TermMax, a fixed-rate lending protocol developed by Term Structure Labs, announced on August 26 that it has secured a strategic investment from YZi Labs. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The protocol was also selected for YZi Labs’ EASY Residency Season 3.

TermMax has raised more than $8 million to date. Its earlier investors include Cumberland DRW, which led the 2023 seed round, along with HashKey Capital, Decima Fund, Longling Capital and MZ Web3 Fund.

Protocol Scale and Market Presence

The protocol has operated on mainnet since April 2025 and is now deployed across 10 EVM-compatible chains. It currently supports 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 act as Curators managing the strategy vaults. The $TMX token completed its token generation event on August 25.

YZi Labs has publicly identified a gap in the infrastructure surrounding tokenized assets. In an August 14 statement, the firm noted that while tokenized blue-chip equities have reached meaningful volume, the surrounding financial application layer—covering credit, collateral management, risk transfer and structured products—remains underdeveloped. Options and other risk-transfer products, in particular, are largely missing.

Expansion into Tokenized Equities

Tokenized equities currently stand as the fastest-growing asset class on-chain, with a total value of $2.48 billion and a 165 percent rise in holder count over the past 30 days. TermMax integrated Ondo Global Markets in January 2026 to create the first fixed-rate borrowing market accepting tokenized U.S. equities as collateral. It later added Binance’s bStock. In August the protocol launched on Robinhood Chain, allowing users to post QQQ, SPY and NVDA against USDG.

Financing alone does not meet the full requirements of tokenized equities. Most infrastructure development this year has focused on perpetual futures, with little attention given to options. TermMax Alpha addresses this by offering physical delivery options that carry no liquidation risk before expiry. The conversion price is set at the time a position is opened, and settlement occurs through physical delivery at expiry. This structure prevents a directionally correct position from being closed out by short-term volatility in thin markets, a limitation common to perpetual contracts in less liquid tokenized equities.

The same physical-delivery principle applies to liquidations across the protocol. When liquidation occurs, collateral is delivered directly to the lender rather than sold into the market. This design accounts for the limited depth of many tokenized equity markets, where the assumption of immediate fair-value sale does not hold as reliably as it does for assets such as ETH.

Institutional Activity and Security Metrics

On the institutional front, TermPrime completed its first live trade on the Canton Network 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 institutional lending through open markets on the network.

TermMax holds a DeFiSafety Process Quality Review score of 93 percent, equal to that of Aave V3.

The protocol aims to function as the on-chain interest rate curve rather than operate solely as another lending platform. Debt is split into three tradable tokens: FT representing principal, XT representing interest and option value, and GT, an ERC-721 receipt for leveraged positions. Professional Curators establish target APR ranges across isolated markets and oversee strategy vaults.

Jerry Li, co-founder and CEO of TermMax, brings 25 years of experience in global financial markets. He previously served as Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, where he oversaw fixed income and foreign exchange for Greater China.

YZi Labs manages more than $10 billion in assets worldwide and invests across Web3, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Its portfolio includes more than 300 projects spanning over 25 countries. Notable holdings include Trust Wallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena and others. More than 65 of its portfolio companies have participated in the firm’s EASY Residency incubation program.