Tiger Research: DeFi利回り低下を万字で解説、RWAにはどのような真の価値があるのか？

Core Points

• This report is written by Tiger Research. Aave V3's USDC deposit rate is currently 2.7%, lower than the US 10-year Treasury yield of 4.3%. The short-term speculative dividends of DeFi are fading.
• The market is not dead. Although yields are declining overall, Real World Assets (RWA) and stablecoins have grown into a multi-hundred-billion dollar sector, leading the industry towards a new development direction.
• The failures of projects like Compound, Curve, and Olympus reveal a profound lesson: a model where tokens prop each other up collapses instantly once external capital inflow dries up.
• In the past, DeFi was like a power strip without an external power source; RWA is now connecting this circuit to the real external value grid.
• The industry is maturing: anchoring value with RWA while gradually establishing mechanisms for collaborative governance and accountability, as exemplified by initiatives like DeFi United.

1. Declining Yields, Growing Market

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is no longer a high-yield product.

Since 2022, the spread between DeFi yields and Treasury yields has narrowed to near zero, with occasional yield inversions. As of April 2026, Aave V3's USDC deposit rate is approximately 2.7%, lower than the US federal funds rate (3.5%) and the US 10-year Treasury yield (4.3%).

In the past, users had a clear return logic for taking risks.

Back then, on-chain yields were far superior to bank deposits. However, the situation has now reversed. If the actual DeFi returns are lower than traditional financial products after accounting for various on-chain risks like hacks and stablecoin de-pegging, the incentive for ordinary retail users to actively participate in DeFi weakens significantly.

Nevertheless, the entire industry is evolving in a new direction. While native DeFi yields are declining, the **Real World Assets (RWA)** and stablecoin markets are deeply integrating with traditional finance, growing to hundreds of billions of dollars. Institutional capital inflow is the core factor driving this shift.

However, institutions often overlook DeFi's history and native community ecology, blindly copying traditional financial rules and paradigms. Before large-scale institutional entry, DeFi was a market primarily driven by token incentives. Many protocols used incentive mechanisms to build market awareness and reshaped the industry's operational logic. This model still profoundly influences DeFi today. Aave, a leading protocol born during DeFi Summer, has now become the benchmark interest rate for the entire DeFi industry.

For new institutional participants, deeply understanding the core market players who have weathered cycles and survived is essential groundwork before entering. This article will review the key protocols that shaped the industry's core narratives throughout DeFi's complete development cycle and summarize the lessons learned by the market.

2. DeFi History: From Experimentation, Collapse, to Reshaping

DeFi wasn't initially built on promises of token incentives. Its starting point was simple: Can we lend, borrow, exchange, and stake assets on the blockchain without intermediaries?

The early stage of the industry was more of a financial experiment. The core value lay in the model itself: lending without banks, asset exchange without centralized exchanges, and any user holding collateral assets could provide liquidity. But after 2020, the market shifted rapidly, with token incentives becoming the primary means of attracting capital. A flood of protocols and innovative ideas emerged, but only a few projects survived the cycles. The industry learned lessons and continuously corrected its development direction through successive narrative shifts.

Compound integrated its native token $COMP into its yield incentive system, thereby attracting massive liquidity. However, when similar projects replicated this approach, the inflow of new capital dried up, exposing the structural fragility of its model.

Curve transformed governance voting into a competitive arena for allocating yields among pools, turning yield competition into a fight for protocol control. The market thus realized that DeFi governance could also become a tool for monopolizing power and incentives.

OlympusDAO was the most extreme case. It attempted to prove the feasibility of DeFi controlling its own liquidity without external capital, offering ultra-high annual percentage yields. However, the vast majority of its yield didn't come from real cash flows but relied on minting new tokens and new capital inflows. Once capital inflow slowed, the price of its governance token OHM collapsed, and market confidence in the protocol was completely shattered.

These three projects collectively served as a wake-up call for the industry: If the core source of yield is the protocol's native token, the business model will ultimately be unsustainable. This history completely reshaped the perceptions of ordinary users, development teams, and institutional capital towards DeFi.

It was precisely after the burst of this model bubble that new tracks emerged: EigenLayer, Pendle, YBS, and RWA.

2.1. Compound: A Bubble Built on Token Distribution

In June 2020, Compound began distributing governance tokens to users, rewarding both depositors and borrowers. In some phases, COMP rewards even exceeded borrowing costs, creating the peculiar phenomenon of making money by borrowing.

