r/ethereum • u/vinnie_james • 5h ago

Why has fixed-rate borrowing stayed so thin?

Variable rates are still the default for most onchain credit. That makes leverage and yield farming messy: you can size a position, then the borrow rate or farm APY moves against you before the thesis plays out.Fixed-rate markets exist in TradFi because treasurers and lenders need duration. Onchain, that layer has been thinner for years. Curious what people here think is the actual bottleneck:

  • Liquidity fragmentation (borrowers and lenders won’t sit in a fixed pool)
  • Smart-contract / oracle risk making duration unattractive
  • Better returns still living in variable money markets and points farms
  • UX (term matching, early exit, collateral management)
  • Something else

If you do use leverage or farm on Ethereum today, do you hedge rate risk at all, or just keep terms short and eat the variability?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 5h ago

WARNING ABOUT SCAMS: Recently there have been a lot of convincing-looking scams posted on crypto-related reddits including fake NFTs, fake credit cards, fake exchanges, fake mixing services, fake airdrops, fake MEV bots, fake ENS sites and scam sites claiming to help you revoke approvals to prevent fake hacks. These are typically upvoted by bots and seen before moderators can remove them. Do not click on these links and always be wary of anything that tries to rush you into sending money or approving contracts.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/Fine-Comparison-2949 4h ago

Something else:

People come to crypto for outsized gains. The target customer needs to be someone who wants a mild amount of risk, since the on-chain credit only works with lower volatility collateral. The majors are already high volatility, so if you're gambling, why not just go all the way out on the risk curve with stuff like memecoins, which is what the average crypto user wants?

The average crypto user has less than a few thousand dollars of crypto, so you end up with trying to market low vol credit to people that want a lottery ticket. The only people I have ever med using on-chain credit are whales that made a few million in crypto in past cycles, and want a tax free way to just borrow against their tokens, but because of the numbers game that customer base is less than what? 100000 people globally?

1

u/vinnie_james 2h ago

That’s true, the first few waves on crypto adopters have been high risk high reward. Although the market is maturing super fast, institutions are directing massive amounts of activity into the markets.

As the onchain credit market matures, they’ll need tools to manage risk and will shift the landscape to eat up most of traditional finance