As the West wraps up the first month of the new year and Asia welcomes the Year of the Snake, BounceBit, born in Asia, seizes this moment to unveil its vision and product roadmap for 2025—a year of opportunity, innovation, and growth.
Jack Lu, BounceBit Founder
Introduction: Setting the Stage for 2025 with CeDeFi + RWA
As traditional finance grapples with shifting interest rates and the increasing institutional adoption of digital assets, 2025 stands as a pivotal year for the convergence of TradFi and DeFi. Real World Assets (RWAs) are moving from experiment to mainstream, while the crypto ecosystem matures beyond speculation into genuine utility. In this landscape, CeDeFi emerges as the critical bridge between these evolving worlds.
Before outlining our vision for 2025, I want to express our deepest gratitude to our community, partners, and investors. Your trust and support have been instrumental in establishing BounceBit as a leader in the CeDeFi & RWA space, and your continued faith drives us forward.
Reflections on 2024: The Dawn of CeDeFi
In 2024, the crypto market underwent a transformative shift. Basis arbitrage mechanism was redefined, expanding its reach beyond institutional players to everyday users through innovative on-chain products. This breakthrough was driven by technological advancements in fund segregation and mirroring between custodial institutions and centralized exchanges.
Solutions like Ceffu’s MirrorX and Copper’s ClearLoop set new benchmarks for transparency, efficiency, and security. They introduced a powerful concept: capital efficiency can coexist with trust.
Amid this wave of innovation, BounceBit and Ethena emerged as pioneers. Ethena focused on leveraging base-layer arbitrage yields to expand USDE and USDtb, emphasizing stablecoin adoption. BounceBit, on the other hand, introduced a decentralized asset management marketplace, offering users unparalleled freedom to explore diverse investment combinations.
BounceBit's trajectory in 2024 demonstrated the power of organic growth in CeDeFi. While our TVL touched $1 billion early in the year during our pre-TGE phase, the true validation of our model came in Q4. Following the November launch of CeDeFi V2, our TVL surged organically from $200 million to over $700 million—a remarkable 3x growth achieved without any token emissions or points programs. This growth translated directly to protocol fees, with November and December setting consecutive records of $2.5 million and $3 million respectively, demonstrating the sustainable economics of our model.
(Source: DefiLlama)
The institutional adoption of our platform reached a significant milestone when Boyaa Interactive International Ltd (HKG: 0434), Asia's largest public-listed Bitcoin holder, not only invested in BounceBit but also entered into a strategic partnership to expand our CeDeFi ecosystem collaboratively. This partnership, alongside our position as the first platform to adopt BTCB on BNB Chain and strategic collaborations with Ethena and Ondo Finance, validated our bridge between traditional finance and crypto innovation.
Our global expansion continues to accelerate. Based in Singapore, we've established deep connections with Asian exchanges and institutional players, while simultaneously building our presence in the West. As I write this, our team is spending January in New York City, meeting with RWA issuers and leading financial institutions to expand our U.S. institutional partnerships. This dual-market presence uniquely positions us to connect Eastern liquidity with Western innovation.
While Ethena led in capital volume through their focus on stablecoin adoption, BounceBit excelled in reinventing basis strategies to provide token-denominated yield across a wide range of assets including BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL, and more; the technical complexity and robust risk management engine reflect the unique strengths and opportunities of both Western and Asian markets. Our technological edge, combined with our deep understanding of both markets, positions us uniquely in the CeDeFi landscape.
As we step into 2025, BounceBit stands at the intersection of two transformative trends: Wall Street's growing appetite for digital assets and Asia's dominance in crypto trading infrastructure. We're not just building a bridge between these worlds—we're creating the foundation for a new financial paradigm where traditional capital meets crypto innovation, institutional trust meets DeFi efficiency, and Eastern markets meet Western opportunity. The future of finance isn't East or West—it's both, and BounceBit is making it possible.
