Blockbooster: 한계와 가능성 해독 - 온체인 네이티브 신용 창출

Original author: @BlazingKevin_, Blockbooster Researcher

On December 11, a16z crypto published its annual “Big Ideas 2026: Part 3”. In the section on stablecoins written by partner Sam Broner, the following content is worth discussing:

“Stablecoins that lack robust credit infrastructure look like narrow banks—only holding specific liquid assets deemed extremely safe. A narrow bank is an effective product, but I don't believe it will be the long-term pillar of the on-chain economy.”

Broner then offered his judgment:

“We are already seeing a new cohort of asset managers, curators, and protocols beginning to facilitate on-chain asset-backed loans collateralized by off-chain collateral. These loans are typically originated off-chain and then tokenized. I see little benefit in tokenization here… so debt assets should be originated on-chain, rather than being created off-chain and then tokenized.”

Four months later, in March 2026, Sam Broner left a16z to found The Better Money Company. a16z crypto led a $10 million seed round, with Circle co-founder Sean Neville also participating. However—what Broner chose to build himself was not the “on-chain native credit origination” he pointed to in the article, but a different track: a stablecoin clearinghouse for low-cost swaps between different regulated stablecoins. Signed partners include issuers and distribution channels like Paxos, Stripe's Bridge, and MoonPay.

The person most bullish on stablecoin infrastructure and the first to call out the “narrow bank ceiling,” when it came time to build, chose the clearing/interoperability layer, not the credit origination layer. This is because the credit origination layer is too difficult. No project is mature enough for him or someone of his caliber to stake their time on it. In other words, even the people who best understand this judgment are still waiting for the “right time” to engage with the credit layer.

This is the theme of our discussion today: While the entire industry talks about “RWA tokenization,” the next truly structural opportunity may be “on-chain native credit origination”—a direction repeatedly discussed but yet to be scaled by anyone.

0. Defining “On-Chain Native”

There are two easily confused interpretations of “on-chain native credit origination.” We will discuss the second.

The first is “on-chain native” in terms of process: The entire loan lifecycle—from origination, interest rate pricing, to liquidation and disposal—is completed on-chain. In this sense, Aave, Compound, and Morpho are already fully on-chain native—loans are initiated on-chain, rates are dynamically priced by algorithms based on capital utilization, and liquidations are executed automatically by smart contracts when collateral ratios are breached.

The second is “on-chain native” in terms of credit assessment: Underwriting credit using a borrower’s on-chain behavior, cash flow, and on-chain identity, rather than relying on over-collateralization in crypto or traditional off-chain credit reports and financial statements. This is the part that is truly immature.

The fundamental difference lies in “why you lend.” Aave’s model is “over-collateralization”—to borrow $100, you must first deposit $150 worth of ETH. This is essentially not credit, but a pawnshop. It doesn't create any new purchasing power; it merely unlocks the liquidity of existing assets. The borrower must already have money to borrow.

True credit origination is “lending based on a judgment of future solvency”—a bank lends you money for a house based on your income, credit history, and repayment ability. This credit creates new purchasing power and is the core engine of the money multiplier and economic growth in a modern economy.

A common misconception needs clarification: “Isn’t Aave’s algorithmic interest rate a form of on-chain underwriting?” No. Aave’s algorithm prices the interest rate based on capital utilization, not the borrower’s risk. When more funds are borrowed from a pool, the rate increases—this prices the pool’s capital tightness, treating all borrowers uniformly. Aave gives the same rate to every borrower in the same pool because it doesn't distinguish between borrowers. True underwriting, by nature, gives different rates to borrowers with different risks—this is the core of credit origination. A system that doesn't distinguish borrowers, no matter how complex its rate algorithm, is not underwriting.

1. Current Status

Regarding this direction, there are products in the market today, with 5 to 10 teams making serious attempts. However, their combined TVL is barely a fraction of Aave’s single USDC pool. For example:

• 3Jane: This is currently the closest attempt to “on-chain native credit underwriting.” It uses zkTLS technology to pull a borrower's off-chain bank data (via Plaid integration) and on-chain asset profile. An underwriting algorithm called 3CA calculates a real-time “Jane Score” credit score, then issues uncollateralized USDC credit lines—borrowers don't need to lock any crypto collateral. Defaults follow a real legal chain: bad debts are bundled and auctioned to US collection agencies, with recovered funds distributed between the agency and the lender.
• Its $5.2 million seed round in June 2025 was led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, and Robot Ventures—Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire was also an angel investor. 3Jane launched its mainnet in early November 2025, with an initial cap of around $50 million, initially limited to US residents with total assets over $150,000.

However, even this most watched project in the track, backed by Paradigm and Delphi, has a minuscule actual TVL (early stage with tens of thousands of dollars).

