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 venture firm formerly known as Binance Labs. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The investment follows TermMax's selection for YZi Labs' EASY Residency Season 3, and brings the protocol's total funding to more than $8 million raised to date. Its earlier backers include Cumberland DRW — which led the 2023 seed round — HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital and MZ Web3 Fund.

TermMax has been live on mainnet since April 2025 and now operates across 10 EVM-compatible chains, running 60 fixed-rate markets and 40 strategy vaults, with 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 — one day before the investment was announced. Most large DeFi lending markets still quote variable rates; TermMax's fixed-rate, fixed-term markets let both sides lock terms through maturity, which is the function bonds perform in traditional finance, where debt securities outstanding are measured in the tens of trillions of dollars.

The Gap YZi Labs Is Targeting

The investor's 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

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 Ondo Global Markets in January 2026 to launch the first fixed-rate borrowing market to accept tokenized U.S. equities as collateral, and later added Binance's bStock. In August, it went live on Robinhood Chain, the brokerage's own blockchain network, 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 blockchain designed 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 93% score on DeFiSafety's Process Quality Review — an independent assessment of DeFi protocol processes — matching Aave V3.

“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

What TermMax wants 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. The firm invests in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI and biotech. YZi Labs' portfolio covers over 300 projects from over 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).

Media contact: TermMax Marketing Team — hello@cipherdance.com

Source: Chainwire — https://chainwire.org/2026/08/27/yzi-labs-backs-termmax-to-advance-on-chain-bond-market-infrastructure/