Gearbox Protocol Launches USDC Vault on Etherlink With Re7 Labs

Tezos-powered Layer 2 blockchain Etherlink has gained a new USDC vault courtesy of Gearbox Protocol with a little help from Re7 Labs. Its deployment on the EVM-compatible L2 will support institutional onchain strategies, enabling professional investors to seek new opportunities to generate yield. It’s the latest vault to be launched by Gearbox, which is fast becoming a cornerstone of the composable DeFi landscape.

Etherlink Goes Up a Gear

The USDC vault that’s gone live on Etherlink does much more than simply provide a place to park USDC. Specifically, it allows users to explore onchain strategies that are synonymous with institutions by leveraging treasury-backed tokens such as mTBILL, mBASIS, and mRe7YIELD. This is DeFi meets RWAs.

The initiative has been made possible by combining Gearbox’s composable leveraged lending with Re7 Labs’ token engineering nous. Essentially, anyone who knows what they’re doing can create their own lending product using Gearbox – which is exactly what the Re7 Labs team has done. Indeed, Re7 Labs is fast becoming the leading name for vault curation, having been responsible for spinning up onchain vaults that hold more than $700M in TVL across 14 chains.

With each vault it creates and curates, Re7 Labs aims to maximize yield without materially increasing risk. The ability to maintain this delicate balancing act has been integral to its success, the launch of each new vault burnishing its reputation as a DeFi yield curator par excellence.

New Vault Is a Major Leap

Etherlink’s receipt of a new vault courtesy of Gearbox Protocol and Re7 Labs is the latest catalyst for the network, which continues to go from strength to strength. It recently launched Apple Farm Season 2, providing network users with more $3 million in incentives, while its stablecoin solutions had already been bolstered by the integration of Curve Finance enabling low-slippage stablecoin swaps. The latest USDC vault will enhance this capability, adding to the ways in which users can put their assets to use on the Tezos Layer 2.

It’s been a prolific few weeks for Etherlink all round. In July, Lombard Finance rolled out Liquid Bitcoin (LBTC), which helped contribute to the chain’s TVL growing by almost 70% during the course of the month. With Gear’s USDC vault now operational, that metric looks poised to further swell while cementing Etherlink’s reputation as a rising Layer 2 that offers something different from the other L2s out there competing for market share.

Gearbox’s decision to deploy its latest vault on Etherlink is a boon for the latter and another coup for the former, whose own TVL now surpasses $360M. The quest for sustainable onchain yield is incentivizing protocols to devise ingenious ways to disburse onchain rewards to DeFi users that aren’t merely reliant on native token issuance. Gearbox’s novel take on DeFi lending, enabling up to 10x more credit than would ordinarily be available, has been at the vanguard of this trend, enabling users to do more with their digital assets across the omnichain landscape.