This week I’ll be taking a closer look at products from:
Forest Road
INFINIT
Overwrite
Superform
And cover 30 day DeFi yields
Let’s jump in.
Forest Road Vault
I’ve found so many tokens via the Pendle UI over the years and this week I just noticed USDfr by the Forest Road team.
Right now their sUSDfr appears to be yielding around 35% APY 👀.
I actually spoke to the Forest Road team on a call maybe 3 years ago when they were first breaking into DeFi. It’s cool to see they kept forging ahead and have finally started building their own products onchain.
Essentially, they’re bringing part of their specialty lending business onchain. The broader company already works across media, renewable energy and digital assets, so the interesting angle here is an existing lender opening up another source of capital.
What are they lending against?
Film and TV: tax credits and contracted payments a production is owed, rather than betting on box office success.
Renewable energy: tax credits and project cash flows.
Digital assets: collateral backing loans to Forest Road’s own trading subsidiary. That last one is a related-party arrangement worth understanding.
How does it work?
You deposit USDC to mint USDfr, then stake it for sUSDfr. The vault earns interest from the underlying loans, with the return reflected in the value of your shares after applicable fees. Loan losses can reduce that value too.
When I checked, Pendle was reporting roughly 35% underlying APY for sUSDfr. That’s a pretty big number and as always when I see a big number like that I can’t help but become immediately skeptical:
Straight from Pendle UI
A few things to keep in mind
Exiting sUSDfr involves a minimum 21-day wait, followed by a queue that depends on available cash. This queue is interesting, I wonder how long wait times could actually be?
There’s capital intended to absorb losses before depositors, but their September update said the second protection layer was still unfunded.
I worry about duration mismatch with something like this. For example, the Renewable Energy receivables say its “medium to long, spanning construction and operation”. Also the Media & Entertainment receivables say its “short: months to roughly two years, driven by receivable payment timing”. Both of these raise a bit of worry. In the event that many people want to exit all at once would there be available liquidity?
One thing I found a bit odd when going through their docs was that two findings affecting depositors were still marked Medium/Open.
LMV-09, described in their security docs, involves redemption settlement during stressed credit conditions. Their testing showed that a participant could cause permanent losses to another depositor waiting to exit. They describe the practical likelihood as very low because it requires roughly $6 million, carefully timed positions and several other conditions. But they also acknowledge high technical impact.
LMV-18, described in their audit register, is a fee accounting issue. In a test, capital meant to absorb loan losses was treated as investment performance, triggering performance fees and diluting depositors.
These are documented test findings, not reports of a live exploit. I appreciate that they’re publishing this, but I’d want the team to clarify whether these issues remain in the deployed contracts or have since been fixed and independently retested before getting comfortable depositing. Or it’s possible I’m interpreting these things wrong?
I do always appreciate new and innovative DeFi, but it’s a good reminder that innovation can come with new risks. This is still a first pass for me. I’d need to get more comfortable with the borrowers, withdrawal mechanics and those outstanding findings before putting my money in.
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INFINIT
I was recently reintroduced to INFINIT regarding their new vault strategy. Essentially, they’ve launched a marketplace for automated trading vaults, starting with APEX Multi-Strategy on Hyperliquid. My understanding is that an AI trading engine handles the trades within a strategy and risk framework set by the manager. You deposit USDC and get exposure without having to execute or monitor every trade yourself.
How does it work?
Deposit USDC during a vault’s deposit window.
Receive a token representing your share of the vault.
The manager trades for a set period.
At maturity, redeem for your share of the remaining USDC, after fees. Your return depends on how the strategy performs.
What’s the first strategy?
According to their launch article, the first vault is APEX Multi-Strategy, run by Apex Quantitative Capital.
My understanding is that it’s a systematic momentum strategy. It goes long stronger markets and shorts weaker ones across crypto, stocks and commodities, using perps on Hyperliquid. It aims to keep equal dollar exposure on each side, although that doesn’t eliminate market risk.
