From CoinDesk · By Peter Gaffney
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Happy Wednesday,
This is your institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:
Peter Gaffney of O2O Capital Partners on what’s keeping real-world assets from scaling in DeFi
Top headlines institutions should pay attention to by Francisco Rodrigues
“Tron led crypto card volume in Q3 2026” in Chart of the Week
…and if you’re looking for more institutional insights: ETF Central’s Trackinsight Global ETF Survey 2026, produced with Calamos Investments and S&P Dow Jones Indices, finds nearly 7 in 10 professional investors are reassessing their ETF holdings.
Plus, CoinDesk’s latest Digital Assets Quarterly Report is out now.
Thanks for joining us!
- Kim Klemballa
by Peter Gaffney, co-founder, O2O Capital Partners
Fixed-rate lending is the clearest growth lever for real-world assets (RWAs) in decentralized finance (DeFi). It unlocks a strategy that credit desks have run for decades but DeFi has never meaningfully implemented: buy a quality income asset, borrow against it at a locked rate below the asset’s yield and buy more of the asset. Stablecoins are steadily sitting around $300 billion in supply and aggregate vault assets are nearing the $20 billion milestone. Morpho alone carries more than $16 billion in deposits, most of it in variable-rate markets priced on pool utilization, which serve crypto-native traders who manage liquid positions in real time but leave longer-dated borrowers with uncertainty. Fixed-rate, fixed-term lending closes that gap by matching the term of the loan to the duration of the collateral, especially for RWAs whose redemptions can settle anywhere from T+7 to T+90. With the borrow cost and maturity known at entry, institutional counterparties can underwrite an RWA looping vault the same way they approve conventional term financing. This is the same bedrock foundation that formed and grew traditional credit markets to $51 trillion in US fixed income versus $1.6 trillion in floating-rate leveraged loans. The move to fixed rates is already underway: Morpho recently opened fixed-rate, fixed-term markets through Morpho Midnight, which Coinbase used to launch fixed-rate crypto-backed loans to its customers in September 2026.
DeFi is a battle-tested real-time execution engine with a narrow collateral base of volatile crypto assets that move by magnitudes in stress. This is what turned the October 10, 2025 liquidation cascade into a $19 billion event, marking the start of a nearly 60% reduction in DeFi total value locked for the eight months to follow. Expanding DeFi beyond crypto requires non-crypto-correlated RWAs, and RWAs require more precise lending markets to scale. RWAs already back the largest stablecoins, with Ethena and Sky committing more than $2.4 billion to JAAA, BUIDL, STAC, and USTB.