The world of decentralized finance or DeFi—a Lego-like stack of services that let people trade and lend without intermediaries—is expanding rapidly, and coming to include more and more elements from the traditional sphere of finance.
One recent example is Yield, a startup that launched in early 2020, and on Wednesday announced a $10 million funding round led by blue-chip crypto investment firm Paradigm.
Yield is one of a growing number of startups to offer fixed-rate lending, a relatively new innovation in DeFi, which initially only let users borrow and lend at variable rates. This is an important development as fixed-rate offerings provide reliable income and are a cornerstone of traditional finance.
The specific product Yield offers is akin to zero-coupon bonds in the conventional finance world but consists instead of tokens worth a fixed amount that borrowers can sell at a discount to obtain capital.
Yield has developed its own protocol, Yield Protocol, which operates atop the
