Many people are still stuck in the concept that RWA = putting US stocks on chain, but what RWA should truly solve is not the “on‑chain” aspect itself, but giving traditional assets new attributes in the cryptocurrency space.
When you buy US stocks through a traditional broker, aside from dividends (and most growth stocks don’t even pay dividends), there is basically no additional income. Holding is just holding; at most you can do margin financing, but the thresholds are high, the rules are complex, and the costs are not transparent. In the crypto world, assets have meaning beyond mere holding—they can be combined, pledged, earn yield, and be reused as financial building blocks.
Therefore, the real value of on‑chain US stocks is not to let investors buy stocks somewhere else, but to turn a “stock” into an asset that can enter DeFi, generate yield, unlock liquidity, and be managed strategically. This is the core reason to motivate users to buy US stocks on‑chain and to encourage projects to issue on‑chain US stocks.
The NYSE understandably wants to bring the traditional brokerage system on‑chain, but that road is too long. Regulation, clearing, custodianship, settlement cycles, compliance identity, cross‑border restrictions—each cannot be solved by a single “chain”. Currently, the platforms that have achieved scale are those that first connect the most critical link: tokenizing the asset and then integrating it into on‑chain financial use cases.
Ondo draws attention for two reasons: it entered the RWA space early, and its partnerships with traditional finance giants like BlackRock make its asset backing and compliance narrative more trustworthy. More importantly, Ondo solves the asset side, while @TermMaxFi helps Ondo address the on‑chain DeFi yield of US stocks.
If investors buy on‑chain US stocks on Ondo and just let them sit there, they are still just a repackaged stock. What turns them into a crypto asset is whether they can enter the DeFi loop. That’s what TermMax aims to do.
When users hold Ondo’s tokenized US stocks, they can use them as collateral on TermMax to borrow stablecoins, or they can feed them into specific wealth‑management systems that the market utilizes. Thus, returns no longer come solely from stock price changes or dividends, but from on‑chain lending demand and capital‑market pricing.
What RWA capital cares most about is order, and the core of order is certainty. In traditional finance, a fixed interest rate is the most basic pricing tool, whereas one of the biggest problems in DeFi is floating rates and uncontrollable costs, making risk control impossible for institutions.
TermMax’s fixed‑rate offering is achieved by breaking loans into individual bonds with maturity dates, turning the rate from a protocol parameter into a market price.
Simply put, after a borrower pledges collateral, they don’t pull money directly from a pool; instead, a “maturity‑payable” certificate is generated, which can be seen as a zero‑coupon bond on‑chain. This certificate can be redeemed 1:1 at maturity, but before then it trades on the market at a discount. The size of the discount corresponds to the interest rate.
The borrower needs immediate stablecoin liquidity, so they sell the “maturity‑payable” certificate for cash. The sale price determines their financing cost, and once sold, it is locked in; subsequent market swings won’t change the loan’s cost structure.
Lenders, on the other hand, seek certain returns, so they buy the discounted certificates with stablecoins and receive 1:1 face‑value redemption at maturity. Effectively, the yield is fixed at the moment of purchase and will not change even if market rates rise later.