• Divine Research: Represents a completely opposite path to 3Jane. Divine is a San Francisco-based company founded by Diego Estevez. Since December 2024, it has been issuing uncollateralized USDC short-term loans through a platform called Credit. By the second half of 2025, it had originated over 500,000 loans to more than 100,000 borrowers and completed a $6.6 million funding round.
• Its underwriting is based on a progressive establishment of identity + repayment history: Borrowers must first undergo an iris scan using Sam Altman's Worldcoin (World ID) to anchor a unique identity, then start with very small loan amounts (typically under $100). With each successful repayment, the limit increases, up to around $1,000. It primarily targets populations in developing countries (Argentina, Nigeria, Colombia, etc.) overlooked by traditional finance—in the founder’s words, “high school teachers, fruit vendors… essentially anyone with internet access.” Interest rates are 20%-30%.
• Its first-time loan default rate is indeed high, around 40%. However, as borrowers accumulate a record within this “repay-for-increase” flywheel, the overall default rate has been reported to approach zero. The 40% is the cost of the front-end acquisition layer (covered by high interest and WLD tokens claimed by users), not the steady-state charge-off rate of this model.

Looking at 3Jane and Divine side-by-side reveals two paths for on-chain native credit, along with their respective limitations:

3Jane takes the “asset/income proof” route—using zkTLS to verify bank accounts and on-chain assets, targeting wealthy borrowers (high-net-worth individuals, businesses), with defaults handled via the US legal debt collection system. Its limitation is that it primarily serves people who already have assets, distancing it from true credit origination that creates purchasing power for the asset-poor. Furthermore, legal collection is only effective in mature jurisdictions like the US.

Divine takes the “identity proof + progressive trust” route—first using an iris scan to ensure one identity per borrower, then using a “repay-for-increase” flywheel to gradually build credit. It targets the long-tail, asset-poor population in developing countries, truly touching on inclusive credit. It has no collateral to seize and no effective cross-border legal recourse. The only consequence of default is, “with this iris, you can't borrow here again.” This might sound like a weak deterrent, but the near-zero steady-state default rate suggests this positive incentive system (“pay back to borrow more”) is effective for long-tail borrowers. Divine’s real limitations aren’t on the deterrent side but lie in two points: first, the credit built is only valid within Divine’s own system; second, its entire sybil resistance capability is outsourced to World ID, an off-chain biometric identity, rather than natively solving the pseudonymity problem on-chain.

The comparison of these two paths points to a conclusion: Neither has solved the “why should we lend” problem under the most difficult setting of “an on-chain pseudonymous borrower.” Instead, they each introduce a leverage point from outside this setting. 3Jane bypasses it by “proving you have money” (essentially a form of disguised collateral). Divine anchors identity with World ID and then uses the progressive flywheel of “repay-for-increase” to squeeze credit out of behavior. In other words, neither path has yet directly tackled the hardest version of the problem: “Judging whether an unknown borrower who can change addresses anytime will repay, based solely on on-chain behavior.” Their cleverness lies in finding their respective levers to avoid this direct confrontation while still being able to lend.

Other players include: Wildcat Finance (on-chain matching for bilateral private credit, with lenders and borrowers negotiating terms directly, the protocol acting only as a matching engine and smart contract executor, and lenders coordinating recourse directly in case of default); Clearpool, TrueFi (varying degrees of unsecured/under-collateralized institutional lending attempts); Union Protocol (credit based on social relationships); Accountable (verifiable credit disclosure for off-chain assets). The TVL for these protocols mostly ranges from tens of thousands to a few million dollars, with a few institution-oriented ones being larger.

You might wonder: why are these small teams doing this, while the largest DeFi lending protocols—Aave, Morpho, Compound—don't engage in uncollateralized lending themselves? They have the deepest liquidity, strongest brands, and most on-chain data, seemingly best positioned for on-chain native underwriting. There are two structural reasons they don't:

• First, tail risk cannot be borne by token holders: Liquidations in over-collateralized systems are automatic and predictable, but default losses in uncollateralized lending are real bad debt. Governance token holders cannot bear this credit tail risk—a large-scale default could break the entire protocol.
• Second, regulatory arbitrage: Over-collateralization has a clear legal narrative of “non-security, non-traditional lending” (essentially a collateral swap), while uncollateralized lending immediately falls under consumer lending regulation. The business models and risk structures of these giants make it impossible and undesirable for them to do this—creating a structural window for new teams that the giants cannot enter.

Next, let's answer: where is the actual demand? If it were just “there should be demand theoretically,” this would be a story searching for a solution. But real on-chain credit demand is already distributed across several specific scenarios: market makers and quant teams need working capital turnover without locking up equivalent collateral; on-chain native merchants, RWA asset originators, and crypto projects need accounts receivable financing and advances; and a large number of small and medium borrowers are directly blocked by the over-collateralization model—they lack surplus crypto assets to pledge but have real cash flow.

In other words, the over-collateralization model serves people “who already have money wanting to unlock liquidity.” The demand blocked by this model is precisely the group “with cash flow but lacking collateral”—this is the true market for credit origination. This demand has been filtered out by the collateral threshold of existing models and has never been counted.

2. Why Stablecoins “Need” to Solve This Problem

To understand why on-chain native credit origination is a “structural necessity,” one must first understand the concept of “narrow banking” from traditional monetary economics.

