Blockbooster：解讀鏈上原生信貸創設的局限與可能性

Original Author: @BlazingKevin_, Blockbooster Researcher

On December 11 last year, a16z crypto released its annual "Big Ideas 2026: Part 3." In the section on stablecoins written by partner Sam Broner, the following points are worth discussing:

"A stablecoin lacking a robust credit infrastructure looks like a narrow bank—holding only specific liquid assets considered extremely safe. A narrow bank is an effective product, but I don't believe it will be the long-term backbone of the onchain economy."

Broner then offered his assessment:

"We are already seeing a new cohort of asset managers, curators, and protocols facilitating onchain asset-backed loans collateralized by offchain collateral. These loans are typically originated offchain and then tokenized. I see little benefit in tokenization here... So debt assets should be originated onchain, not originated offchain and then tokenized."

Four months later, in March 2026, Sam Broner left a16z to found The Better Money Company, with a16z crypto leading a $10 million seed round, joined by Circle co-founder Sean Neville. However—what Broner is building himself isn't the "onchain native credit origination" he highlighted in his article, but rather a different track: a stablecoin clearinghouse for low-cost swaps between different compliant stablecoins, already signing partners like Paxos, Stripe's Bridge, and MoonPay as issuers and distribution channels.

The person who was most bullish on stablecoin infrastructure and first to declare the "narrow bank ceiling" chose, when it came time to build personally, the clearing/interoperability layer rather than the credit origination layer. This is because the credit origination layer is too difficult, with no project mature enough for him or someone of his caliber to bet their time on it. In other words, even the person who best understands this judgment is still waiting for the credit layer's "ready-to-build moment."

This is the topic of our discussion today: When the entire industry is talking about "RWA tokenization," the next truly structural opportunity might be "onchain native credit origination"—a direction repeatedly discussed but where no one has yet achieved scale.

0. Defining "Onchain Native"

"Onchain native credit origination" has two easily confused interpretations; we are discussing the second.

The first is "onchain native" in a procedural sense: the entire process from loan origination, interest rate pricing, to liquidation and disposal is completed onchain. In this sense, Aave, Compound, and Morpho are already fully onchain-native—loans are originated onchain, interest rates are dynamically priced by algorithms based on capital utilization, and liquidations are automatically executed by smart contracts when collateral ratios are breached.

The second is "onchain native" in a credit assessment sense: underwriting credit based on a borrower's onchain behavior, cash flow, and onchain identity, rather than relying on over-collateralization of crypto assets, or offchain traditional credit reports and financial statements. This is the truly immature part.

The fundamental difference lies in "on what basis you lend." Aave's model is "over-collateralization"—you want 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 releases the liquidity of existing assets. The borrower must already have money to borrow.

True credit origination is "lending based on a judgment of future repayment ability"—a bank lends you money to buy a house based on your income, credit history, and repayment capacity. This type of 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 onchain underwriting?" No. Aave's algorithm prices the interest rate driven by capital utilization, not the borrower's risk. When more money is borrowed from the pool, rates rise—this prices the pool's capital tightness, applying equally to all borrowers. Aave gives every borrower in the same pool the same rate because it doesn't distinguish between them. Real underwriting, by contrast, is about giving different prices to borrowers with different risks—this is the core of credit origination. A system that doesn't distinguish between borrowers, no matter how complex its rate algorithm, is not doing underwriting.

1. Current Status

On this front, there are products in the market, with 5 to 10 teams seriously attempting it. But their combined TVL is less than a fraction of Aave's single USDC pool. For example:

• 3Jane: Currently one of the closest attempts at "onchain native credit underwriting." It uses zkTLS technology to pull a borrower's offchain bank data (via Plaid integration) and onchain asset profile. A real-time underwriting algorithm called 3CA calculates a "Jane Score" credit score, then issues uncollateralized USDC credit lines—borrowers don't need to deposit any crypto collateral. Default handling follows a real legal chain: bad debts are packaged 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 exceeding $150,000.

However, even this most watched project in the track, backed by Paradigm and endorsed by Delphi, has minimal actual TVL (early stage at around a few hundred thousand dollars).

• Divine Research: Represents a completely opposite route 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 method is based on progressive identity + repayment history building: Borrowers must first complete an iris scan using Sam Altman's Worldcoin World ID to anchor a unique identity, then start with very small loan amounts (usually under $100). With each repayment, the limit increases, up to around $1,000. It primarily targets underserved populations in developing countries (Argentina, Nigeria, Colombia, etc.) overlooked by traditional finance—in the founder's words, "high school teachers, fruit vendors... basically anyone with internet access." Interest rates range from 20% to 30%.
• Its first-loan default rate is indeed high, around 40%. However, as borrowers build a record within this "repay for more credit" flywheel, the overall default rate is reported to approach zero—the 40% is the upfront cost of customer acquisition (covered by high interest and users claiming WLD tokens), not the steady-state bad debt rate of the model.

