Leading options · 7 ranked

Fixed-Rate Yield

Fixed-Rate Yield evaluated across what happens at maturity; whether the rate is actually fixed, and who can change it; the price of leaving early; and who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses.

Ranked here: protocols that sell a depositor a known rate to a known maturity, through principal tokens, fixed-term lending with an expiry, or a tokenised fixed leg. Not ranked here: lending and borrowing markets with no expiry, yield aggregators, tokenised T-bills and money-market funds, which the scope excludes by construction.

#1 of 7published ranking

Exactly Protocol

80ChainChoice Score

Why it leads

Exactly Protocol scores higher than everything else in this ranking on its early exit cost.

Show the arithmetic

Best in this ranking on early exit cost (9/10; next 8/10)

Cost

Not priced · No comparable price is published

Reviewed 28 September 2026Next review by 12 November 2026Published 13 August 2026Methodology v2026.11.1

How this page is reviewed

Reviewed means every product ranked on this page was read against its sources on or after that date; every ranked category is re-read at least every 45 days. Models research, extract and parse. A deterministic engine ranks. Every quote passes an adversarial refute pass.

Accountable for this review: Mathias Siemonsmeier, Founder.

How we review · Review calendar · Corrections log · How we make money

No provider can pay for a position in this table. The code that computes this order cannot read which links carry a referral code, and every build proves it. Every score below rebuilds from the published criteria.Ranking v2026.11.1 · 4 criteria · 7 products · same inputs, same order

How we review · 7 ranked of 7 assessed · 4 criteria · 0 sponsor weight

How we review

7ranked

7assessed

4criteria

0sponsor weight

Recommendation first, comparison only if needed.

Reviewed and rechecked on the current cycle.

Commercial relationships disclosed before clickout.

Personal comparison

Fixed-Rate Yield ranked comparison

No comparable price is published; ranking still uses verified product evidence.

RankProviderBest fitScore

Exactly ProtocolA variable-rate lending market that als...Top ranked

What happens at maturity — 9/10Trade-off: Judge the documentation and judge the book separately, because they diverge sharply....

80score

Check availability for your country

Exactly Protocol · exact.ly. Provider links appear once we know which country you are browsing from: ChainChoice links to providers only where it serves in full.

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

PendleSplits a yield-bearing token into a zer...

What happens at maturity — 10/10Trade-off: Pendle is the best-documented survivor in a category consolidating hard, and the two...

79score

Check availability for your country

Pendle · pendle.finance. Provider links appear once we know which country you are browsing from: ChainChoice links to providers only where it serves in full.

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

Term FinanceNon-callable on-chain tri-party repo wh...

Who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses — 9/10Trade-off: Term Finance is small and shrinking in absolute terms, and it is a professional venue...

76score

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Term Finance · term.finance. Provider links appear once we know which country you are browsing from: ChainChoice links to providers only where it serves in full.

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

Exponent Yield ExchangeSolana yield-stripping exchange selling...

What happens at maturity — 8/10Trade-off: Fees are the blind spot, and it is worse than "unpublished": no numeric protocol fee...

75score

Check availability for your country

Exponent Yield Exchange · exponent.finance. Provider links appear once we know which country you are browsing from: ChainChoice links to providers only where it serves in full.

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

LoopscaleA Solana credit order book where lender...

Who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses — 9/10Trade-off: Loopscale grew year on year to August but not since: DefiLlama's Solana series shows...

72score

Check availability for your country

Loopscale · loopscale.com. Provider links appear once we know which country you are browsing from: ChainChoice links to providers only where it serves in full.

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

Spectra V2Permissionless yield-tokenisation proto...

Who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses — 8/10Trade-off: Spectra sells the cleanest fixed-rate mechanism in this category and the thinnest mar...

71score

Check availability for your country

Spectra V2 · spectra.finance. Provider links appear once we know which country you are browsing from: ChainChoice links to providers only where it serves in full.

Commission: This provider pays ChainChoice nothing for this link. Disclosure

Crypto products are high risk. Check the provider is authorised where you live before you deposit.

1 more assessed and ranked below — none of them hidden for commercial reasons.

Ranking blindCommercial terms excludedDated primary sources

Ranked on 4 published criteria weighted 32/26/24/18, which set goal alignment — 30 of the 86 points. The rest: regional access 20 (constant here), evidence depth 18 (constant here), ease of use 10 (constant here), institutional trust 8 (constant here). Profile match is shown in breakdowns but carries no weight.

How you can lose money here, and what the ranking scores

Control failure: a key or vote changes the rules, freezes or mints.
Scored by Is the rate actually fixed, and who can change it · 26% (Exactly Protocol 4/10, Pendle 3/10, Term Finance 4/10)
Insolvency failure: the firm or issuer that owes you cannot pay.
Scored by Who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses · 18% (Exactly Protocol 7/10, Pendle 7/10, Term Finance 9/10)
Exit failure: you cannot get out at par, on time, or with what is yours.
Scored by What happens at maturity · 32% (Exactly Protocol 9/10, Pendle 10/10, Term Finance 8/10)
Scored by The price of leaving early · 24% (Exactly Protocol 9/10, Pendle 8/10, Term Finance 6/10)

Not assessed by this ranking: Contract failure, Regulatory failure, Execution failure. A high place says nothing about these; the Methodology tab says what each means.

