Re7 Celebrates 5 Years. In recognition, The Hedge Fund Journal featured Re7 Capital. Read the full profile to find out how we think about risk in DeFi, and why we treat it closer to a credit discipline than a trading strategy.

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New Institutional Report, written in collaboration with Zodia Custody. How should institutions think about DeFi? Our latest report applies a traditional finance lens to the question: where yield comes from, the risks behind it, and what institutional-grade participation requires.

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Re7 Labs

Re7 Labs x Kamino: Introducing the Plume Vaults.

Re7 Labs, in partnership with Kamino, launched a dedicated Plume Vaults market - bringing curated lending and borrowing to a new class of onchain products.

Re7's OP Morpho WETH vault was integrated by AlchemixFi.

The market lends against Re7ETH - Re7's flagship ETH Yield strategy - and wstETH.

Learn more: app.re7labs.xyz

Weekly Summary

We cover:

• Why trading continues to move from centralised exchanges to DEXs

• How tokenisation and recent US regulatory changes could accelerate the shift

Markets Are Moving Onchain

We have argued for years that more financial activity will move onchain. The thesis is grounded in a few structural advantages:

• CEX-like execution and UX, without giving up self-custody.

• Global accessibility with greater privacy over user and trading information.

• Direct composability with DeFi, allowing assets and liquidity to move across applications.

• Faster and broader asset listings, particularly across the long tail.

• Cheaper blockspace and better infrastructure, reducing the historical trade-offs of trading onchain.

The data increasingly reflects those structural advantages, with spot markets leading the move onchain.

Spot Leads The Way

Last week, our Chart of the Week showed spot DEX volume reaching a new ATH at around 27% of CEX volume, up 8 percentage points over 12 months and around 4x in two years.

The opportunity is also expanding beyond crypto-native assets. Tokenised equities have grown to around $2.5–3bn onchain, up more than 3.5x YTD.

Robinhood Chain has been one of the clearest examples, rapidly issuing tokenised equities to its users with the ability to interact with the wider DeFi stack.

Tokenised equity volume ($) by blockchain (daily).

Centralised platforms are increasingly issuing assets onchain themselves. These assets can then trade across DEXs and integrate with DeFi, adding new markets and liquidity to the onchain ecosystem.

Total value of tokenised stock onchain since December 2024.

Derivatives Following the Trend

The shift is also visible across derivatives.

Perpetual DEX open interest has consistently gained share against CEXs, reaching a new ATH of almost 30%.

Perp DEX/CEX open interest ratio.

The harder-to-game metric of actual trading volume effectively tells the same story too. Perp DEX volume is now around 12% of CEX futures volume, approximately 6x its share two years ago.

Perp DEX/CEX volume ratio

Options remain much earlier. DEX options notional has reached a new ATH at around 2.5% of CEX volume, having spent most of 2024–25 below 1%.

Spot, perpetuals and options are all gaining share against centralised venues. Tokenisation adds another leg by increasing the range of assets that can trade onchain.

Regulation Meets The Trend

Last week’s US regulatory developments could accelerate this further.

The SEC’s Innovation Exemption creates a pathway for tokenised US-listed stocks to trade through permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools. This came despite the CLARITY Act failing to advance, providing a route under existing regulatory authority.

The CFTC also reduced regulatory friction for software facilitating access to registered derivatives markets.

These changes temporarily remove constraints on a shift already underway. DEX share is rising across spot, perpetuals and options, while tokenisation expands the assets available onchain.

We have highlighted this thesis for years based on the structural advantages of onchain markets.

Better UX and execution have made those advantages more accessible, while more assets moving onchain and lower regulatory barriers should accelerate the trend.

Market Update

Crypto gained 6.3% last week, with BTC breaking through the $80k sell wall and its May 2026 high.

This follows our 200DMA signal in August, which historically marked sustained momentum over medium and longer-term horizons.

BTC has now also broken its 50W MA, mirroring the Q1 2023 consolidation where the break preceded the next move higher.

Alt dominance has broken above its three-year downtrend, supporting a broader move beyond BTC where capital is rotating into longer-tail opportunities.

This momentum has manifested despite a higher rate environment.

Bearish equity sentiment is at its highest in more than a year, with investors focused on the traditional impact of higher rates while underweighting structural growth from AI and productivity.

Higher rates are still weighing on rate-sensitive parts of the economy, but have so far been insufficient to offset growth in AI-related investment, earnings and productivity.

Crypto increasingly has exposure to the same structural growth. AI agents create demand for onchain payments, settlement, privacy and programmable assets, while inference expands the number of autonomous users able to transact onchain.

In early July, we highlighted the conditions for capital to rotate back into crypto as valuations became deeply discounted relative to the AI trade.

The catch-up is now underway, with adoption becoming a larger driver of returns and reducing reliance on easier liquidity.

Crypto has been outperforming the NASDAQ materially since June 2026.

The catch-up has already started. Since June, crypto has significantly outperformed equities, with alts leading all major asset classes.

Alts (pink) and crypto beta (white) have outperformed major asset classes since June 2026.

We expect crypto to continue outperforming as AI creates a new source of structural demand for onchain infrastructure, increasingly independent of the traditional liquidity cycle.

State of Yields

Yields have expanded slightly across the board in light of recent market volatility:

Stablecoin lending yields:

• ~3.66% on Aave (USDC) — 4 bps higher than last week.

• ~4.85% on Aave (USDe) — same as last week.

• ~5.07% on Maple (syrupUSDC) — 11 bps higher than last week.

Fixed-rate DeFi lending: yield premium in fixed markets:

• Pendle sUSDAi: ~11.57% (Oct 2026 – Feb 2027 maturities).

• sUSDe: ~5.83% — 232 bps lower than last week.

ETH yield benchmarks:

• Lido staking: ~2.23% — 1 bps lower than last week.

About Re7

Re7 Capital is a research-driven digital asset investment firm specialising in DeFi yield and liquid alpha strategies.

Re7 Labs is an on-chain asset management and risk curation firm bringing institutional-grade rigour to DeFi.

Disclaimers

The content is for informational purposes only. None of the content is meant to be investment advice. Use your own discretion and independent decision regarding investments. The opinions expressed in all Re7 public research articles are the independent opinions of the authors at the time of publication and not the opinions of the affiliates of Re7.

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