The returns come from trading PNL and their early POC vault has performed quite well as you can see below:
My takeaway from chatting to team is that they are very satisfied with the performance of this early vault and are looking to scale it further now.
Why is it interesting?
I think the interesting part is the infrastructure around the managers. INFINIT says managers need a live trading record, identity checks and their own capital committed to absorb losses first. Trading permissions are separated from withdrawal permissions, and the platform monitors activity against each vault’s declared risk limits. The infrastructure is called INFINIT OS, while the requirements managers have to meet are the INFINIT Standard. They explain both in their launch article here.
I like the idea of more complex trading strategies being opened up and made accessible. But I still want to understand how much protection the manager’s capital provides, who controls the multisig holding the funds and what their OpSec looks like in practice.
The next APEX deposit window is planned for October 28 to November 11. I’m going to keep a closer eye on this as we approach that window and try to get a few more of my questions answered. Overall, I think this style of vault could become pretty popular. It’s not too dissimilar in concept from Growi, which we highlighted last week.
Overwrite
I wrote about Overwrite a month or so ago and wanted to give a quick update. If you missed it, it’s a project I’m advising, built by a close friend of mine, Keegan Selby. The team has been absolutely grinding to get it ready, and as I write this, phase one is live.
As a refresher, Overwrite aims to make trading options on Derive easier for both new and experienced users. This infographic gives a good overview:
With Overwrite, you can work through strategies with your own AI options tutor, execute trades and set up automations, all from the same terminal. It’s now fully live on Derive V3.
For example, I asked Overwrite:
“If I'm bullish HYPE in the short to medium term, lets say over the next 2 - 3 months, how could I express this?”
Here’s what it fired back:
It allows you to visualize your upside and your downside and then execute the position all in a few clicks:
This an example size using 10 HYPE
Some important security and risk disclosures from the team:
Funds are never pooled: each account trades from its own Derive subaccount under a session key you authorize and can revoke at Derive → Developers, and on Base there is no server-side key at all — your wallet signs every transaction and approvals are exact-amount. The hosted key is held encrypted in our backend; on Derive V3 it carries trading-only scopes (order book and option RFQ) and cannot withdraw or transfer, and before the agent opens a position it re-checks that the plan carries your signature. Every control-plane action — deploy, go live, pause, unwind, kill, withdraw — is an owner-signed, single-use message, and the chat can only prepare a ticket.
Overwrite's app, backend and trade-execution fleet have been through several internal reviews, including multi-agent code reviews run with Claude Code's ultrareview, but no independent security firm has audited them. An AI review is not an audit. Overwrite is experimental software: trade at your own risk, and use a wallet that does not hold significant funds.
The team is about to embark on a small raise and some proceeds from this raise will be allotted for audits from auditing firms. However, as mentioned above, there’s no proprietary smart contracts here and Overwrite never takes control of any user funds.
Overwrite is still early in development and if you want to pay attention to updates and hear from the team, you can join the official Telegram.
A Look at DeFi Yields
We’re looking at 30 day real yields this week with minimum of $10M in TVL:
Stablecoin Yields
7 day benchmark stablecoin rates from Portals: 3.10%:
Down from 3.97% last week
Here’s the top yields on stablecoins (real yields) for the past 30 days:
Min $10M TVL
ETH & BTC Yields
7 day benchmark ETH staking rates from Portals: 2.25%
Down from 2.32% last week
Here’s the top yields on ETH & BTC (real yields) for the past 30 days:
Min $10M TVL
Looping
Here’s a snapshot of the front page of looping this week from yieldz.io (30d APY):
Yield Trading
Taking a look at the front page of Stablecoin yields and RWA yields this week on Pendle:
Before we dive in, we wrote about these Superform stock vaults last week and now you can actually lock in ~32% yield for 176 days. I think these vaults are going to be pretty game changing:
These vaults aren’t without risk of course. The 2nd post in this mini thread below explains where all the yield comes from:
Stablecoins
11.69% - 29.38%
RWA
18.66% - 2000%
Thanks for reading!
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