Thala and Mountain Protocol Partner to bring Real World Assets to Aptos

Thala Labs
6 min readMay 22, 2024

--

Thala is bringing Mountain Protocol’s Yield-Bearing Stablecoin USDM to Aptos

Thala is excited to announce an integration with Mountain Protocol’s wUSDM, powered by LayerZero. This marks another pivotal step in bringing tokenization to the Aptos ecosystem and cementing Thala’s position as the leading liquidity hub for all assets.

Why RWAs?

Real World Assets (RWA) bring a range of off-chain financial assets to the blockchain, encompassing everything from real estate to credit, from T-bills to green bonds. The tokenization of RWAs aids in creating a global financial infrastructure that is programmable, composable, and operational 24/7. According to estimates from BCG’s report, the tokenization of RWAs could reach a staggering $16 trillion by 2030. The adoption of RWA is accelerating, driven by the demand for stable yields in DeFi, although the current adoption still represents only a small fraction of its potential.

Tokenized treasuries have ballooned to over $840 million in issuance since the start of 2023, with this growth being largely fueled by rising treasury yields and crypto-natives searching for robust yields beyond existing solutions.

Mountain Protocol and USDM

Mountain Protocol offers an institutional-grade stablecoin (USDM), built on the pillars of safety and compliance. USDM is a fully backed stablecoin, supported by “USDM Reserves” pegged at a 1:1 ratio with USD. It’s also the first permissionless yield-bearing stablecoin. USDM is collateralized by short-duration US Treasuries (T-Bills) with an average duration of 60 days or less.

Key features of USDM include:

  1. Instant liquidity via multiple OTC USDC-denominated lines of credit.
  2. A rebasing ERC20 token, redeemable at a pegged 1:1 USD value by primary users. It distributes yields via rebasing mechanism i.e the amount of tokens keeps increasing for a user to accrue the yields.
  3. Backed by “USDM Reserves”, which are held under custody with regulated financial institutions in bankruptcy-remote accounts.

According to DeFilLama, USDM has a TVL of approximately $52 million, yielding an APY of 5% as of May 22, 2024, and is live on multiple chains such as Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and more.

wUSDM is coming to Aptos via LayerZero:

USDM is an ERC4626 vault token, backed by U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills). Mountain Protocol wil leverage on Layerzero to seamlessly connect existing USDM liquidity with Aptos. LayerZero enables secure and permissionless bridging of wUSDM from Ethereum to Aptos for use on Thala. The bridge is active and integrated into the Aptos Bridge, powered by LayerZero.

wUSDM, a Layerzero wrapped version of USDM, is non-rebasing in nature. The bridged asset on Aptos will be entirely permissionless, meaning any user can freely transfer their wUSDM, deposit it into smart contracts, and interact with DeFi protocols.

Thala — The Liquidity Hub for RWAs

Thala’s suite of products were built with composability in mind — enabling innovation and meaningful integrations of quality assets such as USDM. In the coming days, Thala will onboard wUSDM across various several products:

  1. Liquidity Pools — wUSDM liquidity will be seeded on ThalaSwap, with $THL and $APT incentives.
  2. MOD Stablecoin Collateral — Thala is working with oracle providers such as Pyth and Switchboard to enable USDM price feeds. With upcoming oracle integrations, wUSDM will become available as a CDP collateral against MOD — enabling permissionless access to leverage wUSDM and its robust yields.
  3. PSM — The protocol will explore onboarding wUSDM onto the MOD peg stability module (PSM) in the near future via governance on Parliament.

About Thala

Thala is a decentralized finance protocol powered by the Move language, enabling seamless borrowing of a decentralized, over-collateralized stablecoin, Move Dollar, and capital-efficient liquidity provisioning via a rebalancing AMM on the Aptos blockchain.

Website: http://thala.fi/

Foundry: https://thalalabs.typeform.com/foundry

Discord: https://discord.gg/thala

Twitter: http://twitter.com/thalalabs

Documentation: https://docs.thala.fi

Disclaimer

This article by Thala Labs and/or its affiliates/contributors (“we”, “us” and “our”) is for information purposes only. We do not provide tax, legal, insurance or investment advice, and nothing in this article should be construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy, sell or issue or subscribe for, or a recommendation for any security, investment, cryptocurrency, token or other services, product or commodity by us or any third party. You alone are solely responsible for determining whether any purchase, sale, investment, security or strategy, or any other product or service, is appropriate or suitable for you based on your personal objectives and personal and financial situation and for evaluating the merits and risks associated with the use of the information in this article before making any decisions based on such information or other content. You should consult a lawyer and/or tax professional regarding your specific legal and/or tax situation. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Therefore, you should not assume that the future performance of any specific investment, cryptocurrency, token, commodity or strategy will be profitable or equal to corresponding past performance levels. Inherent in any such transaction is the potential for loss. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any transaction is suitable for a particular person. By accessing this article, you acknowledge and agree to all of the foregoing and that you bear responsibility for your own research, due diligence and transaction decisions. You also agree that we, our affiliates and our respective directors, officers, employees, consultants, shareholders, members, representatives, advisors and agents will not be liable for any decision made or action taken by you and others based on this article, news, information, opinion, or any other material published, discussed or disseminated by us.

This article contains forward-looking statements or forward-looking information (referred to collectively as “forward-looking statements”). Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as: “anticipate”, “intend”, “plan”, “goal”, “seek”, “believe”, “predict”, “project”, “estimate”, “expect”, “strategy”, “future”, “likely”, “may”, “should”, ”would”, “will”, and similar terms and phrases and the negatives of such expressions, including references to assumptions. Examples of forward-looking statements in this article include, among others, statements we make regarding our future plans, expectations and objectives.

Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are based only on our current beliefs, expectations and assumptions regarding the future of our business, future plans and strategies, projections, anticipated events and trends, the economy and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. Our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Therefore, you should not rely on any of these forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause our actual results and financial condition to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements include, among others, the following: reliance on blockchain technology and blockchain technology service providers; digital asset transactions being irrevocable and losses occurring from such transactions; our use and reliance on proprietary data and intellectual property in its business; potential misuses of digital assets and malicious actors in the digital asset industry; digital assets potentially being subject to hold periods; developments and changes in laws and regulations; and disruptions to our technology network including computer systems, software and cloud data, or other disruptions of our operating systems, structures or equipment. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list is not exhaustive.

Any forward-looking statement made by us in this article is based only on information currently available to us and speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, we undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, w

--

--

Thala Labs
Thala Labs

Written by Thala Labs

Thala is a decentralized finance protocol on the Aptos blockchain.

No responses yet