Welcome to another DeFi Markets Update—your no-nonsense briefing on the cryptobanking plumbing and market pulse.
Steakhouse in Singapore: TOKEN2049 Week Recap
Steakhouse chefs touched down in Singapore for TOKEN2049 and a packed week of side events. Across panels, presentations, private forums, dinners and meetings, our team spent the week talking about stablecoins, vaults, institutional lending and the next stage of onchain finance.
You could catch our APAC Lead Jiyeon Park joining a panel on Stablecoins as a new Settlement Layer, and co-founder Mark Phillips speaking on Institutional DeFi on Solana, onchain allocators and vaults.
Our other Steakhouse co-founder, Sébastien Derivaux, also took the stage at DAS Asia and Vault Summit, covering institutional money markets and the risks around vault strategies. For readers who missed us in Singapore, here is a short recap of some of the ideas we brought to the stage.
At DAS Asia, Sébastien explained that stablecoins are becoming a real settlement and savings layer, while credit markets around them need deeper liquidity, transparent risk management and useful places for that capital to go. Onchain USD lending has kept building across market cycles, with $12.7B of stablecoin loans outstanding today.
From there, he focused on three areas that can take onchain money markets further, more stable and predictable rates, greater efficiency between lenders and borrowers, and collateral that reflects the assets institutions actually hold.
On stability, DeFi lending rates have been moving closer to SOFR as liquidity deepens and more capital enters the market. The average absolute spread between Aave USDC supply rates and SOFR fell from 6.0% in 2021 to 0.7% in 2026, while volatility also came down over the period.
There were plenty of other interesting points in Seb’s talk, and we’d encourage you to give the full presentation a watch. From here, we’ll keep building, and you can catch what we have cooking next in London this November. Thanks to everyone who spent time with us in Singapore and made the week such a good one!
Credit Spreads Across Base and Ethereum
By examining the credit (High Yield - Prime) spread on Base vs Ethereum, we noticed that Base has been stabilising and flattening over the past month, while Ethereum has remained more volatile and slightly wider.
On Base, the spread has compressed to around 40-50 bps, compared with 80-100 bps on Ethereum currently.
When looking at the yields separately, we can see they are all relatively similar now compared with the much wider differences seen in the first half of the year.
The Prime vault yields have been converging, largely driven by the rates in their underlying cbBTC markets, which we covered in our previous issue here. Moreover, Base HY‘s APY has been slightly plateauing over the past month as newly deployed stock markets were added to the vault and have been building up borrowing demand, while cbXRP market remains the main allocation with steady supply and borrowing.
On the other hand, Ethereum HY has been yielding above 5% over the past month, making it the highest earning one of the four vaults. This has mainly been driven by strong and growing borrows in the PT-reUSD-10DEC2026 market, with mF-ONE also helping keep yields elevated. These collateral markets are currently only available on Ethereum, which helps explain why the Mainnet vault is able to earn a higher yield.
Launch of the new Steakhouse USDG Pro Vault on Arbitrum
Steakhouse USDG Pro vault launched on Arbitrum, and it allocates to the USDG/syrupUSDG market. The rollout is supported by Arbitrum incentives, with rewards bringing the vault APY to almost 8% on Morpho.
The elevated yield has already attracted new deposits, with over $5.7m flowing into the vault within its first week since deployment on 6 October.
Moreover, there is even more capital flowing into the underlying USDG/syrupUSDG market the vault allocates to, which now has over $16m supplied and $14.4m borrowed, putting utilisation at around 89%.
