Aave Launches “Horizon” to Accelerate Institutional DeFi Lending

It’s GDPfi Summer. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it has started posting GDP data to a number of blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. You can now check on U.S. economic data on Etherscan.

It’s a symbolic step, but a meaningful one: treating blockchains as neutral, tamper-proof infrastructure for public data. And it doesn’t stop at GDP. With the help of Chainlink, the government is also posting PCE, consumer spending, and real final sales data onchain.

So, yes, this is it. We did it. We’ve finally brought the world economy onchain… well, you know, kind of.

Today, we’ll talk about:

• Aave launches “Horizon” to accelerate RWA adoption
• Google enters layer-1 race
• Circle and Paxos pilot “Know-Your-Issuer” solution

HIGH SIGNAL NEWS

• BNB, SOL, and CRO get new treasury vehicles. First, the investment firm B Strategy announced plans to raise $1 billion for a BNB treasury company. In another deal, the Trump Media Group committed to invest $1 billion in CRO, Crypto.com’s native token. Lastly, investment firm Pantera is seeking to raise $1.25 billion to transform a publicly traded company into a SOL treasury vehicle, with a $1 billion joint venture between Galaxy, Jump, and Multicoin Capital following suit.💰️
• Global stock exchanges call for crackdown on tokenized stocks. In a letter to the U.S. SEC’s Crypto Task Force, the European Securities and Markets Authority, and IOSCO’s Fintech Task Force, the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) warned that tokenized equities mimic shares without granting legal ownership or shareholder rights, posing potential risks to investor protection and market stability.✉️
• Kalshi unveils push into crypto. On Monday, the largest U.S. prediction market announced that prediction market influencer John Wang will join as its new Head of Crypto, leading the platform's onchain and developer ecosystem growth.🔮
• Donald Trump Jr. bets on Polymarket. According to Axios, the world's largest prediction market has received an investment from Trump Jr.'s venture capital fund, and he will also join the platform's advisory board. In January, he already became a strategic advisor to Polymarket's competitor, Kalshi.🤝

REAL-WORLD ASSETS

Aave Launches “Horizon” to Accelerate Institutional DeFi Lending

A new horizon: On Wednesday, DeFi’s largest lending platform, Aave, launched “Horizon,” a new Ethereum-based lending market that allows institutions and other qualified users to borrow stablecoins against real-world assets. At launch, RWAs from Centrifuge (JRTSY, JAAA) and Superstate (USTB, USCC) can be used as collateral, while the first supported stablecoins include Aave’s GHO, Ripple’s RLUSD, and Circle’s USDC.

• Why it matters: Real-world assets (RWAs) represent a $26 billion market today, led by tokenized private credit ($15 billion) and U.S. Treasuries ($7 billion). Yet despite recent growth, RWAs remain largely isolated from DeFi, and users often have to redeem and sell their assets just to unlock liquidity. Horizon changes that dynamic. By allowing users to borrow directly against their RWAs through overcollateralized loans, it improves capital efficiency and integrates RWAs more deeply into the onchain economy.

Second attempt: Horizon is Aave’s second push into institutional lending. Back in January 2022, the team launched “Aave Arc,” a protocol that allowed institutions to tap into onchain liquidity. However, following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX later that year, Arc was put on hold.

• “The market grew to an extent, but then all of the institutions were less eager,” Aave founder Stani Kulechov said in an interview. “We kept improving the idea, though. Horizon is Arc 2.0.“

New approach, open design: Unlike Arc, where both lenders and borrowers had to be whitelisted to participate, on Horizon each RWA issuer only whitelists its own borrowers, while there are no restrictions on who can supply stablecoins and act as a lender.

Battle-tested infrastructure: At its core, Horizon is powered by Aave’s V3 codebase, whose smart contracts secure $40 billion in assets across 17 blockchain networks. However, lending against RWAs introduces challenges that traditional lending markets in DeFi don’t face, so the protocol design needed to adapt.

Managing new risks: One of the biggest of these challenges is pricing. Unlike tokens priced on aggregated exchange prices, RWA prices depend on NAVs reported by the respective issuers, creating risks of delayed or faulty price updates that could trigger unintended liquidations.

• Oracle safeguards: To address this, Horizon features a refined oracle and risk management design powered by Chainlink, Chaos Labs, and LlamaRisk. In this setup, specific price thresholds for each RWA are enforced at the oracle level, and any reported NAV outside those bounds is blocked before being updated onchain, preventing faulty liquidations.

Additional protections: Horizon also includes an emergency multisig that can pause new loans if something unusual is detected. RWA issuers also have recovery tools that let them move a borrower’s position to a new wallet in case of lost keys or other operational issues.

Next steps: The coming months will likely be all about further integrations. On the RWA side, issuers like Securitize, VanEck, and WisdomTree are expected to launch their assets, while Ethena is also working on listing its USDtb stablecoin on Horizon.

Martin Quensel is the Co-founder of Centrifuge, a leading tokenization platform and a launch partner for Aave Horizon, as well as the Founder of Anemoy, a web3-native asset manager built on the Centrifuge protocol.

We think a dedicated RWA market on Aave is an important step forward. RWAs are fundamentally different from crypto-native assets. They come with added legal, technical, and liquidity complexities, and having a curated marketplace run by the leading DeFi lending protocol makes it easier for investors to access high-quality opportunities in one place.

