RealFi Says Its Stablecoin Yield Tops 12% as Ethereum Launch Nears

Seny Orlov (0:00)

I've spent many years in capital markets, and I'm very excited about brands that are happening and tokenized assets coming on chain, and there being more and more high quality assets to back products like us. Our investment team is very excited about the world of RWAs and bringing it on chain, and delivering real yield that is backed by real borrowers and really attractive risk adjusted opportunities that can't easily be found in public markets.

Jennifer Sanasie (0:36)

Introducing RealFi, a smarter stable coin that's backed by real world assets. Join the mainnet now at app.realfi.co. RealFi, the Cardano native real world asset stable coin protocol, launched its mainnet recently, marking the next stage in its development following a public test net that attracted over 3000 verified active wallets. Joining us now with more is RealFi's Chief Business Officer, Seny Orlov. Hey Seny.

Seny Orlov (1:02)

Hey, thanks very much for having me.

Jennifer Sanasie (1:03)

Thanks for being here. Now that mainnet launch happened, I think, about two weeks ago now. Talk to us about what's been going on in the last two weeks. What's happened since mainnet?

Seny Orlov (1:14)

So we're live on Cardano mainnet since the first of October, which is very exciting. It's been a very busy last month or so.

But yeah, obviously, coming out of a public test net, as you mentioned, with thousands of verified wallets participating in it, we've had a lot of feedback from our community and users. Lots of people actually testing out the protocol, proving the loops, not actually that it's just farm numbers, but actually helping us test that the full loop works has been really valuable. And so what happened on the 1st of October when we launched was a very technically clean launch that we're very proud of, very proud of our tech and engineering team. No real incidents, no pauses, swaps working as they should, staking working as it should.

Yeah, essentially proved that the full loop works end to end. USDC in by our partner DEX, users getting USDRF as they should, staking it into SUSDRF, getting the income from our portfolio borrowers. So yeah, everything worked just like it should.

Jennifer Sanasie (2:32)

Sounds like a successful mainnet launch. I think it's always successful when everything works as expected and there were no surprises. Let's just take a step back and lay a foundation for our viewers who maybe are just hearing about RealFi now. Just talk to us about the RealFi ecosystem and USDRF. How does the ecosystem work? How are people able to operate within it?

Seny Orlov (2:54)

We have two tokens, right? USDRF, which is the sort of one-to-one dollar peg liquid stablecoin. You can stake that to get access to our yield-bearing portfolio, which is comprised of real world assets, primarily credit assets. We do a lot of lending to fintechs that provide credit to things like revenue-based finance, supply chain finance, trade finance, things like that. Then that's overlaid with a lot of liquid instruments in order to support the liquidity profile of stablecoin. Things like CLA, AAA-related CLA ETFs, T-bills, money market funds, like all super high-quality liquid instruments. What's super exciting is actually last week, we distribute a yield on a weekly basis.

Yesterday, our annualized yield came to over 12 percent, which is from our portfolio. This is, I think, one of the highest real-world-asset-based stablecoin yields in the market right now.

Jennifer Sanasie (4:06)

I want to talk about that 12 percent number because it is a staggering number, especially when we're talking about yield. Can you talk to us a little bit about the mechanics there and what types of users are operating in the ecosystem right now and are benefiting from the 12 percent yield that you just mentioned?

Seny Orlov (4:24)

A lot of the anchor investors that we've launched with are institutions from the Cardano ecosystem and or other ecosystem backers that we know we can lock up for a long period of time, so say 12 months plus. That means we can allocate that institutional capital into high yielding opportunities. Some of the private credit opportunities that is actually how the company started, the company has been doing private credit and direct fintech lending for the last over three years now. They built up a track record in this space, a lot of relationships with fintechs that deliver really nice returns, and we're talking returns of 15-16 percent on six to 12 month tenors. Given that our initial capital is sticky and locked up for a long time, obviously, that is generating an outsized yield at the moment from the private credit opportunities.

As new people come in and as retail flows, obviously, we'll be investing some of that capital into way more liquid assets. But right now, the opportunity is there to earn something that's very attractive, so 12 percent currently.