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 purposes, or you 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 usually have to use a form of liquid staking token, which may not carry the same governance rights or abstract 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 up trillions of potential value.
My excitement about Dolomite comes from the fact that it is 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 the same time.
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 that you do not lose staking rewards, governance rights, or the underlying yield generated by that asset. It allows you to stack yield 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, including treasury tokens that generate yield like GLP or those rejected by older protocols.
This is not just a feature; to me, it is a glimpse into the next generation of DeFi. The future of this space is not just about seeking new sources of yield, but about unlocking maximum capital efficiency from the assets we already have. Older protocols treat assets as employees with a single task. Dolomite views them as versatile freelancers capable of working multiple jobs at once.
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, allowing users to finally break free from silent compromises and unleash the full potential of their digital assets 18
