Research-driven fund backing the builders of frontier digital infrastructure. Investing since 2017. Pitch: pitch@iosg.vc
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Joined April 2017
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IOSG is glad to announce an investment in @immersve. It represents our conviction in the payment architecture to bridge the gap between stablecoin balances and everyday commerce.
Highlights:
🔹 Who filled @coinbase's Bitcoin loan book? @sparkfinance was one of the main LPs, supplying up to 80–90% of the liquidity as the product grew from $0 to $600M.
🔹 The money is no longer crypto-native, crypto-native liquidity is thinning.
🔹 Who's actually borrowing? 35% crypto hedge funds, half of it OGs levering BTC and ETH. And off-chain OTC lending is still twice the size of everything on-chain.
🔹 In Asia, a good product only gets you to the table — trust, distribution, regulation, and what Western protocols keep getting wrong out here.
🔹 Seven years, still no fixed rates: the cold-start problem, and whether the yen carry trade can finally move on-chain.
🔹 "In three to five years, you won't hear about DeFi" what both of them think is left standing once the label goes away.
Hope you enjoy this episode!
Who Funds Crypto's Loan Book?
The bottleneck in DeFi lending may not be capital. It’s origination.
In this episode, our Managing Partner @momir_amidzic sits down with @hexonaut, Co-founder / CEO @sparkfinance and @shanandwater, APAC Lead @Morpho for a full teardown of where the money comes from, who's borrowing it, and what the market still can't do.
Timestamps
00:45 Intro
02:05 Seven years of money markets
07:00 Morpho vs Spark
08:55 "The world of credit is $200 trillion, crypto is a tiny fraction of it"
10:15 Two games in money markets
17:45 Who filled Coinbase's Bitcoin loan book
21:40 West vs East: Crypto as one of the last deep techs that's still global
29:05 Is an HKD stablecoin any different from holding USDC?
35:50 Who's actually borrowing: are money markets just leverage facilitators?
40:10 "Perps are more of a retail product"
42:10 The bottleneck isn't capital, it's loan origination 44:35 The missing pieces
56:40 Market narratives
01:08:10 The DeFi mullet: blockchains are becoming back-end infrastructure
01:11:20 Predictions
🎧 Apple: podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcas…
🎧 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6ct…
🎧 Xiaoyuzhou: xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/6a8…
📺 YouTube: youtu.be/pc4f1UL94sg
📺 Bilibili: bilibili.com/video/BV1JWh36L…
Proud to partner with @SurfAI as their first design partner. 🌊 We've plugged @SurfAI into our internal research agent as the sole source for 5 data categories our stack couldn't cover: social mindshare, perp liquidations by exchange, VC fund data, prediction markets, and fundraising.
One question in, cross-checked diligence out.
How it actually works in our research stack👇
Full write-up: asksurf.ai/blog/en/announcin…
