse, but free money on the table while these stablecoins aren't bridged to fiat).

Axal's v1 - Autopilot Yield

Axal(@getaxal) is building a product providing global, autonomous yield for all, adaptive over time. Our initial yield product is live at yield.getaxal.com and inside our broader trading product (Autopilot), offering exposure to three strategy types varying in risk and rate. Pilot users earned higher, healthier yield than anything else available in TradFi or DeFi.

We believe that non-custodial smart wallets with permissions for what agents can do on your behalf, intents for yield constraint expression, integrations across DeFi (protocols and strategies mentioned above), strategy execution proofs and permissions (ZK, Permit2, and more), can offer ideal yield solutions for everyone.

Learning about strategies, modifying them, and getting out of them just requires speaking with an LLM assistant, dragging some sliders, or clicking a button. Strategies are managed by a non-custodial wallet owned by you, all transactions and positions are visible, and agents compete to provably find the best opportunities that fit your needs. Getting in and out of the app is as easy as signing in with Google and connecting a bank account to on-ramp/off-ramp.

Dashboard of yield exposure across categories and a chat assistant to learn more.

The current simple conservative strategy, a mix of 20% of funds in Aave and 80% across three major USDC Morpho pools, earns between 5-10% APY with strong risk diversification.

It takes under a minute to setup, with future plans to integrate ramps and speed things up even more.

Right now, the 7% rate is better than Robinhood, HYSAs, or DeFi protocols that lack risk management automations and diversification.

Our goal is to make this the best place to earn on the dollar, for everyone.

A 100% conservative strategy (currently earning ~7% across Aave and Morpho pools) and an audit trail of transactions.

The history of yield opportunities has been brutal - counterparty risk is high, UX is terrible, and opportunities are hard to manage.

Global, autonomous yield - powered by stablecoins, new DeFi primitives, and verifiable agents - will bring significant earning opportunities to all and create efficient, democratic yield markets.

A world where anyone can type into diverse yield strategies across different assets, automate yield management decisions, and earn a little bit more on their assets (low risk/their risk tolerance level) is net good for humanity.

Follow @getaxal for more content, DM if you are interested in exploring the future of agents and yield with us, and try our product out in less than a minute at yield.getaxal.com.

Autopilot Yield is a product created by Axal that allows for users to use agents to find the best yield on their stables. What makes this product unique is the ability for Axal agents to provide forms of guardrails, like stop losses and activity pool monitoring, in order to ensure user funds are more protected than they would be in the wild.

We have created three separate categories:

1. Conservative: A strategy that gets users roughly 6-7 percent yield on stables. The strategy incorporates agents finding yield from Tier 1 trusted locations, like AAVE and Coinbase, and auto rebalancing/providing stop losses based on set parameters (TVL, Actvitity, and more).

2. Balanced: A more aggressive strategy than conservative, the yields expected in this custom generation typically range between 10-20%. The yield here is generally earned through staking mechanisms in platforms like Morpho and more.

3. Aggressive: The aggressive yield generation strategy incorporates agents searching to find yields on ecosystems like Hyperliquid Berachain, Sonic, Solana and more. It gets creative with delta neutral, leveraged LP, and auto rebalancing/ autocompounding strategies. It’s the embodiment of a trench warrior on steroids.

Watch Kozy from our team demonstrate the yield product:
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Tradeoffs & The Lindy Effect

Understanding the tradeoffs is important to deciding how much risk you are willing to take for the yield.

The higher the yield you can get from a protocol, the more likely that the protocol will be untested/new. This is a fact of not just trading, but life.

There’s a phenomenon called “The Lindy Effect,” or that the longer something is around, the less likely it is to experience negative effects, and vice versa.

It is worth remembering this when using Autopilot Yield, that the protocols that offer higher yields are doing so in order to attract new users, and are thus more risky.

While Autopilot provides guardrails around potential “getting rekt” events, each yield strategy comes alongside with its own level of risk.

We address potential returns and risks below.

Conservative

Our first major strategy, the conservative one.

Our selection of low risk low yield strategies is based on battle tested protocols that are already commanding large market share and have proven to stick around. These include Aave and Morpho to start with.

A user can expect a return that fluctuates between 5-10% in this level.

Aave has the most TVL and the least amount of risk due to the billions of dollars that have already been entrusted to the platform. Morpho is slightly riskier. Even though deposits are in USDC, they are curated by trusted 3rd parties like Gaunlet and Moonwell. Yields are autocompounded through the vaults and the curators take a 15% vault performance fee.

Balanced

Medium strategies start to lean towards the experimental phase where yields are higher but there are more associated risks.