This created a new industry paradigm. As users poured in, Ethereum gas fees skyrocketed, with single transactions often costing tens of dollars. Depositing and borrowing were no longer purely financial operations but became tools for farming rewards, as yield-chasing capital rapidly rotated between major protocols.

This period is known as "DeFi Summer."Projects like Uniswap, Aave, and Yearn Finance rose in succession, establishing on-chain finance as a distinct track. But Compound's ultimate model was essentially attracting capital with token incentives, which in turn boosted the token price, creating a positive feedback loop. The behavioral habits of today's DeFi users, highly sensitive to yields, liquidity, and reward mechanisms, were gradually solidified during this phase.

2.2. Curve and veCRV: The Beginning of the Curve Wars

Curve started as a simple exchange platform for stablecoins, but the introduction of veCRV completely changed its underlying logic. The longer users locked their CRV, the more veCRV they received; veCRV represented voting power that determined the distribution of CRV rewards to different liquidity pools.

From then on, the core of industry competition was no longer the level of yields, but the power to control yield distribution. Entities holding large amounts of veCRV could direct more token rewards to their own pools. Major protocols began accumulating veCRV, leading to intense competition and the outbreak of the Curve Wars.

Initially, this mechanism was attractive to both retail users and projects: retail users earned higher yields for longer lock-ups; projects could reduce token circulation and direct liquidity to target pools. Consequently, similar lock-up governance models quickly spread across the ecosystem, exemplified by Balancer's veBAL and Frax's veFXS.

But over time, governance power no longer rested with ordinary users. Meta-protocols like Convex began aggregating and locking CRV on behalf of users, concentrating veCRV voting power in exchange for enhanced rewards. The Curve Wars escalated, with the main battlefield shifting to Convex.

veCRV ultimately confirmed a core conclusion: the power to control yields is far more attractive than the yields themselves. Users no longer held governance power directly but delegated it to more efficient intermediaries like Convex. Curve also showed the market that DeFi governance rights themselves could become yield-bearing assets, and such power easily tends towards centralized monopolization.

2.3. OlympusDAO: A Golden Age Built on Game Theory

Even after Curve's veToken mechanism, liquidity remained the biggest long-standing problem in DeFi. Externally sourced liquidity would leave immediately if higher incentives appeared elsewhere, essentially representing speculative, profit-seeking capital.

OlympusDAO, launched in the second half of 2021, garnered significant attention as a solution to this problem. Its core design had three elements: Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL), where the protocol directly holds its own liquidity; the (3,3) game theory model, suggesting that all users staking and locking their tokens was the global optimum; and an ultra-high APY exceeding 200,000% in its early stages.

But this model ultimately proved unsustainable. OHM's yield was highly dependent on minting new tokens, not real business cash flow. Its bond mechanism spawned numerous fork copycats, and the OHM token price eventually crashed by over 90%. After this event, the thinking of developers and users changed fundamentally: before chasing "how high can yields go," people began prioritizing examining the true source of yields.

2.4. EigenLayer and Pendle: From Horizontal Yield Farming to Vertical Leverage

This crash completely changed retail user behavior. The strategy from 2020 to 2022 was simple and brutal:Farm the incentives first, then cash out. It was common for the same user to spread their capital across multiple protocols. The farming of that era was horizontal arbitrage:Capital moved quickly between protocols chasing higher APY.

After 2022, this model's efficiency plummeted. Token incentive models proved unsustainable, and airdrop competition became increasingly fierce. Simply depositing across multiple platforms yielded diminishing marginal returns. The market direction shifted accordingly. Capital began seeking multi-layered yield stacking on a single asset:Restaking staked Ethereum (stETH), reinvesting Liquid Restaking Tokens (LRT) into DeFi, and splitting yield ownership to capture points and future potential returns.

EigenLayer and Pendle became the core representatives of this transformation. From 2024, EigenLayer introduced a restaking architecture, allowing already staked ETH and LSTs to earn additional rewards. In just about six months, its Total Value Locked (TVL) surged from under $400 million to $18.8 billion, clearly confirming that capital was moving en masse from simple deposits to the restaking track.

Pendle splits yield-bearing assets intoPrincipal Tokens (PT) and Yield Tokens (YT). PT represents the near-principal-guaranteed principal claim; YT encompasses all interest, farming rewards, and point entitlements for the duration. YT expires worthless at maturity but maximizes point and yield capture during its holding period. Even without understanding the complex underlying mechanisms, buying YT evolved into a mainstream farming strategy leveraging both time and capital.

