Usual didn’t start by building a lending market. It started by building a stable asset with a clear promise: make dollars onchain usable, scalable, and aligned with the people who rely on them.

But “usable” isn’t a slogan. It’s a property. And in practice, that property is won or lost in one place: credit.

If you can’t borrow against what you hold, you don’t really own flexibility; you own a parked balance. If you can, your USD0 becomes something else: a spending asset, a liquidity buffer, a working capital tool. Credit is the bridge between value and utility. It’s also the layer where a protocol either becomes infrastructure, or stays a token.

That’s the context for Usual Zero Rate.

Why Usual Zero Rate exists

Until now, Usual’s core borrowing lane has lived on external rails. It worked, and that matters: it proved that users wanted a simple trade, post bUSD0, borrow USD0, keep your position intact and your capital liquid.

But the more this lane becomes a core habit, the more obvious the strategic mismatch becomes. When the credit engine sits elsewhere, the protocol is effectively renting a piece of its own future: paying fees outward, inheriting external constraints, and leaving its most important product surface dependent on someone else’s priorities.

Usual Zero Rate is the decision to stop renting.

It’s a narrative shift as much as a product launch: moving the credit lane back under Usual-owned infrastructure, so the system can capture its own economics, control its own roadmap, and build the foundation for what comes next. If Usual is serious about becoming a financial primitive, not just a stablecoin, then credit can’t be a third-party extension. It has to be part of the core.

The philosophy: remove complexity, not add it

The point of Usual Zero Rate is not to introduce complexity. It’s to remove it.

The experience is meant to feel familiar: borrow USD0 against bUSD0, without forcing anyone to migrate or breaking what already exists.

But the philosophy tightens. The market is designed around predictability and governance clarity: a deliberate “zero rate” posture, paired with a small, capped fee that accrues to the DAO rather than leaking to external venues.

In other words, the lane is simple for users, and legible for the ecosystem. You know what you’re getting, and you know where the value goes.

Value capture is also responsibility

That value capture isn’t just about revenue. It’s about responsibility.

When you own the lane, you can make coherent product decisions across the stack: how credit should behave, what risk assumptions are acceptable, how incentives should, or should not, shape behavior.

And that’s where Usual Zero Rate connects to a deeper alignment choice already made at the DAO level: collateral used in these credit lanes shouldn’t be a perpetual emissions magnet. Credit should exist because it’s useful, not because it’s farmable.

Treating bUSD0 in these markets as a zero-coupon instrument, and making it ineligible for USUAL distribution, draws a clean line between utility and inflation. It’s a deliberate move toward sustainability: fewer reflexive emissions, clearer economics, and a stronger long-term foundation.

The long game

Zoom out, and Usual Zero Rate is a first brick in something larger.

Today, it’s a borrowing lane that feels like the one you already know. Tomorrow, it’s the backbone for maturity-based credit, fixed-rate markets, and the kind of financial plumbing you need if you actually want to build a neobank-like stack onchain.

You can’t build that future on borrowed infrastructure. You build it by owning the rails, earning the trust, and making the hard calls about alignment early, before scale makes them impossible.

Usual Zero Rate is one of those calls.

It says: Usual’s credit demand is real, and it belongs inside the Usual ecosystem. It says: the simplest user experience is the one where the protocol’s incentives are clean and the value loop closes back to the DAO. And it says: if we want to become durable infrastructure, we have to start acting like it, starting with the layer that turns a stable asset into a usable one.

That’s what Usual Zero Rate is really about. Not a new market for the sake of it. A strategic step toward owning the credit engine that makes USD0 more than a balance, and makes Usual more than a product.

To learn more, you can find the UIP-18 proposal regarding the launch of Usual Zero Rate Market by Usual DAO: https://snapshot.box/#/s:usualmoney.eth/proposal/0x16dd10633ab146c51e8a6eae58be4b475560707fd694e82169286896170a3f11