A user could expect to earn roughly 15-20% APY on their deposits in this category.

For example, the staked token may not be native USDC but instead an overcollateralized version like feUSD, USDXL, and so forth meaning that there is more collateral backing the token than the value of the actual token. The main risk is that in the case of a bank run the protocol does not redeem the overcollateralized token 1:1.

We can get creative on the yield strategies here, incorporating things like liquidation premium (discount on liquidated assets on money markets), delta neutral positions, and trading fees from providing liquidity on a decentralized exchange.

Platform and smart contract risks exist here also. Every additional layer creates an additional surface area of potential risk (but also additional yields).

Smart contracts are susceptible to hacks and exploits therefore the number of smart contracts your capital routes through is a key factor for allocation.

Aggressive

Aggressive is for those that do not mind entering the high risk spectrum to capture outsized gains. Strategies here include looping, liquid staking derivatives, chaining through multiple platforms, as well as providing liquidity for volatile tokens. Capturing volatility is the name of the game here.

Risks are another level above medium risk strategies where you have exposure to multiple platforms, each with its own risk parameters.

Yields are typically astronomical, sometimes over 100% APY meaning that large inflows of capital will invariably dilute it. The main idea is having risk measures in place where positions are automatically managed based on market and platform data. We do not leave anything to chance so proper guardrails are in place to avoid unintended situations.

Remember, this strategy is risky and impermanent loss is still a possibility. But having agents monitor the yield protocol can provide a lot more ease of mind than investing without guardrails.

One of the most fascinating parts about crypto is the yield that you can earn from staking tokens, specifically stablecoins.

Through this form of yield generation, you are able to make money based on a token that is tied to the US dollar, and thus not subject to volatility in price.

What is truly remarkable about this form of revenue generation is the scale that it can reach.

Organizations like Coinbase, which is a publicly traded company that is audited by the SEC, and blue chip crypto protocols like AAVE, Compound, and Morpho offer yields that range from around 3% to 8 % in a relatively risk free manner → OR a LOT more than what you would get from sitting on dollars in your bank account.

Axal is launching a product, Autopilot Yield, that will allow for users to not only take advantage of these lower risk yield generation strategies, but also start tapping into the more outrageous yield offerings with clear risk mitigation guardrails. All automated.

What is the risk mitigation?

Well,

Autopilot Yield is a DeFi automation tool designed to simplify yield generation and management across various protocols and chains.

The system will monitor protocol and risk metrics to make data-driven decisions for entering, exiting, or shifting allocations between strategies to optimize yield and manage risk.

This includes functionalities like dynamic stop-losses and automated investment adjustments. The system aims to provide users with automated, efficient yield generation tailored to different risk profiles.

Currently, we divide autopilot yield into three risk categories: low, medium, and high.

Low

Low-yield strategies revolve around stablecoin yields from battle-tested platforms like Aave and Morpho. In terms of metrics, Aave has one of the highest TVLs in DeFi at over $16 billion and is one of the safest protocols out there. Morpho is newer to the space but still commanding over $2.5 billion in TVL and allows for curated vaults that provide competitive yields at a relatively low risk profile.

In terms of safety, Aave is one of the most stable platforms with high TVLs and reliability. The yield stands at 2.97% APY.

Enter Morpho, with their USDC vaults we can capture a good 6-7+% APY on USDC.

We monitor any notable TVL drops per vault/across vaults, depegging risks, as well as large TVL withdrawals from the top 5 vault allocators.

Medium

The next category we identified is medium-level risks.

Here you can earn over 10% return on just your stables, which once again are pegged to US dollars.

How does this happen?

Protocols like Hyperliquid HLP, Kamino, and Pendle have pools where you stake your stables that provide liquidity to stablecoins, market makers, and more!

It is worth noting that this high level of yield is tied to higher smart contract risk, depegs, and other platform risks.

What Autopilot can do is set up agents that are trained to monitor the pools that you are lending to, and if there’s a risk – i.e. it looks like there is a depeg event that may occur because price is dropping for the stable – it would withdraw your capital from the strategy and potentially even move it to an external wallet.

High

In crypto there are platforms, like OX.Fun, or leveraged pools on platforms like Kamino where you can earn up to 80% on your principal.

Providing liquidity to highly illiquid token pairs. Large drawdown potential.

The thing that gets scary here is issues related to lower liquidity, higher slippage, and volatility in these pools.

Enter Autopilot. Through using agents, we’ll create a way for you to set stop losses to the pools that you enter.

Thus, you are able to capture the insane value that is presented, while also not getting screwed.

Obviously this is still a risky choice, so be careful before going too crazy, know that even with risk parameters – these pools remain risky, and be sure to do your own research!

