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DeFi Generated $8 Billion in Onchain Yield in 2025: Analysis

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DeFi Generated $8 Billion in Onchain Yield in 2025: Analysis

A breakdown of DeFi’s yield sources reveals that borrowing demand, trading fees, and funding rates drove the bulk of returns, while more than half of stablecoin deposits in the Ethereum ecosystem are earning less than U.S. Treasuries.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) produced roughly $8 billion in onchain yield in 2025, according to a detailed analysis published by researcher Vadym that maps the full spectrum of where DeFi returns actually originate. The breakdown reveals that yield is abundant in aggregate but unevenly distributed, often circular, and in many cases difficult to package into structured products.

The findings land as yields across DeFi have dried up. Borrowing rates on major lending platforms have converged with the Federal Reserve’s policy rate, and “safe” stablecoin supply rates now average roughly 3% — below U.S. Treasuries and the Secured Overnight Financing Rate. On Aave, the 30-day average yield on USDC and USDT sits around 2%. Out of more than $20 billion in stablecoin vaults across Ethereum and its Layer 2s, 58% of TVL is earning under 3% APY, the report notes.

Where the $8 Billion Comes From

The analysis identifies five primary yield sources, each with distinct risk profiles and scalability constraints.

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AMM trading fees were the largest single category at roughly $4.2 billion, with Uniswap, Meteora, and Raydium accounting for 62% of the total. But the analysis cautions that these fees are notoriously difficult to capture in structured products. Liquidity providers — particularly those using concentrated liquidity — frequently lose money to toxic order flow, and LP-manager vaults have failed to gain meaningful traction.

Borrow interest generated approximately $1.76 billion across money markets, including Aave, Morpho, Spark, Maple and Fluid. Money markets account for more than 60% of total DeFi TVL, making lending the sector’s economic backbone. However, the analysis found that roughly half of all borrowing demand is recursive — users borrowing to loop back into other yield sources, such as liquid staking tokens or yield-bearing stablecoins. On Aave’s Ethereum deployment, about 39% of borrowing demand goes toward leveraging ETH staking rewards, while another 11.6% loops Ethena’s sUSDe.

Perps funding fees, largely pioneered onchain by Ethena, contributed around $300 million. Ethena’s sUSDe derives its yield from staking rewards and short funding rates — a mechanism that drew both praise and alarm when it launched in 2024.

Real-world assets generated an estimated $600–900 million, with U.S. Treasuries holding the largest share of the RWA market at about 41% and private credit at 25%.

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Network staking rewards and MEV comprise the remainder, with Ethereum’s issuance totaling roughly one million ETH in 2025. The MEV-derived portion of staking yield has been trending downward as private order flow routing — now handling about 90% of swaps — has reduced frontrunning opportunities.

Untapped and Underdeveloped Sources

The analysis also highlights categories where yield capture remains negligible. Insurance underwriting generated just $5.5 million in premiums in 2025, mostly through Nexus Mutual. Options — despite CeFi open interest of $30–50 billion — have roughly $1.8 billion in onchain OI with no breakout structured product. Volatility selling and protocol risk transfer remain largely untapped, which the analysis flags as a potential opportunity as risk curation grows more competitive.

Sky’s Balancing Act

As a case study in how protocols assemble these disparate yield sources, the analysis examines Sky (formerly MakerDAO), whose 3.75% USDS Savings Rate has attracted significant capital amid the compression. Sky’s TVL surged 38% in March, making it the fourth-largest DeFi protocol, with the sUSDS savings pool alone accounting for approximately $6.5 billion in deposits.

The breakdown reveals that approximately 70% of Sky’s income derives from offchain origination — primarily USDC earning Coinbase rewards through the peg stability module (PSM), and RWA exposure through products like BlackRock’s BUIDL and Janus Henderson funds. The remaining 30% flows from onchain sources, with Spark acting as Sky’s primary allocation arm, routing capital into Sparklend, Maple’s institutional lending, Anchorage, and other yield-bearing opportunities depending on prevailing rates.

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The implication, the analysis argues, is that even as TradFi yield increasingly flows through permissioned channels, its redistribution happens onchain, providing a floor for DeFi rates and potentially setting the stage for a next generation of yield derivatives, including fixed-rate products, interest-rate swaps and structured tranches.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

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LINK price consolidates above $9 while CCIP adoption cements Chainlink’s tokenization role

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Chainlink’s (LINK) price is changing hands around $9.42 today, with 1-hour gains of 0.13%, a 24-hour rise of 3.64% and a 7-day increase of 1.19%, putting its market capitalization at roughly $6.67 billion on a circulating supply of about 708.09 million tokens.

