Umoja Labs and August Digital are teaming up to give institutions a new edge in crypto: the ability to borrow against $yBTC, Bitcoin’s safest high-yield LST. By leveraging bilateral OTC lending agreements, institutions can borrow OTC against $yBTC, unlocking access to premium yield opportunities in the market.
The State of BTC APYs
BTC yields are often scarce, diluted, and misleading. Many APYs are inflated with points, foreign tokens, or complex math, promising 40%+ returns but typically delivering around 1% in BTC alongside community rewards like NFTs or airdrops.
Institutions mainly rely on DEX liquidity provision and leverage. With borrowing rates at 5%, they borrow against Bitcoin, use stablecoins for on-lending or arbitrage, and earn up to 9% APY.
Quantitative funds may push yields to 20% through advanced trading, but these strategies lack principal protection and risk significant losses in volatile markets.
The fact is, safely monetizing Bitcoin without long lock-ups is hard. 🥵
Unlocking Rare BTC Yield
What if you could add 5-10% BTC APY to your strategy by tapping into institutional-grade OTC lending? 🤯
Umoja, a next-gen liquid staking protocol, has partnered with August, an institutional capital efficiency platform, to elevate BTC yields.
This collaboration unlocks the potential of $yBTC, the highest-yield, lowest-risk BTC LST, allowing institutions to borrow against it through bilateral OTC lending agreements via August’s platform.
By leveraging $yBTC as collateral, institutions can earn 5-10% APY on their BTC while borrowing against it and on-lending stablecoins, achieving returns similar to quantitative funds with far less risk.
With August’s advanced cross-margin collateralization tools, account structures, and robust risk engine, institutions can confidently borrow against $yBTC, knowing their capital remains secure, transparent, and BTC-principal protected. 🟧 🔒
Accelerating Yield with DeFi Trade Execution
The secret behind $yBTC’s yields is Umoja’s trade execution engine (referred to as the “UTE”), enabling parallel execution of multiple yield strategies across DeFi protocols and CEXs.
By integrating with August’s DeFi interface, Umoja’s trade execution will vastly expand to support Curve, Convex, Uniswap, Aerodrome, GMX, Paraswap, 1inch as well as all of their forks on different EVM chains.
Why is this important? Because it enables Umoja to introduce higher-yield, lower-risk liquid staking tokens for virtually every blue-chip cryptocurrency, including upgraded versions of $yBTC itself.
Needless to say, the future of BTC yield is looking bright!!! ☄️😎
About Umoja
Backed by the likes of Coinbase, Blockchain Founders Fund, and Quantstamp amongst others, Umoja is a next-generation liquid staking protocol introducing Smartcoins: low-risk, high-yield LSTs supercharged by DeFi algo-trading. Umoja’s mission is to democratize wealth creating tools for everyone.
About August Digital
August Digital (previously, Fractal) is building the next generation of web3 infrastructure by bringing the prime brokerage stack on-chain through a universal margin account. August wallets enable users to interact seamlessly across all on-chain assets, optimizing capital efficiency. Their vision is to make On-Chain Finance as efficient and scalable as CeFi, bridging the gap between decentralized and traditional finance.