A better lending product: DeFi put credit onchain. Then it stopped. Most lending still floats, leaving treasuries and institutions unable to plan. Fira introduces fixed-rate, maturity-based credit to build the onchain yield curve.
DeFi did something extraordinary: it put credit onchain. Then it stopped.
Most onchain lending today is still spot credit. Rates float continuously, reacting to utilization, liquidity shifts, and leverage cycles. The moment market conditions change, visibility disappears. For traders, that volatility can be tolerated. For treasuries, institutions, and long-horizon allocators, it is a structural limitation.
In traditional finance, credit has a shape. It has maturities. It has term structure. It has fixed rates that allow capital to be planned, allocated, and underwritten over time.
Onchain credit has speed, composability, and transparency. What it lacks is maturity.
Fira exists to close that gap.
Fira, Fixed-rate rails for onchain finance
Building the onchain yield curve
Today, DeFi lending is floating by default: rates move with utilization and flows, with no maturities, no term structure, only a spot price of capital.
The consequences are simple:
Borrowers can’t lock their cost of funding.
Lenders can’t lock their returns.
Treasuries can’t plan liabilities or manage duration.
In TradFi, it’s the opposite. Markets are organized by maturities because time has a price.
Fira starts from that premise: if DeFi wants to become a real financing layer, it must move from spot to maturity, from reactive rates to markets where you borrow and lend at a fixed rate for a defined duration, with continuous price discovery and real exit liquidity.
Fira makes time explicit. Maturity becomes the unit of organization. A yield curve can emerge onchain.
Guiding principle: Fira moves DeFi credit from spot lending to maturity markets: fixed rates, continuous liquidity, and an onchain yield curve.
Demand is already proven onchain
Fira isn’t inventing the need for rate certainty. It is formalizing it into a market.
Usual Stability Loan (USL) demonstrated clear demand for predictable financing: fixed-rate borrowing at 5%, used notably for delta-neutral strategies against variable yields. Since launch, USL has attracted >$400M of bUSD0 collateral in under 6 months.
That demand exists today. Fira turns it into maturity-based markets: rates by expiry, a term structure, and ultimately a yield curve.
Why fixed-rate protocols failed before (and why Fira is different)
Fixed-rate has existed in DeFi before. The problem wasn’t the concept of fixed rates.
It was market structure.
Historically, maturity-based designs suffered from:
Liquidity fragmentation (one pool per expiry),
theoretical exits before maturity with practically illiquid markets, and
discontinuous liquidity, dependent on incentives, matching, or episodic activity.
Fixed-rate credit requires two things at the same time:
continuous liquidity, and
real exit optionality.
That’s the core of Fira’s design: a maturity-native system built to support ongoing rate discovery and usable liquidity throughout the life of a position, not just at origination.
Why Fira is a protocol, not a feature
Fixed-rate credit cannot be bolted onto variable-rate systems without compromise.
Pricing term risk requires maturity segmentation, yield curves, and mechanisms designed around time, not just balances. These mechanics conflict with products optimized for instantaneous reallocation and perpetual floating exposure.
Fira had to be built as its own protocol, with maturity selection and fixed-rate discovery at the core. That separation is intentional: it keeps Fira rate-native, while remaining modular and composable within broader DeFi stacks.
The link with Usual
Usual aims to become a full onchain neobank. In fintech, credit is inseparable from the core business.
Fira adds the missing credit layer to Usual’s architecture:
Usual provides capital and balance-sheet primitives.
Fira provides maturity markets: fixed rates, term structure, and predictable funding.
Together, they form a complete onchain credit stack, simple enough for end users, precise enough for treasuries and institutions.
From Labs to DAO: infrastructure ownership
Fira was developed by Usual Labs as core infrastructure for Usual’s long-term roadmap.
UIP-17 asks the Usual DAO to acquire the infrastructure and the IP developed for Fira.
In line with the principles outlined in UIP-15, core infrastructure and associated revenues developed by the Labs are intended to be owned by the Usual DAO and accrue to USUAL stakeholders. Governance of Fira, parameters, risk frameworks, market listings, incentives, will be decided by the USUAL DAO.
This is not a spin-out. It is an extension of Usual’s architecture, with ownership and direction anchored in governance.
Usual Zero Rate as a first market
Usual Zero Rate is the first step toward rate certainty. By abstracting yield volatility away from the user, it introduces predictability at the product level, allowing users to earn without managing rate exposure directly.
Fira will routes credit activity through Usual-owned infrastructure, restoring attribution and strategic control. It reduces fee leakage and dependency risk by relying less on third-party venues and their shifting parameters. And it builds the fixed-rate credit backbone needed to support future products across the neobank stack.
A long-term vision: building toward a bank
Banks exist to transform capital across time. They convert short-term deposits into long-term loans. They manage duration, liabilities, and rate exposure.
None of that is possible without fixed-rate, maturity-based credit markets.
An onchain financial system that aspires to be bank-like must eventually solve the same problem.
Fira enables duration-aware credit, treasury-grade planning, and institutional participation. It helps Usual move from yield products toward balance-sheet primitives capable of supporting long-term financial infrastructure.
Why now
DeFi is maturing, but meaningful participation requires predictability. Fixed-rate credit is not a bull-market feature. It is a maturity-market requirement.
Launching Fira now positions Usual ahead of the next credit cycle: focused on infrastructure over incentives, aligned with long-term scalability, and built to make onchain finance legible across time.
Fira is the missing layer.
And this is just the beginning.
To learn more, you can find the UIP-17 proposal regarding the acquisition of Fira Protocol infrastructure by Usual DAO: https://snapshot.box/#/s:usualmoney.eth/proposal/0x75ac2e8fdeaa8c54c661a43e95bbabfe029859a3b08a89c66b0e02bb4c8e5a5b