BounceBit’s All-Weather Product Strategy
The cyclical nature of the crypto market demands adaptability and forward thinking in anticipation of the evolving risk appetite and portfolio allocation. BounceBit’s All-Weather Strategy provides tailored solutions for each market phase:
2024: BTC Denominated Real Yield Products
As the market entered a bull phase, BounceBit launched BTC denominated real yield products, becoming the first CeDeFi-built BTC yield solution through basis arbitrage.
2025: Dollar Denominated Real Yield Products
The latter stages of a cycle are typically characterized by profit-taking and risk aversion, driving asset rotation into dollar and dollar equivalents. BounceBit will shift focus to dollar denominated yield products, helping investors manage bull-market profits and secure long-term capital growth.
2025 Strategic Product Rollout:
Building on this foundation, our quarterly roadmap focuses on systematic expansion:
Q1: Introduction of BounceBit Prime, flagship institutional offering combining CeDeFi & RWA
Q2: Strengthening BB Chain’s ecosystem with RWA Credit Market and CeDeFi applications
Q3: Deployment of RWA Settlement and Clearing House for enhanced market stability
Q4: Regulatory compliant yield product and institutional partnership expansion
Macro Opportunities: Western Innovation Meets Asian Agility
The West focuses on tokenizing the best capital market assets, from the U.S. Treasuries to money market funds and private credits. The real challenge is creating sustainable, long-term innovation and giving these assets actual utility beyond their inherent yield.
Asia markets, given the region's dominance in liquidity venues such as CEXs, are focused on bringing new retail and institutional liquidity into crypto. They are constantly reiterating for better UIUX and exploring new ways to reduce onboarding friction.
The greatest opportunity lies in bridging these two paradigms: enabling Western tokenized assets to access Asian credit and liquidity infrastructures. By making RWAs into functional, collateralizable settlement assets, this convergence could unlock significant growth and innovation.
BounceBit Prime: Institutional Product for Dual Yields
BounceBit’s 2025 mission centers on realizing this bridge. Through BounceBit Prime, we aim to seamlessly integrate Western RWAs with Asia’s dynamic credit and liquidity markets.
Imagine 2 scenarios:
A crypto fund manager holding tokenized RWAs but faces challenges in maximizing their capital efficiency and income opportunities.
A TradFi fund manager eyeing the basis yield, but struggles with counterparty risks associated with stablecoins and centralized exchanges.
With BounceBit Prime, users can transform RWAs into yield-bearing settlement assets and leverage Asia's robust credit and liquidity infrastructure to access diversified trading and yield opportunities, all while bypassing the need to hold USDT/USDC on centralized exchanges. Investors no longer face a trade-off between stability and growth—they can earn yields from basis trading and risk-free treasury assets simultaneously and securely.
This isn’t just a product; it’s a global financial solution, unlocking utility for RWAs, enhancing liquidity, and harmonizing the innovative strengths of the West with the agility of the East.
Micro Opportunities: Breaking Down Stablecoin Barriers
Stablecoins, the backbone of crypto liquidity, present inherent limitations:
Trust Barriers
Issuance of both treasury-backed and algorithmic stablecoins by private institutions presents significant barriers to entry for TradFi participants. Key concerns include reserve transparency, regulatory clarity, issuer credit risk, and algorithmic stability (for algorithmic stablecoins), all of which contribute to substantial friction in onboarding.Distribution Bottleneck
Stablecoin issuers heavily rely on centralized exchange (CEX) listings for distribution. However, new entrants often introduce minor variations in wrappers and yield distribution mechanisms among existing treasury-backed stablecoins, complicating CEX integration and leading to fragmented liquidity.Value Extraction
Stablecoin holders often face a trade-off between earning yield through basis trading or treasury yield, but not both. This limitation arises from structural designs, directing yield of the underlying asset to the issuer.
The Opportunity of Stablecoin Alternatives
The solution lies in bypassing stablecoins entirely. By directly integrating tokenized treasuries and money market funds (like BlackRock's BUIDL or Franklin Templeton's BENJI) with liquidity venues through BounceBit, we can unlock liquidity, enhance capital efficiency, and minimize friction for TradFi onboarding.