Viewing 3Jane and Divine side-by-side reveals two paths for onchain native credit, along with their respective limitations:

3Jane follows the "asset/income proof" route—using zkTLS to verify bank accounts and onchain assets, targeting asset-rich borrowers (high-net-worth individuals, enterprises), with defaults handled through the US legal debt collection system. Its limitation: it serves people who already have assets, distancing it from the true credit origination of "creating purchasing power for the asset-poor," and legal collection is only effective in mature jurisdictions like the US.

Divine follows the "identity proof + progressive trust" route—first using iris scans to ensure one identity per borrower, then using the "repay for more credit" flywheel to gradually build credit, targeting the long-tail, asset-poor population in developing countries, truly touching on inclusive credit. It has no collateral to recover and no effective cross-border legal recourse; the only consequence of default is "your iris can't borrow here anymore." This may sound weak, but the near-zero steady-state default rate indicates that the positive incentive of "pay up to borrow more" is effective for long-tail borrowers. Divine's real limitation is not in deterrence but in two aspects: first, the credit built is only valid within Divine's platform; second, its entire Sybil resistance is outsourced to World ID, an offchain biometric identity system, rather than natively solving the pseudonymity problem onchain.

The comparison of these two paths points to a conclusion: Neither has solved the "on what basis to lend" under the most difficult setting of "onchain, facing a pseudonymous borrower." Instead, they each introduce a fulcrum from outside this setting. 3Jane circumvents it by "proving you have money" (essentially a form of disguised collateral); Divine uses World ID to anchor identity and then squeezes credit out of behavior through the progressive "repay for more credit" flywheel. In other words, the hardest version—"judging, based solely on onchain behavior, whether an unknown borrower who can change addresses at will will repay in the future"—neither path has directly solved; their cleverness lies in each finding a fulcrum that allows them to lend money without needing to solve it head-on.

Other players include: Wildcat Finance (onchain matching for bilateral private credit, with lenders and borrowers negotiating terms directly, the protocol acting only as a matching engine and smart contract execution, with lenders coordinating recovery directly upon default); Clearpool, TrueFi (varying degrees of uncollateralized/under-collateralized institutional lending attempts); Union Protocol (social graph-based credit); Accountable (verifiable credit disclosure for offchain assets). The TVL for these protocols mostly ranges from hundreds of thousands to a few million dollars, with a few institutional-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 pursue uncollateralized credit themselves? They have the deepest liquidity, strongest brands, and most onchain data. Arguably, they are best positioned for onchain native underwriting. There are two structural reasons they don't:

• First, tail risk cannot be absorbed by token holders: Liquidations for over-collateralization are automatic and predictable, but default losses in uncollateralized credit are real bad debts. Governance token holders cannot bear this kind of credit tail risk—a single large-scale default could break the entire protocol.
• Second, regulatory arbitrage headroom: Over-collateralization has a clear legal narrative of "not a security, not traditional lending" (essentially a collateral swap), whereas uncollateralized credit immediately enters the purview of consumer credit regulation. Thus, the business models and risk structures of these giants prevent them from doing this, creating a structural window that new teams can enter.

Next, let's answer another question: Where does the demand truly lie? If it's just "theoretically there should be demand," this is a story looking for a solution. But real onchain credit demand is already distributed across specific scenarios: market makers and quant teams need working capital turnover but don't want to lock up equivalent collateral; onchain-native merchants, RWA asset originators, and crypto projects need accounts receivable financing and prepayments; and a large number of small and medium borrowers directly shut out by the over-collateralization model—they lack spare 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 left out is precisely the group "with cash flow but lacking collateral." This is the true market for credit origination. Demand is filtered out by the collateral threshold of the existing model, never statistically counted.

2. Why Stablecoins "Need" to Solve This Problem

To understand why onchain native credit origination is a "structural need," 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 treasuries, central bank reserves), issuing no loans at all. A narrow bank's deposits are 100% backed by safe assets, theoretically immune to runs or bankruptcy. It sounds safe, but it has never become mainstream—because it has a fatal commercial ceiling: it doesn't create credit, thus generates no money multiplier, and its business model has extremely limited profit potential.

