Singapore, August 27, 2026 (Chainwire) — TermMax, a fixed-rate lending protocol built by Term Structure Labs, announced on August 26 that it has received a strategic investment from YZi Labs, the Web3 investment firm formerly known as Binance Labs. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TermMax was selected for YZi Labs' EASY Residency Season 3 and has raised more than $8 million to date. Its earlier backers include Cumberland DRW — which led the 2023 seed round — HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital, and MZ Web3 Fund.

The protocol has been live on mainnet since April 2025 and now operates across 10 EVM-compatible chains, with 60 fixed-rate markets, 40 strategy vaults, tens of millions of dollars in total value locked, and more than 1.5 million registered wallets. Keyrock, Hardcore Labs, Edge Capital, and Origami serve as Curators, managing strategy vaults on the protocol. The $TMX token completed its TGE on August 25. Most DeFi lending still runs on variable-rate, open-ended pools; fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing — the on-chain analogue of the bond market — is the far smaller corner of the market where TermMax operates.

The Gap the Investment Targets

YZi Labs' own public position points to the gap this investment is meant to fill. In an August 14 post describing what it wants to see built, YZi Labs wrote that tokenized blue-chip equities have reached meaningful volume, but that the financial application layer around them — credit, collateral management, risk transfer, and structured products — remains underdeveloped, and that options and other risk-transfer products in particular remain conspicuously absent.

YZi Labs placed this investment precisely where that gap sits.

“When I left banking, there were a few hundred billion dollars of assets sitting on-chain without a single directly observable interest rate curve between them. In traditional markets, that would be unheard of. That is what made me decide to build this infrastructure on-chain.” — Jerry Li, Co-founder and CEO, TermMax

That curve matters because it is the benchmark from which traditional markets price credit, hedge interest-rate risk, and build structured products on top — the same functions the application layer YZi Labs flagged as underdeveloped depends on.

Tokenized Equities as Collateral

Tokenized equities are the fastest-growing asset class on-chain, now at $2.48 billion, with holder count up 165% in 30 days.

TermMax integrated tokenization platform Ondo Global Markets in January 2026 to launch the first fixed-rate borrowing market to accept tokenized U.S. equities as collateral, then added Binance's bStock. In August it went live on Robinhood Chain, the retail brokerage's chain for tokenized assets, where QQQ, SPY, and NVDA can be posted against USDG.

Financing, however, is only half of what tokenized equities need. Nearly all of this year's tokenized-equity infrastructure has gone into perpetual futures, and almost none into options.

TermMax Alpha and Physical Delivery

TermMax Alpha is where that changes: physical delivery options, with no liquidation before expiry. The conversion price is fixed when the position is opened, and the position is settled by physical delivery at expiry. A directionally correct position therefore cannot be knocked out by a few minutes of volatile trading in thin liquidity — the failure mode that makes perpetuals unsuitable at the illiquid end of tokenized equities.

This no-liquidation design rests on a choice running through the whole protocol: when liquidation does happen, it settles by physical delivery, with collateral delivered directly to the lender rather than sold into the market. The usual assumption — that collateral can be sold at fair value on demand — holds for ETH and fails for a tokenized equity with a few million dollars of depth.

Institutional Expansion

On the institutional side, TermPrime completed its first live trade on Canton Network — a privacy-enabled blockchain built for institutional financial markets — at the end of June and has since grown its counterparty network to nine institutions. TermMax runs an early validator node on Canton, and TermPrime is ready to support lending business for institutions there through open markets.

TermMax holds a DeFiSafety Process Quality Review score of 93%, matching Aave V3, one of DeFi's largest lending protocols.

“What we set out to do is not to teach traditional institutions DeFi. It is to let DeFi grow into something professional enough to genuinely serve finance.” — Jerry Li, Co-founder and CEO, TermMax

The near-term markers are concrete rather than narrative: the $TMX TGE on August 25, the YZi Labs announcement a day later, the August Robinhood Chain launch, and a Canton counterparty network that has grown to nine institutions.

What TermMax aims to be is not another lending protocol, but the on-chain interest rate curve itself.

About TermMax

TermMax is a fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing and lending marketplace built by Term Structure Labs, live on mainnet since April 2025 and deployed across 10 EVM-compatible chains, where it runs 60 fixed-rate markets and 40 strategy vaults. The protocol splits debt into three tradable tokens: FT (principal), XT (interest and option value), and GT (an ERC-721 receipt for leveraged positions). Professional Curators set target APR ranges across isolated markets and manage strategy vaults, and liquidations settle by physical delivery of collateral. Co-founder and CEO Jerry Li has 25 years in global financial markets and served as Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, running fixed income and FX for Greater China.

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About YZi Labs

YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Its investment philosophy emphasizes impact first — the belief that meaningful returns will naturally follow. YZi Labs invests in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech. Its portfolio covers over 300 projects from more than 25 countries across six continents. Notable portfolio companies include Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, SafePal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI, and more. More than 65 of YZi Labs' portfolio companies have gone through its incubation program, EASY Residency. For more information, follow YZi Labs on X (@yzilabs).

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