For many years, users of decentralized finance have silently compromised without realizing it. The structure of most leading lending protocols forces us to make painful choices: you either use your assets for their native purpose or lend them out for yield. You can't have both.
Think about it. The ETH you stake can earn staking rewards, but if you want to lend it on Aave or Compound, you often have to use a liquid staking token, which may not have the same governance rights or abstract you from the core protocol. The liquidity provider (LP) tokens you earn from Uniswap are generating trading fees, but you can't use them as collateral for loans. Each asset must choose its unique function. This is a significant compromise in DeFi, locking up trillions of potential value.
My excitement about Dolomite stems from it being one of the first protocols I've seen designed to end this compromise. Its architecture is built around a single revolutionary idea: your assets should be able to do all the work simultaneously.
This is what they mean when they say users retain their 'DeFi-native rights.' When you lend assets on Dolomite, the protocol is smart enough to ensure you don't lose staking rewards, governance rights, or the underlying yield generated by the asset. It allows you to stack yield and utility in ways that were previously unattainable. That's why it can support such a vast array of unique and complex assets—over 1000, including treasury tokens like GLP or yield-generating tokens rejected by old protocols.
This is not just a feature; in my view, it's a glimpse into the next generation of DeFi. The future of this space is not just about finding new sources of yield but about unlocking the maximum capital efficiency from the assets we already have. Old protocols view assets as employees with single tasks. Dolomite sees them as versatile freelancers, able to profit from multiple jobs simultaneously.
The headline feature may be the vast number of assets it supports, but for me, the real revolution lies in the philosophical shift. Dolomite is building a more complex and efficient money market that finally frees users from silent compromise, enabling them to unlock the full potential of their digital assets.
