For years, users of decentralized finance have unknowingly made silent compromises. The structure of most leading lending protocols forces us to make painful choices: you either use assets for their native purpose or lend them out for yield. You cannot have both.
Think about it. The ETH you stake can earn staking rewards, but if you want to lend it out on Aave or Compound, you typically have to use a liquid staking token, which may not have the same governance rights, or abstracts you away from the core protocol. The liquidity provider (LP) tokens you earn from Uniswap are generating trading fees, but you cannot use them as collateral for loans. Each asset must choose its unique function. This is a significant compromise in DeFi, locking away trillions of potential value.
My excitement about Dolomite comes from its being one of the first protocols I have 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 at once.
This is what they mean by users retaining their "DeFi native rights." When you lend assets on Dolomite, the protocol is smart enough to ensure you do not lose staking rewards, governance rights, or the underlying earnings generated by that asset. It allows you to stack yields and utility in ways that were previously unattainable. That is why it can support such a vast array of unique and complex assets—over 1000 types, including treasury tokens like GLP or yield-generating tokens that were rejected by old protocols.
This is not just a feature; in my view, it is a glimpse into the next generation of DeFi. The future of this space is not just about finding new yield sources, but about unleashing maximum capital efficiency from the assets we already have. Old protocols view assets as single-task employees. Dolomite sees them as versatile freelancers capable of working on multiple jobs simultaneously.
The headline feature may be the vast array of assets it supports, but for me, the real revolution lies in the philosophical shift. Dolomite is building a more complex, more efficient money market that finally allows users to escape the silent compromise and unleash the full potential of their digital assets 10
