Singapore, Singapore, August 27, 2026, Chainwire — TermMax, a fixed-rate lending protocol built by Term Structure Labs, said on August 26 that it has received a strategic investment from YZi Labs, the investment firm formerly known as Binance Labs. The companies did not disclose the terms.

TermMax was selected for YZi Labs’ EASY Residency Season 3, part of an incubation program that more than 65 of the firm’s portfolio companies have gone through, and has raised more than $8 million to date. Earlier backers include Cumberland DRW, the digital-assets trading arm of proprietary trading firm DRW, which led the 2023 seed round, as well as 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. Fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing mirrors how bonds and repurchase agreements function in traditional finance, while most on-chain lending to date has run on variable rates that reset automatically with pool utilization. TermMax supports 60 fixed-rate markets and 40 strategy vaults, has 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 token generation event (TGE) on August 25.

YZi Labs has previously said that tokenized blue-chip equities have reached meaningful volume, but that the financial application layer around them — including credit, collateral management, risk transfer and structured products — remains underdeveloped. In an August 14 post, the firm said options and other risk-transfer products are notably absent. The investment in TermMax is aimed at that gap.

“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.

Tokenized equities are currently the fastest-growing asset class on-chain, with a market value of $2.48 billion and holder count up 165% over the past 30 days. That growth sits within a broader shift in which traditional asset managers and trading firms have begun bringing funds and securities onto public blockchains.

TermMax integrated Ondo Global Markets in January 2026 to launch what it described as the first fixed-rate borrowing market to accept tokenized U.S. equities as collateral. It later added Binance’s bStock. In August, the protocol went live on Robinhood Chain, where QQQ, SPY and NVDA can be posted against USDG.

The company said financing is only part of what tokenized equities require. It noted that most of this year’s tokenized-equity infrastructure has focused on perpetual futures, with little development in options.

TermMax Alpha is designed to address that gap with physical-delivery options and no liquidation before expiry. The conversion price is fixed when a position is opened, and settlement occurs through physical delivery at expiry. The structure is intended to avoid the risk that a directionally correct position could be wiped out by short-lived volatility in thin liquidity, a failure mode the company said makes perpetuals unsuitable at the illiquid end of tokenized equities.

The protocol’s liquidation model also uses physical delivery. When liquidation occurs, collateral is delivered directly to the lender rather than sold into the market. TermMax said the common assumption that collateral can always be sold at fair value on demand may hold for ETH, but does not hold for a tokenized equity with only a few million dollars of depth.

On the institutional side, TermPrime completed its first live trade on Canton Network, a blockchain infrastructure designed for institutional financial markets, at the end of June and has since expanded its counterparty network to nine institutions. TermMax operates an early validator node on Canton, and TermPrime is positioned to support lending business for institutions there through open markets.

TermMax said it has a DeFiSafety Process Quality Review score of 93%, matching Aave V3, one of DeFi’s most widely used 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 company said it does not aim to be just another lending protocol, but rather the on-chain interest rate curve itself. Its recent milestones — TermMax Alpha’s physical-delivery options, tokenized-equity collateral on Robinhood Chain and the growing TermPrime counterparty network on Canton — show where that build-out is concentrated.

About TermMax

TermMax is a fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing and lending marketplace built by Term Structure Labs. It has been live on mainnet since April 2025 and is 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, representing principal; XT, representing 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. Liquidations settle by physical delivery of collateral.

Co-founder and CEO Jerry Li has 25 years of experience in global financial markets and previously served as Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, where he ran fixed income and FX for Greater China.

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About YZi Labs

YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. The firm says its investment philosophy is impact first, with the belief that meaningful returns will naturally follow. It invests in ventures at every stage, focusing on Web3, AI and biotech.

YZi Labs’ portfolio includes more than 300 projects across more than 25 countries on six continents. Its notable portfolio companies include Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, SafePal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster and XAI. More than 65 of its portfolio companies have gone through the EASY Residency incubation program.

For more information, follow YZi Labs on X (@yzilabs).

TermMax Marketing Team: hello@cipherdance.com