A Narrow Bank is a classic theoretical construct: it only accepts deposits and holds ultra-safe assets (short-term government bonds, central bank reserves), making no loans whatsoever. A narrow bank’s deposits are 100% backed by safe assets, theoretically immune to runs and bankruptcy. It sounds safe, but it has never become mainstream historically—because it has a fatal business ceiling: it doesn't create credit, thus generates no money multiplier, and its business model has extremely limited profitability.

The core value of a modern bank lies precisely in “fractional reserves + credit creation.” You deposit $100 in a bank. The bank holds a fraction as reserves and lends the rest out. The lent money becomes someone else's deposit, which is lent out again… This process creates purchasing power far exceeding the original deposit (the money multiplier) and is the financial engine of modern economic growth. A narrow bank voluntarily relinquishes this engine, relegating itself to the periphery of the financial system, not its pillar.

Whether on-chain credit origination can truly generate a money multiplier depends on one premise: Can the stablecoins lent out be deposited back into the protocol, becoming a new source for lending? If yes (similar to Aave’s supply→borrow→re-supply loop), it would indeed create a money multiplier-like effect. If borrowers primarily spend the borrowed funds off-chain, removing the capital from the on-chain credit system, the multiplier effect is limited. Strictly speaking, on-chain credit origination is a necessary condition for a money multiplier, but the extent of the multiplier also depends on the capital return rate within the on-chain economy.

Now look at the stablecoin system—it is precisely a giant narrow bank. USDC and USDT absorb “deposits,” with reserves 100% in short-term government bonds and cash. They make no loans, create no credit. The entire stablecoin market's “deposit” scale—around $240 billion in mid-2025, exceeding $320 billion by mid-2026—sits entirely in safe assets, generating no money multiplier.

Avoid a misconception: “generating no money multiplier” doesn't equal “not profitable.” On the contrary, issuers are extremely profitable—they keep the interest from the treasury reserves. Acts like GENIUS and CLARITY prohibit paying interest to holders, not issuers from profiting from the spread. So the problem isn't “nobody profits,” but that this profit is locked at the issuer level, neither distributed to users nor entering the credit creation multiplier cycle. Value is captured, not amplified.

Therefore, for the stablecoin system to break through the narrow bank ceiling and truly become an “on-chain banking system,” the only path is to create credit outside the issuer—that is, at the DeFi protocol layer. However, the current credit at the DeFi protocol layer isn't true credit origination; it's a pawnshop.

Thus, the logical loop is closed: Stablecoin issuers are legally prohibited from lending → Credit origination can only happen at the protocol layer → The current over-collateralization model at the protocol layer doesn't create new purchasing power → Therefore, the only logical path for the stablecoin system to transcend the narrow bank ceiling is to develop genuine on-chain native credit origination.

3. Why is it still stuck?

If on-chain native credit origination is a structural inevitability, why have only 5-10 teams tried for over a year, with TVL failing to scale?

The answer is a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but a more precise historical analogy is the US consumer credit market before FICO.

Engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac founded Fair, Isaac and Company back in 1956, but the consumer FICO score wasn't officially launched until 1989. It took until the mid-1990s, when mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac adopted it, for it to become an industry standard for lending. That's 33 years from company founding to the birth of the score, and about 40 years to industry-wide adoption.

The maturity of a credit infrastructure layer is measured in “decades,” not “years.” The FICO score was the first thing to make credit calculable, reusable, and standardized across institutions. In the decades following FICO's普及, the US consumer credit market truly exploded—the scaling of credit cards, auto loans, and mortgages all followed the path of FICO standardization. FICO wasn't a feature of consumer credit; it was a prerequisite for its scaling.

What on-chain credit is missing now is exactly this “FICO moment”—a widely accepted, credibly designed, cross-protocol reusable “on-chain credit score.”

Without this standardized credit layer, every protocol doing on-chain native underwriting is forced to build its system from scratch: 3Jane builds its own 3CA algorithm and Jane Score; Spectral creates credit scores based on on-chain wallet behavior; Cred Protocol and Blockchain Bureau each develop their own on-chain credit models; identity layers are attempted by Worldcoin and Gitcoin Passport. Every protocol is reinventing the wheel, with no standard that others can reuse. It's like the US before FICO—every banker had their own subjective judgment, making scaling impossible.

All current attempts at on-chain native credit are stuck in a chicken-and-egg cycle: True on-chain credit assessment requires rich on-chain credit history, but most real borrowers' economic activity happens off-chain. There isn't enough on-chain behavioral data to support underwriting. So protocols are forced to either revert to off-chain data or limit lending to “people whose assets are already on-chain.” Neither path can reach the long-tail borrowers who truly need credit origination.

However, the FICO analogy also diagnoses a deeper sticking point. FICO's success wasn't just about standardizing the score; it also standardized the consequences of default—once you default, your FICO score is visible across the industry, affecting your ability to borrow anywhere. This “cross-institutional transmissibility of default consequences” is the true source of FICO's deterrence: not one bank punishing you, but the entire financial system punishing you together.