The core value of modern banking lies precisely in "fractional reserves + credit creation." You deposit $100 in a bank; the bank keeps a fraction as reserves and lends the rest out. The lent money becomes someone else's deposit, which can be lent out again... This process creates purchasing power far exceeding the original deposit (the money multiplier), and it is the financial engine of modern economic growth. A narrow bank voluntarily abandons this engine, so it can only be a marginal player in the financial system, not its backbone.

Whether onchain credit origination can truly generate a money multiplier depends on a prerequisite—can the lent-out stablecoins be redeposited into the protocol to become a new source of lending? If yes (similar to the supply→borrow→re-supply cycle on Aave), it can indeed create a money-multiplier-like effect. If borrowers primarily use the funds for offchain consumption, removing them from the onchain credit system, the multiplier effect is limited. Strictly speaking, onchain credit origination is a necessary condition for the money multiplier, but the extent of the multiplier also depends on the capital return rate within the onchain economy.

Now look at the stablecoin system—it is exactly a giant narrow bank. USDC and USDT absorb "deposits," with reserves 100% in short-term treasuries and cash, issuing no loans and creating no credit. The entire stablecoin market's "deposit" scale—around $240 billion in mid-2025, surpassing $320 billion by mid-2026—is all sitting in safe assets, generating no money multiplier.

Avoid a misunderstanding: "No money multiplier" doesn't mean "not profitable." On the contrary, issuers are extremely profitable—they keep the interest from the treasury reserves backing their stablecoins. The GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act prohibit paying interest to holders, not issuers from profiting from the spread themselves. So the problem with stablecoins isn't that "no one profits," but that this profit is locked at the issuer level, neither distributed to users nor entering the credit creation multiplier cycle. Value is intercepted, not amplified.

Therefore, for the stablecoin system to break through the narrow bank ceiling and truly become an "onchain banking system," the only way out is to create credit outside the issuer—i.e., at the DeFi protocol layer. But current credit at the DeFi protocol layer is not real credit creation; it's just a pawnshop.

Thus, the logical loop closes: Stablecoin issuers are legally prohibited from lending → Credit creation can only happen at the protocol layer → The existing over-collateralization model at the protocol layer doesn't create new purchasing power → Therefore, the only logical path for the stablecoin system to break through the narrow bank ceiling is to develop true onchain native credit origination.

3. Why Is It Still Stuck?

If onchain native credit origination is a structural inevitability, why have only 5-10 teams been trying for over a year, and why is TVL still not scaling?

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

Engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac founded Fair, Isaac and Company as early as 1956, but the consumer-facing FICO score wasn't officially launched until 1989, and it wasn't adopted industry-wide, becoming a lending standard, until the mid-1990s when the housing GSEs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) embraced it. From the company's founding to the score's creation spanned 33 years, and to industry-level adoption took about 40 years.

The maturation of the credit infrastructure layer is measured in "decades," not "years." It was the FICO score that first made credit calculable, reusable, and standardized across institutions. In the decades following FICO's widespread adoption, the US consumer credit market truly exploded—credit cards, auto loans, and mortgages all scaled in step with FICO standardization. FICO wasn't a feature of consumer credit; it was the prerequisite for its scaling.

What onchain credit lacks now is precisely this "FICO moment"—a widely accepted, mechanism-trusted, cross-protocol reusable "onchain credit score."

Without this standardized credit layer, every protocol attempting onchain native credit is forced to build its underwriting system from scratch: 3Jane builds its own 3CA algorithm and Jane Score; Spectral creates credit scores based on onchain wallet behavior; Cred Protocol and Blockchain Bureau each develop their own onchain credit models; identity layers see attempts from Worldcoin and Gitcoin Passport. Each protocol reinvents the wheel, with no standard reusable by others. This is like the US before FICO—every banker had their own subjective judgment, preventing scaling.

All current attempts at onchain native credit are stuck in a chicken-and-egg loop: true onchain credit assessment requires rich onchain credit history, but most real borrowers' economic activities are still offchain, leaving insufficient onchain behavioral data to support underwriting. So protocols are forced to either fall back on offchain data or restrict lending to "people whose assets are already on the chain—the wealthy." Neither path reaches the long-tail borrowers who truly need credit creation.

But the FICO analogy can diagnose a deeper bottleneck. FICO's success wasn't just about standardizing the credit score; it also standardized the consequences of default—once you default, your FICO score is visible industry-wide, affecting your ability to borrow from any institution. This "cross-institutional portability of default consequences" is the true source of FICO's deterrent power: