What are the functions of TREE? 1. The fragmentation crisis of interest rates The cryptocurrency fixed income market is severely fragmented, showing significant interest rate differences when the same assets are traded across different protocols. Unlike traditional finance, which ensures market efficiency through a unified benchmark interest rate, DeFi often lacks a unified reference point, leading to inefficiencies that suppress institutional adoption and restrict the development of complex financial products. This fragmentation is particularly evident in the Ethereum lending market, where the interest rates for borrowing ETH can vary dramatically between platforms like Aave, Compound, and Spark. This inconsistency creates uncertainty for users seeking the best terms and hinders the development of complex financial instruments that require stable and predictable reference rates. 2. Lack of infrastructure in professional finance Traditional finance relies heavily on benchmark interest rates such as LIBOR (now SOFR) for pricing trillions of dollars in financial products, from corporate bonds to derivative contracts. The cryptocurrency market lacks equivalent infrastructure, limiting the development of complex fixed income products required by institutional investors. In the absence of standardized reference rates, it is nearly impossible to create products such as interest rate swaps, floating rate notes, or complex yield curves. 3. Limited opportunities for yield optimization The opportunity to generate stable returns through interest rate arbitrage strategies has historically only been available to institutional participants with significant capital and complex infrastructure. Retail investors and smaller institutions cannot effectively take advantage of interest rate differences between protocols, thus missing out on the enhanced returns that professional traders habitually capture.