TREE, short for Treehouse, is an innovative decentralized application that introduces a revolutionary fixed-income infrastructure for cryptocurrencies, creating a cryptocurrency ecosystem. Unlike traditional DeFi tokens that focus on lending or staking, this protocol provides a comprehensive infrastructure to address the fundamental problem of fragmented interest rates in on-chain markets. TREE addresses key flaws in crypto fixed income through two main innovations: Treehouse Assets (tAssets) and Decentralized Offered Rate (DOR). tAssets are liquid staking tokens that allow users to obtain real returns through interest rate arbitrage, while DOR creates the first decentralized consensus mechanism for benchmark interest rate setting in the crypto market. The protocol currently operates through tETH and the DOR mechanism and plans to implement future governance tokenization in its decentralized roadmap.

1. Interest Rate Fragmentation Crisis The cryptocurrency fixed income market is severely fragmented, with significant interest rate differences for the same asset when 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 inhibit institutional adoption and limit 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 for Professional Finance Traditional finance heavily relies on benchmark interest rates like 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 needed by institutional investors. Without 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 Opportunities to generate stable returns through interest rate arbitrage strategies have historically only been available to institutional participants with large amounts of capital and complex infrastructure.