Key innovations include:
Collateral Expansion: Tokenized RWA as collateral in dynamic liquidity venues.
Disintermediation: RWA integration eliminates reliance on stablecoins as an intermediary, enabling seamless Tradfi onboarding.
Yield Parity: Enabling participants to simultaneously earn yields from both basis trading and the risk-free rate of Treasury assets.
This approach doesn’t negate stablecoins but instead capitalizes on their limitations to create more flexible, efficient systems.
The BounceBit Layer 1 Ecosystem Vision: CeDeFi & RWA Prime Services
RWA Settlement, Restaking & Clearing House
To navigate market cycles and facilitate asset rotation, BounceBit will introduce settlement products. These products will enable users to seamlessly allocate between token assets, stablecoins and tokenized Treasuries like BUIDL and BENJI, offering a secure and transparent path for managing funds during volatile periods while generating low-risk returns.
A cornerstone of this vision is our pioneering RWA restaking infrastructure. By integrating regulated, blockchain-native U.S. government money market funds as restaking assets for BounceBit Chain's network security, BounceBit is expanding the frontier of what's possible in making RWAs truly functional within crypto markets. Traditional money market funds already offer steady yields from government securities, but by bringing these assets into our ecosystem, we unlock unique dual-yield opportunities: users can simultaneously earn Treasury-based returns while participating in basis trading yields through our CeDeFi infrastructure. This innovative approach exemplifies our mission of bridging Western financial innovation with Asian trading infrastructure, creating unprecedented capital efficiency for institutional-grade assets.
Furthermore, our RWA clearinghouse will enhance the fungibility and liquidity of RWA assets with similar underlyings. This will facilitate seamless minting, burning, and swapping between different Treasury-backed assets, ultimately improving the overall fungibility, interoperability, and liquidity within the BounceBit ecosystem
BounceBit Network: CeDeFi Applications
The BounceBit Network is our initiative to directly support new protocols innovating with BounceBit’s CeDeFi infrastructure and RWA Credit Markets while aligning $BB with the success of these new protocols. As our infrastructure matures, we're seeing the first wave of independent projects building on BounceBit's CeDeFi stack.
One application that has already been announced is:
durian.win
durian.win, a mobile-first trading platform launching in Q1 2025. Their approach to simplified trading mechanics, combined with the allocation of 20% of their token supply to $stBB stakers, demonstrates the kind of ecosystem synergies we anticipate seeing more of as our infrastructure serves as a foundation for independent innovation.
CeDeFi Liquidity Mining (CLM)
A cornerstone of our initial vision, CeDeFi Liquidity Mining (CLM) has been in development since BounceBit's early stages. After months of preparation and partnership building, we're now in advanced implementation phases with major exchange partners. CLM will reward trading activity on centralized exchanges with token incentives, bridging the gap between CEX liquidity and DeFi incentivization mechanics
The system creates aligned incentives between traders, exchanges, and the broader ecosystem while addressing the persistent challenges of traditional DeFi - fragmented liquidity and limited yield opportunities. Building on our established position as a leading trading entity, CLM represents a natural evolution of our infrastructure.
With development progressing ahead of schedule and exchange partnerships being finalized, CLM will become a reality in 2025, marking another milestone in our mission to bridge traditional trading with DeFi innovation.
Looking Forward
As we build this bridge between Wall Street's assets and Asia's credit &liquidity infrastructure, we invite:
Builders to leverage our CeDeFi stack - durian.win is just the first example of what's possible with BounceBit's infrastructure.
Institutions exploring RWA tokenization and yield generation - our dual-market presence and proven track record with partners like Boyaa show what's achievable.
Users seeking sustainable yields - whether through BTC arbitrage in bull markets or USD yields in bear markets, our all-weather strategy is designed for you.
To our community: Your support through 2024's milestones, from CeDeFi V2 to $700M+ in TVL, made this possible. 2025 is about delivering on our core vision: making RWAs truly functional in crypto markets while bridging Eastern liquidity with Western assets.
-Jack Lu Founder & CEO, BounceBit