Industry strategy was thus rewritten: from spreading capital thinly across multiple protocols for horizontal farming to focusing on a single asset with multi-layered, compounding vertical yields.

3. Profit Model Restructuring: RWA and YBS

In the past, projects heavily relied on token incentives to boost Total Value Locked (TVL). A higher TVL seemed to indicate protocol expansion, and token prices would rise. But the core flaw persisted: external liquidity came and went fleetingly, failing to stick.

Today, TVL is still an important metric, but the industry's focus has completely shifted to: fee revenue, real asset backing, and regulatory compliance capabilities. The key variable behind this is the entry of institutional capital. Institutions rigorously scrutinize the source of yields and the true quality of underlying collateral assets. A new generation of products is iterating and upgrading, simultaneously catering to the needs of retail users and institutional compliance requirements.

3.1. Real World Assets (RWA): Large-Scale Institutional Entry

Since 2024, traditional financial institutions like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan have entered the on-chain market through Real World Assets (RWA). Their operational model involves tokenizing off-chain physical assets such as US Treasuries, money market funds, private credit, gold, real estate, etc., and issuing them on the blockchain.

The on-chain RWA market has grown from tens of billions of dollars in 2022 to hundreds of billions by April 2026. Treasury tokenization and private credit are the core drivers of this growth.

Currently, the leading institutional products areBlackRock's BUIDL andFranklin Templeton's BENJI . Both have similar underlying asset types but differ in operation: BUIDL is strictly for institutional investors, while BENJI has a minimum investment of only $20, open to ordinary US retail investors.

Furthermore, asset management giants like Apollo, Hamilton Lane, and KKR are accelerating the tokenization of private equity funds and private credit in partnership with on-chain issuance platforms like Securitize.

For traditional institutions, the on-chain market is not a new frontier but a new distribution channel for assets. Consequently, protocols serving institutional clients are building out the supporting infrastructure: compliant KYC/AML mechanisms, custody infrastructure, multi-jurisdictional legal adaptability, and professional risk management frameworks.

3.2. Yield-Bearing Stablecoins (YBS): Dollar Assets with Built-in Yield

The most noteworthy niche track currently is Yield-Bearing Stablecoins (YBS). YBS are stablecoins with yield-generating mechanisms directly embedded into the token itself. Ondo USDY, Sky sUSDS, Ethena sUSDe, and the previously mentioned BlackRock BUIDL and Franklin BENJI all fall into this category.

Users only need to hold these assets to automatically accumulate yields generated by the underlying assets. These underlying assets include US Treasuries, funding rate yields, staking interest, and money market funds. The entire structure is essentially the on-chain migration of a traditional Money Market Fund (MMF).

According to StableWatch's Yield Production Output (YPO) data, Ethena sUSDe, Sky sUSDS, BlackRock BUIDL, and Sky sDAI rank among the top in terms of cumulative yield paid out in the market. Figures vary slightly depending on the measurement, but there is no doubt: YBS have long moved beyond the experimental phase and matured into a track capable of consistently distributing real interest.

Even so, simply moving MMFs onto the chain is not a core differentiating advantage. The true moat lies in composability. BlackRock's BUIDL accounts for 90% of the reserves backing Ethena's stablecoin USDtb, which itself can be used as collateral in the Aave lending ecosystem.

In other words, basic financial products originally serving as tools for Real World Assets have now transformed into stable underlying components for on-chain finance. DeFi is no longer barely running on its limited "internal battery"; it is beginning to connect to the real external value energy.

4. Building the RWA Value Grid: Learning from Past Failures

Before this, DeFi was constantly doing one thing:Creating a self-referential, nested power strip circuit, calling it a growth flywheel.

Layer upon layer of leverage and derivatives were added, all operating in a closed loop. The fatal flaw was: the energy never came from outside. The vast majority of yields were artificially created by the protocols' own token incentives. Compound backed its lending with its native token, and Curve used its own token to retain liquidity providers.

On the surface, everyone supplied blood to each other in a circular fashion. In reality, the entire system shared one limited-capacity battery. When the market faced a shock, the underlying value collapsed first, cascading upwards and causing the derivative products at the top to fail first. This self-referential, self-backing model has a natural ceiling on its carrying capacity.

RWA is, for the first time, connecting this system to the real external value grid. Real economic cash flows like bond interest, property rent, and trade receivables become the stable electricity flowing through on-chain finance. Interest rate pricing is no longer artificially controlled by internal token incentives but