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Edel Finance: Building The StockFi Economy
Securities lending generates over $10B in revenue every year.
It’s a major component of institutional portfolio management.
For decades, asset managers have used this market to increase returns for themselves and their constituents, source margin liquidity, and more.
Yet, most investors have never had the opportunity to participate in this market.
Edel Finance changes that.
By merging equity markets with the permissionlessness, composability, and programmability of DeFi, Edel is creating an entirely new opportunity for equity investors: StockFi.
Ultimately, StockFi gives stocks the same properties as money.
In StockFi, shares can be lent and borrowed. They can generate interest and be used to directly create margin. And this can all be done 24/7.
But the core benefit of StockFi is that it’s open to everyone. For the first time, retail investors can reap the same benefits as global asset managers.
Before we explore how this is possible, let’s start with the basics: why should stocks be tokenized in the first place?
The Rise Of Tokenized Stocks
When it comes to tokenizing assets, it’s crucial to ask “does this really need to be tokenized?”
Like many tokenized assets, onchain equities benefit from:
24/7 availability
Transparent chains of collateral
Smart liquidations
Atomic settlement
In recent years, these benefits have become increasingly clear to the world’s largest financial institutions. For example, trillion-dollar asset managers such as BlackRock and Apollo have not simply considered tokenizing their own funds – they’ve actually done it.
But as we’ll see, StockFi brings many more benefits to equity markets.
Recently, the RWA landscape has shifted. While early tokenization efforts focused on US Treasuries and other credit markets, equities have recently entered the spotlight as well.
Since August 31, 2025, the total value of tokenized equities has grown nearly 3x, from $339M to its recent peak of $1B+.
This growth has been led by Ondo and xStocks, which offer solutions to tokenize stocks at a 1:1 basis. Over the past 8 months, these platforms’ combined AUM has grown from $56M to $782M – growth of 1,296%!
On a high level, this is how both projects’ infrastructure works:
You place an order for 100 TSLA shares on Ondo Global Markets
Order is received by a network of liquidity providers (e.g. market makers)
Liquidity providers compete to fill the trade at the best price, directly from the stock market
This ensures low slippage, even for large trades, and deep liquidity
You get 100 tokenized shares of TSLA
100 “real” shares of TSLA are sent to a qualified custodian to back your tokenized shares
While it’s exciting to watch the onchain stock market’s rapid growth, the real innovation opportunities lie in solutions to bring utility to those tokenized shares. After all, we need to make them worth tokenizing in the first place.
Edel’s solution: StockFi.
The foundation for StockFi is being constructed by projects like Ondo and xStocks, which are leading the charge in tokenizing shares.
Edel is building upon that foundation by providing infrastructure for onchain securities lending.
Edel’s Role In DeFi
Ultimately, Edel’s goal is to become the premier credit layer for onchain stocks. Unlike general-purpose onchain lending markets, Edel’s infrastructure was created specifically to account for stock-specific traits such as dividends, stock splits, controlled activity during non-trading hours, and more.
It’s important to note that securities lending itself is not the innovation here – this service has been available for decades. However, infrastructure to support securities lending on a global scale, to all investors, has never been possible until now.
Edel makes this possible by using blockchain technology to tap into the $80B+ onchain lending market, while also providing a service tailored to support the ~$135T global equity market.
To the general public, stocks have always simply been something to trade or invest in – but this is the extent of their utility. However, StockFi creates unlimited opportunities for participants to use stocks just as they’d use money.
While programmability allows stocks to “live” onchain via DeFi apps, Edel’s achievement comes mostly from another unique quality of blockchains: composability.
Since DeFi products and services share common “building blocks” via smart contracts, they can easily “plug into” one another. For example, equities that are tokenized using Ondo Global Markets or Backed Finance’s xStocks infrastructure can seamlessly be integrated into Edel’s securities lending app.
Opportunities On Edel
Before Edel’s official launch on March 24th, demand for StockFi services had already proved to be significant. Their testnet app flourished on Robinhood’s testnet chain, where 98k active users drove 10% of all activity on the entire network.
Now, the app is live on mainnet. Users can deploy real funds to perform various activities, such as:
Borrowing against their tokenized stocks to unlock liquidity without reducing their exposure
“Looping” their positions to increase yield and access stock-specific leverage – an alternative to traditional margin
Using these activities to build strategies across various DeFi apps
Plus, loans on Edel aren’t constrained to traditional stock market hours – like any DeFi position, these can be managed 24/7.
Edel’s first cohort of supported assets includes 5 xStocks-based markets. Users can borrow USDC against SPYx, QQQx, NVDAx, TSLAx, and MSTRx.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the borrow rate for USDC is extremely attractive at 0.15%. In other words, you can take out a loan against your xStocks that accrues essentially no interest. While these rates are always subject to change based on utility, the current near-zero cost of borrowing presents a great opportunity.
Additionally, these markets are enhanced by attractive rewards.
Not only can users borrow at a very low rate, but they can also earn over 16% APY – paid in USDC – by lending out their USDC.
Edel is also incentivizing liquidity by boosting yields with their native EDEL token. Currently, you can earn anywhere from 21% APY for lending SPYx to over 300% APY for lending MSTRx!
Now that mainnet is live, Edel is fully focused on expanding their markets. Looking ahead, we can expect lending to expand to more assets across xStocks, Ondo Global Markets stocks, and even different asset classes such as FX, as well as credit expansion beyond USDC.
Wrapping Up
Overall, Edel brings StockFi into the spotlight for retail users and professional asset managers alike.
In StockFi, the same opportunities are available to everyone, serving:
Individual users who previously had limited access to global stocks, but can now get exposure via DeFi, can use Edel to also borrow against their positions
Vault managers looking for opportunities to increase returns via onchain securities lending
Traditional asset managers who want to bypass the tedious manual underwriting and approval processes inherent in legacy finance.
Everyone can now take advantage of StockFi via Edel’s fully-autonomous, 24/7 infrastructure: a much-needed alternative to traditional securities lending, custom-built to maximize operational efficiency.
That’s all for this week’s Friday Feature!
I would love to hear your thoughts on Edel Finance and StockFi down in the comments below. Or, feel free to email me at [email protected].
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