The Problem With Rates in DeFi
Traditional finance has SOFR, a single, transparent, daily rate derived from real repo transactions. It's boring, reliable, and foundational. Trillions of dollars in derivatives, loans, and structured products reference it. It is infrastructure so embedded that you rarely think about it.
DeFi has nothing equivalent. Rates are fragmented across dozens of protocols, chains, and assets. Each has its own number, its own methodology. There is no authoritative figure participants can point to and say, "This is the rate". No benchmark against which to price credit. The existing fallback is to simply reference the USDC rate on Aave. That's a proxy, not a standard.
This makes it surprisingly difficult to think about DeFi credit in institutional terms. What is the "risk-free" rate onchain? Where should a stablecoin lending spread be priced relative to the base? How do you construct a term structure when there is no reference point for the short end? These are basic questions in fixed income, and until now, they have had no good answers in DeFi.
What OCRR Is
OCRR, the Onchain Reference Rate, is a daily benchmark for stablecoin lending yields across DeFi. It aggregates supply-side lending rates from the largest and most liquid stablecoin markets, weighted by TVL using a methodology inspired by traditional benchmark construction principles.
The constituent protocols currently include Aave, Spark, Maple, Fluid, Kamino, and JustLend, together representing a significant share of onchain stablecoin lending activity. The rate is computed using square-root TVL weighting, an adaptive concentration cap, and a central 80% trimmed mean to produce a robust, outlier-resistant composite.
OCRR publishes three indices daily at 06:00 UTC:
- OCRR-USD: The composite rate across all major stablecoins
- OCRR-USDC: Restricted to USDC lending markets
- OCRR-USDT: Restricted to USDT lending markets
The result is a single, defensible number that represents the prevailing supply-side yield for stablecoin lending onchain, updated every day, fully transparent, and reproducible by anyone.
The Methodology
A benchmark is only useful if its methodology is sound and its construction is transparent. OCRR is built on four design principles:
Supply-side rates only. OCRR measures what lenders earn, not what borrowers pay. Supply rates better reflect the actual yield available to capital allocators and are less distorted by protocol-specific fee structures or liquidation dynamics. This is sourced entirely from blockchain-level data, direct from the source.
Stablecoin lending only. The rate captures USD-denominated stablecoin lending activity, including but not limited to USDC, USDT, DAI, and other major stablecoins. It deliberately excludes ETH, BTC, and other volatile collateral markets. This is a USD base rate, not a blended crypto yield.
Square-root TVL weighting. Rather than weighting purely by TVL (which would allow one dominant protocol to control the index) or equally (which would overweight small, potentially illiquid markets), OCRR uses the square root of each protocol's TVL as its weight. This balances representation, such that large protocols still carry more influence, but not disproportionately so. This methodology mirrors SOFR's own construction, which applies similar trimming logic to produce a robust composite rate.
Central 80% trimmed mean. After weighting, OCRR discards the highest 10% and lowest 10% of weighted rates before computing the mean. This removes outliers, whether from rate manipulation, temporary dislocations, or illiquid markets, and produces a rate that reflects the genuine center of the distribution.
A benchmark is only as good as its methodology. OCRR's calculation is fully transparent: every rate, every weight, every day.
The entire calculation is deterministic and reproducible. The rate inputs, weights, and outputs are published daily. There is no discretion, no black box, no adjustment committee. The code is the methodology.
The Yield Curve
A spot rate tells you where floating yields are today. But credit markets need more than spot; they need a term structure. Where does the market expect rates to be in 30 days? In 90? In a year? Without answers to these questions, it is impossible to price fixed-rate instruments, construct hedges, or build a serious onchain fixed-income market.
OCRR addresses this by publishing an onchain yield curve, the first of its kind, derived entirely from Pendle Finance's fixed-rate markets. Pendle's yield tokenisation protocol creates liquid markets for fixed-rate exposure at various maturities, effectively enabling price discovery for forward rates onchain.
The OCRR yield curve publishes standard tenors from 7 days to 365 days, providing a complete term structure for onchain USD rates. When combined with the spot reference rate, it gives market participants a full picture: where rates are now, and where the market expects them to go.
This is a genuinely new piece of market infrastructure. For the first time, a participant in onchain credit markets can look at a single source and see both the current base rate and the forward curve, the same basic toolkit that fixed-income professionals have relied on in traditional markets for decades.
Launch Partners
OCRR launches with the support of two protocols that understood the value of a credible onchain benchmark early: Pendle and Maple.
Pendle's fixed-rate markets provide the foundation for the OCRR yield curve. Their protocol creates the price discovery mechanism that makes an onchain term structure possible.
Maple, as one of the leading institutional lending protocols in DeFi, contributes critical rate data to the reference rate and has been an early advocate for benchmark standardisation in onchain credit markets.
We are grateful to both teams for their support and collaboration. Building market infrastructure is a collective effort, and OCRR is stronger for their involvement.
What's Next
OCRR is designed to become infrastructure, the default benchmark layer for onchain credit markets. The rate and the yield curve are the foundation. What comes next builds on top.
We encourage analysts, investors, and those interested in onchain finance to explore the data, whether through our dashboard, our entirely free data download function, or our open-access API. This data is designed to be an industry standard, and we plan to keep it open for all to reference.
The mission is simple: make onchain rates legible to the world. OCRR is where that starts.