IRIS
@iris_credit
Intent based fixed-rate origination layer.
Competitive quotes, sourced across deepest lending protocols.
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Designer's read on @aave, @Morpho, @0xfluid, @eulerfinance, and how we designed IRIS by @k__is__silent.
As of today:
✔️ Internal Testnet is up
✔️ IRIS Solver is quoting
✔️ Two venue integrations are ready
✔️ End-to-end tests are running on SDK / Infra
Therefore, IRIS Club, which has been a private room for a while, is opening today while we wait for the testnet.
Welcome to the club.
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The line we would underline: the innovation was never that fixed rates became possible.
Fixed-rate loans have been buildable( and was built countless times ) onchain for years. What was missing was anyone willing to take the other side at your exact size and your exact duration. That is a market structure problem, not an instrument problem, and it is the part people kept trying to solve with pools.
Matching liabilities and forecasting cash flows is a different buyer from the one onchain lending was built for. Someone optimizing yield wants the best rate available right now. Someone matching a liability wants a number they can put in a model and not revisit. Those two need different products, and onchain lending has only ever shipped one of them.
"Express the outcome you want and let the protocol handle execution beneath the surface." -> IRIS
Thanks to @0xCheeezzyyyy for this amazing overview
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One of the clearest signs that DeFi credit is maturing isn't just higher TVL or lower borrow rates.
It's the structural shift in where capital is flowing.
Over the past few years, lending has grown from 26.7% to 55.5% of overall DeFi TVL according to @DefiLlama , reflecting how credit has gradually become one of the industry's foundational primitives.
Not surprisingly, this is accompanied by an increasing emphasis on institutional-grade credit infrastructure.
And I think the next leg of evolution is obvious: Fixed-term credit.
After all, the overwhelming majority of TradFi credit markets already operate this way.
Whether it's corporate bonds, private credit, structured finance or institutional lending, borrowers typically prioritise funding certainty over constantly repricing floating-rate exposure.
For years, the idea of fixed-term lending has existed across DeFi and the innovation today isn't that fixed-rate lending suddenly became possible.
It's that we're finally seeing the surrounding infrastructure evolve to support it at institutional scale.
What I am referring to is things like:
1. Scalable liquidity
2. Professional execution
3. Risk management
4. Sustained + optimised market-making.
These are the pieces that transform a primitive into an actual financial market.
As institutional capital gradually becomes a larger participant in DeFi, certainty becomes increasingly valuable.
Not every allocator wants floating-rate exposure.
Many care less about chasing the highest yield and more about matching liabilities, forecasting cash flows, and locking in funding costs.
That's exactly where fixed-term credit starts making sense.
To me, this represents one of the next major evolutions of on-chain lending.
We're moving beyond simple overcollateralised lending markets into a broader credit stack where floating rates, fixed rates, tokenised credit and RWAs can coexist + complement one another.
What's equally exciting is that we're still incredibly early.
Many of these primitives are only beginning to find PMF, which means the protocols building the right infrastructure today have a genuine opportunity to establish themselves as the default liquidity venues tomorrow.
That's why I'm particularly looking forward to seeing what @IRIS_xyz is building.
Rather than viewing fixed and floating lending as competing products, I think the long-term opportunity lies in abstracting that complexity away altogether.
Users shouldn't have to actively manage interest-rate risk, optimise across multiple venues, or constantly refinance positions.
They should simply express the outcome they want (whether that's funding certainty or cost efficiency) and let the protocol handle the execution beneath the surface.
The future of DeFi credit won't be defined by having more lending markets.
It'll be defined by making increasingly sophisticated credit strategies feel invisible to the end user.
Great read from the team, feel free to check it out 👇
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Real thanks to Hexens, their Builder Support program made a difference.
They took the part that actually matters in a multi-venue integrated lending protocol.
No audit is the final word on that, but this one came back clean, 4 Lows, nothing above.
We're almost ready.
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Hexens Builder Support × @iris_credit
Happy to have supported IRIS through our Builder Support program, backing early-stage teams building thoughtful protocols in Web3.
Our audit focused on Iris's fixed-rate lending core. interest accrual across the fixed, floating, and overdue legs, collateral and bad-debt settlement, and the Morpho and Aave venue adapters.
Wishing the IRIS team the best as they head into launch.
Full report below:
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Notice that every rate headline is written from the lender's chair. Hikes, cuts, the curve. Nobody writes the borrower's version, the one who took the loan and can't reprice it. Most of finance is built for the side that sets the rate, not the side that pays it.
IRIS is the borrower's version. You state the loan you want and we are here to serve.
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Allocators love private credit because it barely moves. The returns come in smooth, the drawdowns look shallow, and it feels safer than a public bond paying the same coupon.
