Deep42 🪴

AAVE: THE NEXT PHASE OF ONCHAIN LENDING I have been looking into @aave latest developments, and three things stand out: institutional capital, modular lending infrastructure and the growing role of external risk managers. On November 5, Payward, the company behind Kraken, disclosed that an affiliated investment fund and its clients had acquired an undisclosed amount of $AAVE through secondary-market purchases. But the token purchase isn’t the only development worth examining. Aave V4 has also crossed $1.5B in deposits, with active loans exceeding $450M, according to its October development update. The more interesting change is how V4 handles lending markets. WHAT IS CHANGING Aave V4 introduces a Hub and Spoke architecture. Instead of treating every lending market as one shared environment, it allows dedicated markets to operate with their own collateral, borrowing assets and risk parameters while connecting to shared liquidity infrastructure. This also opens the door to external curators. Sentora became the first external curator on V4, managing dedicated market parameters while Aave DAO retains ownership of the contracts. The DAO also receives 50% of the instance revenue, with risk-increasing changes subject to a 48-hour timelock. WHY THIS MATTERS This creates a different approach to scaling DeFi lending. Rather than relying entirely on one central risk configuration, specialized markets can be designed around different assets and borrower requirements. That matters for stablecoins, yield-bearing assets and eventually more sophisticated tokenized financial instruments. However, external curation introduces its own risks. Collateral selection, oracle reliability, liquidation parameters and curator accountability still matter. More deposits do not automatically mean better risk management. FINAL TAKE Aave is moving beyond being a lending venue for crypto native assets. Its V4 architecture is creating room for specialized credit markets, while institutional interest in AAVE adds another dimension to its development. The important question is whether this architecture can support increasingly complex financial markets without weakening the risk controls that make lending sustainable. That is the development worth following.

$QNT Is just another speculative token. Yup, that argument is officially dead. At this point, the evidence isn't hiding anymore. 🇺🇸 UNITED STATES September 24, 2026. The Clearing House, owned by 25 major financial institutions including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi, selected Quant. Its payment networks clear and settle over $2 TRILLION DAILY. Quant was chosen to provide interoperability and transaction management for its tokenized deposit initiative. Target availability: H1 2027. And that's just America. 🇬🇧 UNITED KINGDOM Barclays. HSBC. Lloyds. NatWest. Nationwide. Santander. Six major banks participating in the Great British Tokenised Deposits initiative. Quant was selected to provide supporting infrastructure. The initiative has progressed into live pilot activity involving real sterling. 🇯🇵 JAPAN Quant partnered with Dentsu Soken to advance tokenized deposits and programmable settlement. And there's more. Quant also announced an integration partnership with Murex, a major capital markets technology provider. Now stop looking at these developments separately. CONNECT THE DOTS. America. Britain. Japan. Capital markets. Different institutions. Different financial systems. The same problem: Connecting traditional finance with blockchain-based money. And Quant keeps appearing in efforts to solve it.

$SKY Q3'26 REPORT HIGHLIGHTS Net revenue: $37.19M, +11.8% QoQ, margin from 31.0% to 37.5% Gross revenue: $99.29M, -7.4% QoQ, down from $123.79M in Q1 Expenses $62.10M, -16.0% QoQ Where the margin came from: 1. Savings rate payouts $41.94M (-$11.97M) as sUSDS fell from $5.52B to $4.52B 2. $11.97M payout cut minus $8.06M revenue drop = the $3.91M profit gain 3. Since Q3: savings rate up to 3.80% (Oct 7), sUSDS back to $4.72B (Oct 21) Where the profit went: A.) $28.47M to reserves ($85.08M of a $150M goal) B.) $8.72M to the SKY side ($5.60M buybacks + $3.12M USDS to stakers), 23% of net revenue, Stage 2 live from Aug 17 Comments: "Q3 showed that they are already integrating at the balance-sheet level" - Rune Christensen, Sky co-founder Source: Sky Ecosystem Q3'26 Report, Sky Frontier Foundation (self-funded)

Zcash blocks get three times faster this week @Zcash is set to switch on its NU7 upgrade at block 3,543,405, expected around Thursday, November 5. The target time between blocks drops from 75 seconds to 25, cutting the wait for a first confirmation to a third, while the reward per block shrinks so daily $ZEC issuance stays the same. @ZcashFoundation has released Zebra 7.0.0, its first stable node software supporting NU7 on mainnet, with fixes for seven security issues. Node operators need to upgrade before the switch, since older 6.x versions can’t follow the chain past that block, and version 4 transactions will stop working entirely.

Kamino Fixed Rates just crossed $75M in active loans, ~six weeks after launch. The growth is concentrated in one clear use case: leveraged exposure to tokenized U.S. consumer auto loans. On Sept 21, @kamino launched fixed-rate borrowing on Solana w/ Figure and @HastraFi. The first product was a Fixed Rate Multiply vault on AUTO, Hastra's yield-bearing token backed by Figure's near-prime auto loans through Democratized Prime. Borrowers lock in 5.3% for 30 days (later markets sit at 5.75% and 6%) w/ auto-rollover if there's liquidity at maturity. A known rate for a defined period replaces a variable rate that reprices with utilization every few blocks. People clearly wanted it, and the uptake was fast: 🔸 $10M+ originated in the first 72 hours 🔸 $40M+ in two weeks 🔸 $62M+ by late October, now $75M 🔸 AUTO supplied on Kamino went from roughly $9M to nearly $100M, ~10x 🔸 The broader AUTO market crossed $170M in deposits, with fixed-rate debt making up most of the borrowing That makes it the fastest-growing fixed-rate lending protocol onchain. Multiply has been the main driver. Users deposit AUTO → borrow wYLDS at the fixed rate → buy more AUTO, all in one transaction. So leverage demand ends up creating new issuance of the underlying tokenized loans. To me the ramp above is the strongest proof the product works. Almost all onchain lending still runs on open-ended variable rates. That model is simple and capital-efficient for crypto-native looping, and fixed rates now serve the cases that need predictable financing costs, esp over weeks or months. Think about RWA issuers scaling distribution + funds running multi-month strategies + tradfi institutions modelling their cost of capital. Here's what Fixed Rates adds: 🔸 A rate grid, with different rates and durations as separate reserves 🔸 Conditional liquidity, so capital keeps earning in variable pools until it's matched to a fixed-rate borrow 🔸 Effectively the first live onchain yield curve And imo the signal here is real. Borrowers used the product aggressively once rate certainty was there and the underlying yield supported it and that's what institutions look for before they get involved. If the same pattern shows up in other tokenized credit markets or larger RWA pools, this is the kind of credit infra DeFi has been missing. Onchain credit may not end up exclusively fixed. It now has a working, growing option for the cases where fixed actually matters.