Ultimately products like these will fuel demand for high-quality tokenized assets and bring deeper liquidity. We’re already seeing strong client demand for looping strategies, where they borrow against RWAs to reinvest and boost effective yields. This additional utility can make DeFi yields more competitive than traditional yields and attract a broader set of institutional investors onchain.

Over time, this will also drive demand for tokens with higher yield profiles, as investors seek to maximize the spread between what they earn and what they borrow.

BIG TECH

Google Puts Spotlight on Universal Ledger, Enters “Layer-1 Race”

A new layer 1: On Wednesday, a LinkedIn post by Google’s Head of Web3 Strategy, Rich Widmann, drew widespread attention in the crypto industry. While Google has hinted at blockchain ambitions before, this was the first time it explicitly positioned GCUL as a layer-1 network, outlining plans to make it a central platform for tokenization, digital asset management, and payments aimed at financial institutions.

• Why it matters: With a market capitalization of $2.5 trillion, Google’s parent company Alphabet ranks as the world's fourth-largest publicly traded company and serves billions of users along with hundreds of institutional partners across its software ecosystem. This makes Google the largest company to openly announce the development of its own layer-1.

Overlooked press release: Technically, this isn’t the first time GCUL was presented to the public. In March, CME Group, the world's leading derivatives exchange, and Google Cloud announced a pilot for wholesale payments and asset tokenization via GCUL. Back then, however, the network was referred to solely as a distributed ledger, with no mention of the terms “layer-1” or “blockchain.”

What we know so far: Currently in private testnet, GCUL aims to establish itself as core infrastructure for the next generation of capital markets, built around the needs of financial institutions:

• Blockchain-as-a-Service: GCUL is expected to be offered as a service through a single API, with transaction fees billed monthly — in contrast to the per-transaction fee model used by most conventional blockchains.
• Closed system: For now, GCUL operates as a private and permissioned network, designed with compliance in mind, including built-in KYC-verified accounts. However, Google notes the “potential to become more open as regulations evolve.”
• Developer-friendly: GCUL supports Python-based smart contracts, making it far more accessible to traditional financial engineers and enterprise developers. For perspective: While Solidity and Rust, the most widely used programming languages in crypto, have a combined global developer base of ~3.5 million, Python boasts an estimated 8–10 million active developers.

Neutrality, at least in theory: Additionally, Google frames GCUL as “neutral infrastructure,” positioning it in contrast to other recently revealed corporate layer-1s like Circle’s Arc and Stripe’s Tempo. As Widmann put it: “GCUL is a neutral infrastructure layer. Tether won’t use Circle’s blockchain — and Adyen probably won’t use Stripe’s blockchain. But any financial institution can build with GCUL.”

Tokenized deposits, not stablecoins: Another point of differentiation is GCUL’s focus on tokenized deposits rather than stablecoins, as it is primarily built for “native commercial bank money onchain.”

• “Commercial bank money and robust traditional finance regulation solve for stability, regulatory clarity, and capital efficiency in the existing financial system. Google Cloud provides the necessary infrastructure upgrade,” Google Cloud’s website reads.

What’s next: Together with CME, Google will begin direct testing of GCUL with market participants later this year and is targeting the launch of new services in 2026. Beyond that, additional technical details about the network are expected to be released in the coming months.

Georg Schneider is the Global Head of RWA Sales at Canton Network. Just two months ago, the parent company Digital Asset raised $135m in funding to accelerate the adoption of the layer-1 blockchain amongst financial institutions.

Google’s Universal Ledger looks like a natural extension of their cloud business, basically a turnkey blockchain environment plugged straight into the Google Cloud Platform. The pitch is simple: if you’re already a Google Cloud client, spinning up a blockchain service should be as easy as launching a database. And with their distribution, they can get this in front of the right institutions fast.

It also fits into the bigger picture: everyone with scale and distribution wants to own the full stack. Circle has a blockchain, Coinbase has one, Stripe is building one. Now Google joins the club. The first announced partnership with CME Group isn’t surprising either, given Google Cloud’s $1 billion, 10-year deal with them to migrate to the cloud and co-develop financial tech.

The real challenge will be building the ecosystem. Google’s going non-EVM, which means developers can’t just port existing apps or leverage Ethereum’s tooling. From our experience at Canton Network, we know how valuable — and how hard — it is to build the kind of network effects and developer infrastructure you need from scratch. That’s where the uphill battle starts.

Rain | $58 million | Series B : Enterprise-grade infrastructure provider that enables fintechs, banks, and marketplaces to launch compliant stablecoin-powered payments, cards, and wallets via a single API.

M0 | $40 million | Series B : Stablecoin platform enabling institutions and enterprises to issue customizable, branded stablecoins.

The Clearing Company | $15 million | Seed : Fully onchain, permissionless, and regulated prediction market.

Hemi | $15 million | Unknown : Programmability layer allowing developers to build EVM-style applications on top of the Bitcoin network.

A conversation with Chris Brummer, law professor at Georgetown University and founder of Bluprynt. On Wednesday, his company announced the completion of a pilot project with Circle and Paxos aimed at combating counterfeit cryptocurrencies by integrating a “Know Your Issuer” framework into the USDC and PYUSD stablecoins.

Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.