State of Onchain Credit

Key Insights

• Onchain credit grew from $252.2M to $5.58B in 2025, a 22x increase. It is the fastest-growing real-world asset class, and the most actively used across DeFi despite accounting for just 17.3% of the total $30.18B in RWAs.
• Over $302.2B in stablecoins are in constant search of yield-generating opportunities. However, average lending rates across protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Spark have compressed to 2.9%, below the three-month U.S. Treasury rate of 3.7%.
• Onchain credit introduces exogenous yields that exceed benchmark rates. Vault curators like Steakhouse Financial are supplying liquidity to onchain credit money markets, enabling looping that amplifies returns for borrowers and lenders.
• Assets within onchain credit span institutional credit funds from Apollo and Fasanara, tokenized offchain credit from Figure, and a range of onchain origination models, including overcollateralized lending, peer-to-peer lending, InfraFi, and PayFi.
• Sky is the largest capital allocator to onchain credit assets, with Grove having deployed $588.5M and Obex committing $1B for deployment. Morpho houses $359M in onchain credit collateral, while Kamino’s Prime Market alone holds $282.1M.
• The next phase of growth for onchain credit hinges on diverse liquidity and robust risk management infrastructure. Protocols like 3F, Multiliquid, Agra, Cork, and OpenCover introduce liquidity options and price risk, enabling greater composability across DeFi.

Introduction

Institutional adoption is reaching unprecedented scale. Serotonin’s thesis sits at this shift. The world’s financial system will be onchain. Onchain financial products are proliferating, developed by crypto-native protocols, innovative startups, and traditional financial institutions. For years, this shift remained largely theoretical and was hotly debated. Crypto advocates repeated the cliche that “institutions are coming,” while skeptics questioned whether blockchain adoption by financial institutions was substantive or merely exploratory. That debate is settled. Institutional adoption is not a fad, it's the reality.

If history is any guide, tokenization today is roughly where the internet was in 1996.

— Larry Fink & Rob Goldstein of BlackRock

Regulatory clarity with the passage of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act in July 2025 has fueled confidence, while the potential for a market-structure bill to pass in 2026 with the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act remains. Traditional financial instruments are being tokenized, held, traded, and borrowed against directly onchain. Stablecoins have reached a market cap of $302.2 billion, while tokenized U.S. Treasuries, credit, and commodities are rapidly growing. These products are no longer pilots. They improve upon their legacy versions by offering lower cost structures, faster settlement, and DeFi composability. They are strategic shifts amongst the world’s largest financial institutions that have resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars coming onchain.

Serotonin operates at the intersection of finance, crypto, and the breakthrough technologies that stem from them. This report explores how the credit asset class is merging with blockchain infrastructure and analyzes the stack's layers across credit issuance, money-market use, capital allocation, and risk management. The future of credit is onchain.

*This report was produced independently by Serotonin and does not necessarily refle