LINK price consolidates above $9 while CCIP adoption cements Chainlink’s tokenization role - 1
Chainlink price 3-month chart, source: TradingView

LINK price hovers near 3-month low

Over the last 24 hours, LINK’s spot trading volume has reached about $659,390,868 across tracked exchanges, giving the asset a volume-to-market-cap ratio close to 10%, a level consistent with heavy but orderly trading in a liquid large-cap altcoin. In earlier snapshots, the token traded near $14.28 with a market cap of $9.94 billion and daily volume of $687.78 million, showing how LINK has compressed in price from its late-2025 range while maintaining deep liquidity.

Historical data from market dashboards shows that LINK remains far below its all-time high near $52.70, leaving it down roughly 70–73% from peak even after the latest bounce, but with its full 696–708 million token circulating supply actively traded across major venues. That combination of long-term drawdown and persistent liquidity has made LINK a structural component of many portfolios that want oracle and interoperability exposure, rather than purely momentum-driven flows.

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Chainlink is a decentralized oracle and interoperability network that connects smart contracts to off-chain data, computation and other blockchains, positioning LINK as a core infrastructure token rather than a pure DeFi coin, AI asset or layer-1. Its nodes deliver price feeds, proof-of-reserve data, random number generation and, increasingly, cross-chain messaging via the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). In this model, LINK is used to pay for oracle services and secure the network, making demand for tokenized assets, DeFi and institutional connectivity directly relevant to the token’s long-term economics.

Recent technical and ecosystem updates have reinforced this role. Chainlink’s own communication describes CCIP as an “end-to-end interoperability standard” that allows tokenized funds to keep their share register on one chain while using CCIP to process subscriptions and redemptions across others, including private bank networks and public blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. A January 2026 deep dive outlines plans for CCIP v1.5 on mainnet, which will enable self-serve token integrations, customizable rate limits and support for EVM-compatible zk-rollups, expanding the protocol’s reach.

Adoption data around CCIP and related services helps explain why LINK continues to attract directional interest despite its long consolidation. Research cited in a March 2026 price outlook estimates that CCIP has been averaging around $90 million in weekly token transfers, hinting at steady cross-chain volume already moving through the protocol. Chainlink itself reports that its oracle infrastructure has enabled over $28 trillion in cumulative transaction value across DeFi, tokenized assets and other use cases, providing a track record that appeals to institutional users.

New partnerships add regional and sector depth. In early March 2026, the ADI Foundation announced that it would integrate Chainlink and use CCIP as the canonical bridge for ADIChain, a network focused on tokenization across the Middle East, Africa and Asia and reportedly backed by over $240 billion in assets through its institutional partners. Under that collaboration, Chainlink also becomes ADIChain’s official oracle provider for price feeds, reserve verification and NAV calculations for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, making LINK central to the network’s RWA and stablecoin stack.

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More broadly, coverage of CCIP in banking and asset management circles highlights pilot projects in which major banks and asset managers use Chainlink to move tokenized fund shares and stablecoins across public and private chains, including experiments by ANZ and SBI Digital Markets to settle cross-border payments and manage subscriptions. In that environment, LINK’s current price level around $9–$10, coupled with hundreds of millions of dollars in daily volume and a multi-year consolidation structure around the $14 support region, positions it as a liquid, infrastructure-linked bet on the scaling of tokenization and cross-chain activity rather than a short-lived momentum trade.

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Company Partnering with Marshall Islands to Boose Digital Sovereign Bond

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Company Partnering with Marshall Islands to Boose Digital Sovereign Bond

Update (March 25 8:22PM UTC): This article has been updated to clarify the role of M1X Global in the first paragraph.

The technology provider building the infrastructure for the Republic of the Marshall Islands’ universal basic income (UBI) program which will use a US dollar-pegged sovereign financial instrument has attracted some significant crypto-tied backers.

In a Tuesday notice shared exclusively with Cointelegraph, M1X Global announced that it had launched following a $3 million angel investment round by current and former executives connected to crypto and financial services companies.

Backers for the M1X Global angel round included former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan and Cumberland Labs CEO Tama Churchouse.

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According to the company, the funding will support the development and adoption of the USDM1 digital sovereign bond which allows citizens of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to access the UBI program.