Building Better Yields

The overarching vision that we have with Autopilot Yield is to create a world where you are able to have better risk relationships with these high yield offerings.

The goal is to make it possible for people to dip their toes, depending on their risk tolerance, in the different sets of offerings that yields have.

Be sure to follow us on socials (@getaxal on twitter) to stay up to date with every update!

There’s one paper that is pretty much RELIGION for understanding the world of intents and solvers, and it is “An Analysis of Intent-Based Markets” by Tarun Chitra, Kshitij Kulkarni, Mallesh Pai, and Theo Diamandis.

We wanted to give an explanation of the paper, both summarizing and explaining how Axal fits into the world of Intent-Based markets.

At a high level, the paper introduces the idea of intents and solvers → pretty important stuff in our neck of the woods.

Why intents matter

Decentralized exchanges are super important for the world of DeFi, which has a TON of volume/liquidity in it, and – we hope – the ability to make finance more fair.

The most popular type of decentralized exchanges aka DEX is the Constant Function Market Maker (CFMM). An example of this would be UniSwap.

There’s two large issues with DEXs: maximal extractable value (MEV), which leads to things like front running by larger traders, and liquidity fragmentation → think of this as each item at a mall having a different price for the same product.

Intents sort of developed as a means to solve problems that exist with DEXs.

As the paper explains: Intents allow for “arbitrary covenants,” or the ability for users to express what they want done, and how they want it to be done.

How does this happen?

Well, instead of trying to make the order happen fully onchain → an intent will go out to a marketplace where a solver (agent, filler, searcher, tons of names for this) will, you know, solve it. The key thing to note on this is the “solving” happens offchain.

This is important because it solves the two big problems mentioned with DEXs by preventing the orders from going to a public mempool (the waiting room that orders sit in while they’re waiting to be executed).

By doing the execution offchain, the solver is able to pull multiple different sources to find the best execution price for the requested token/prevent front runners from trying to take advantage of a transaction. So users get reduced MEV + a more competitive price.

There are two major types of intents

1. The first is the Maximal Output Intent, which means that your intent, or “request”, is to get the most amount of the requested token when exchanging your starter token

   1. The issue with this is actually verification → it is hard to verify that the solver got the MAXIMUM amount of tokens as per their request. That being said, auctions/other competitions can help optimize and we can verify that the agreed amount is transferred.

2. The second is the Variance-Limited Transfer Intent, where a user specifies the specific conditions and “ranges” that they want to have done by the solver before sending it out.

   1. This is fully verifiable → and probably what can be extrapolated to intents outside of the crypto trading world. Maybe I can’t guarantee that you get the cheapest price for a task, but I can verify that it is within 5% of $X.

Studying Solving

The paper then starts to talk about the ways in which auctions can happen for solvers, focusing on UniswapX’s Dutch Auction style.

There’s a TON of math that comes up in this part, and if you want to check it out we suggest reading the paper.

What is worth noting here is that the paper proves mathematically that when it comes to the marketplace of solvers, it is better to have an oligopoly of solvers.

Why?

If there are too many solvers, then it could lead to adverse prices for the user. Lots of reasons as to why, but to use an example, if you have a bunch of people competing to buy someone a ticket to Montreal, new entrants need face upfront costs (planning/finding optimal ticket to be cheapest to win) and congestion costs (odds of them winning given that other folks can enter). Congestion costs intuitively go up with more solvers, making it harder to do business as a solver, potentially giving users sub-optimal prices compared to oligopolies.

Also, solvers have to front upfront costs in order to solve which further naturally promotes the oligopoly.

Some final thoughts

While this paper is seminal to understanding intents and the world around them → a lot has changed since its publication.

On our end, we actually plan to use a combination of Maximal Output Intents and Variance-Limited Transfer Intents. For something like rebalancing on Autopilot, we’d lean more on sending a Maximal Output Intent to make sure that we’re getting portfolios rebalanced in the most optimal way (cheapest/fastest swaps).For something like travel planning, we’d lean more on a Variance-Limited Transfer Intent because we’d want the solver to fit criteria like: “I need to be at these cities, on these dates at this time, I’m willing to spend at most $500, and make sure I never fly Spirit Airlines;” far more constraints focused with thresholds.

When it comes to the idea of the oligopoly, we’re excited to see if it holds true for generalized and more complex intents. We believe that truly competitive markets can ensure users get “the best,” at least for commoditized tasks. Obviously right now, there aren’t that many solvers in this space. However, as this technology continues to be built out, we’ll have more and more people realize the financial benefits from solving (to see the financial scale of solving right now, check out this), and thus markets will get more competitive.