Cliff Asness has a name for most of that calm: volatility laundering. The asset is not steadier than its public cousin. It is marked less often. Stop observing a price and it stops jumping on your statement, but the risk never left. It waits, unpriced, until a redemption or a forced mark makes the whole move show up at once.
Hold that next to how a DeFi borrower actually pays for capital, because onchain the trick is not for sale.
A variable-rate borrower is marked every block. Pool utilization moves, the rate moves, and it hits the vault's realized cost immediately and in public. There is no quarterly mark to stand behind. You cannot make the volatility feel smaller by looking at it less often. It might be the most observed liability in finance.
So onchain there are only two honest positions. Carry the variance yourself, fully visible, or hand it to someone who is paid to hold it.
That second position is what a fixed rate is, and it is what IRIS runs. A borrower states the terms, and solvers compete to quote a fixed rate against them. The liquidity never leaves Aave or Morpho or wherever it came from. What changes hands is the variance. The solver who wins is paid to carry the repricing risk the borrower just shed.
The stability the borrower walks away with is not the private-credit kind. It is not calm borrowed from being unobserved. It is calm that someone underwrote, and they underwrote it for the one moment laundering always fails: the spike.
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Fixed rate lending onchain is overdue, and Midnight moving this way matters.
One distinction TradFi spent decades learning, and it is easy to miss here that a fixed rate loan and a fixed rate are not the same product.
One is a lender committing principal at a fixed coupon for a term which is the bond market. The other is leaving your floating loan where it is and buying rate certainty from a separate party who is paid to carry it.
What makes the second work is that the rate can be separated from the funding without moving the principal. A treasurer with a floating loan rarely refinances into a fixed one. They keep the loan and add the swap, and the two together behave like a fixed rate loan.
Midnight is building the first onchain. IRIS sits on the second side, but it is not a rate swap. It takes the one idea underneath the swap, that the rate can be unbundled from the funding and carried by someone else, and delivers it a different way. The borrower keeps drawing from the deepest liquidity onchain, even Midnight itself, and a solver underwrites the outcome on top.
Swap-like, but not a swap. More on why that difference is the whole point soon.
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Certainty is a symptom of running a single model; calibration comes from an ensemble.
Tetlock's forecasting tournaments found that hedgehogs (experts with one big theory who filter all evidence through it) predict worse than "foxes" who hold many small, partial models and aggregate them, despite (in fact because of) the hedgehog's greater confidence.
That is precisely why ensemble methods beat single models in statistics. A random forest outperforms one deep decision tree, model-averaging beats any single estimator because averaging many independent, individually-mediocre views cancels their uncorrelated errors.
The fox is an ensemble; the hedgehog is a single over-committed model; the felt experience of certainty is the sensation of having stopped averaging. You know your forecast is degrading at the exact moment it starts to feel clean.
A borrowing rate is a forecast too. Each lending venue is a single model - one utilization curve, one governance regime, pricing its own local noise as if it were the cost of capital. Accept a fixed rate from any single venue and you've trusted a hedgehog: it feels clean, one number from one source, which is the tell.
IRIS prices across venues at once. A solver's fixed rate isn't Aave's estimate or Morpho's but it's what remains once each venue's idiosyncratic noise cancels against the others: the systematic cost of capital, no longer padded for any single venue's local shocks. The ensemble, not the hedgehog.
The rate that survived aggregation.
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A bank does not write a thirty-year mortgage, fund it once with matched thirty-year debt, and forget it.
The rate the borrower pays is fixed. Everything beneath that rate stays in motion. Short-term paper rolled against long bonds, deposits repriced, positions hedged and re-hedged continuously to hold the cost of carrying that loan as low as it will go.
GOFR is a great example of active liability management. Galaxy sources across lending markets and hands the client a single optimized rate.
IRIS points the same machinery at a different target.
A solver does the same continuous cross-venue work but the number you hold is the one you set: fixed, at origination. The variability doesn't reach you. It stays with the solver, who took the job by winning your quote.
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Introducing GOFR: the Galaxy Onchain Financing Rate.
Institutions can now access onchain credit by facing Galaxy directly instead of DeFi protocols, borrowing at a single optimized rate blended across Aave, Morpho, Spark, Kamino, and more.
No wallets. No private keys. No smart contracts. Galaxy sources, executes, and services every position, backed by up to $100M of our own capital as first-loss protection, subject to applicable terms and conditions.
Learn more:
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Before IRIS opens Exclusive Mainnet, we’re opening a small glimpse of the intent-driven borrowing experience.
After submitting an intent, you’ll also see a portal to request access to Exclusive Mainnet.
Over the past few months, we’ve been thinking not only about how a borrower-centric credit protocol should work, but also how it should feel to use.
With this demo portal, you can submit the kind of borrow intent you would want IRIS solvers to price later - collateral, debt asset, size, duration, and preferred conditions.
Try it out today, and tell us how it feels.
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