Audit

Infrastructure

Methodology

2026.11.1

published 10 November 2026

Providers tracked

860+

across 121 categories

Last verified

28 September 2026

newest dated pricing or sentiment read

Named on the roster

2 people

managing directors · 6 automated processes

Decision guide

What matters most before choosing in this category

A fixed rate is a promise with a date attached, so the first question is not how large the rate is — it is what happens when it ends. That carries the most weight here because the published answers diverge completely: some venues state, with a worked formula, that a matured position simply stops accruing and can be claimed with no deadline; on others nothing published tells a holder what happens if they hold past maturity and do nothing at all. Then ask whether the rate is genuinely fixed or merely quoted, because on at least one venue the protocol fee is an on-chain parameter an admin can change, with no numeric rate published anywhere in its documentation and an on-chain ceiling of one hundred percent. Then price the exit, since the whole point of a term is that leaving early costs something — and this category has consolidated so hard that depth is scarce: the leader's TVL fell roughly 86% in twelve months and is still, by a wide margin, the only venue deep enough to sell into. Read the mechanism and the order book separately, because a clean redemption invariant with nobody on the other side is a rate you can enter and cannot leave.

If you hold past maturity and do nothing, what happens — does it stop accruing, auto-roll, or must you claim it by a date?

Is the rate fixed by contract at deposit, or quoted and changeable before settlement — and who can change it?

What does it cost to leave before maturity, at the size you would actually sell, and is there depth to sell into?

Who owes you the fixed leg if the underlying strategy does not earn it?

Current engine lead

The #1 overall and the scoring weights

Exactly ProtocolData checked Sep 2026

A variable-rate lending market that also sells fixed terms: each 4-week maturity is its own pool, the depositor's interest is stamped into contract storage at deposit, and exit before maturity is priced by a published discount formula the protocol will quote you on-chain before you sign — but on 28 September 2026 its Optimism USDC fixed-deposit book was 140,787 USDC, only 58,622.83 of it not yet matured, in an $11.38m protocol, and on Base, where the growth is, it is exactly zero. Strongest on what happens at maturity (9/10): Exactly's Deposits guide says matured deposits can be withdrawn with "no limit to the time" but earn no further interest, and nothing rolls automatically; on Optimism 80,150 USDC sits idle in the pool that matured 24 September 2026. Weakest on is the rate actually fixed, and who can change it (4/10): Exactly sets each fixed deposit's rate from its pool, and its markets are upgradeable through a 24-hour TimelockController run by a 3-of-6 Safe, disclosed on the access-control page rather than the deposit guide. Base holds no fixed deposits at any maturity. Published price: Parameters page (https://docs.exact.ly/guides/parameters), re-fetched 28 September 2026 (HTTP 200, "Last updated 24 days ago"). The fee that lands on a fixed DEPOSITOR is section "G.

Best forWhat happens at maturity — 9/10

Main tradeoffJudge the documentation and judge the book separately, because they diverge sharply. Every quotation in this brief survived a character-exact re-fetch on 2026-08-12: the docs publish a discount formula with a worked example, an explicit no-deadline / no-accrual statement for matured deposits, a named 24-hour timelock and 3-of-6 Safe (both re-read on-chain: getMinDelay() 86400, getThreshold() 3, 6 owners), and an honest admission that a large fixed deposit can sit at zero yield. But the fixed-rate DEPOSIT product is a rounding error inside a variable-rate lending market. Sweeping all 15 deployed Markets — Auditor.allMarkets() returns 6 on Optimism, 4 on Base and 5 on Ethereum — across 80 four-week maturities each on 12 August 2026 (OP block 155,484,248; Base 49,888,858; Ethereum 25,741,355): total fixed deposits are 175,905.14 in stablecoins (OP USDC 175,087.954149, OP USDC.e 316.066486, ETH USDC 251.121281, ETH DAI 250.000000) plus 3.886895 WETH, 1,879.965432 OP, 0.500013 wstETH and 0.00015651 WBTC — against DefiLlama TVL of $5,587,508, roughly 3%. Of the OP USDC book, 18,628.829764 (10.6%) was then already past maturity and earning nothing. On 28 September 2026 (OP block 157,509,261) the OP USDC book was 140,787.19, of which 82,164.36 was past maturity — 80,150.00 in the pool that matured 24 September 2026 and 2,004.235477 still stranded in the pool that expired 7 May 2026 — leaving 58,622.83 live, against DefiLlama TVL of $11,376,990; OP MarketUSDC had taken no fixed deposit in the 32 days since 27 August 2026. Five of the fifteen markets hold zero fixed deposits at any maturity. Most starkly, Base — where the DAO put its growth (EXAIP-26, cbXRP, 1,883,516.72 USDC of fixed borrows on 28 September 2026, up from 705,445.60 in August) — has ZERO fixed depositors: on 28 September 2026 fixedPools[m].supplied reads 0 at every maturity in all four Base markets, and across the 200,000 Base blocks to 51,914,056 (~4.6 days) MarketUSDC emitted no DepositAtMaturity event against 4,024 BorrowAtMaturity events from 392 borrowers. On Base, Exactly's fixed-rate product exists only as a borrower product, funded entirely by the variable pool. A depositor should also know Base is permissioned and mechanically different: lockedAssets(address) returns there and reverts on Optimism, proving Base runs VerifiedMarket/VerifiedAuditor with Auditor.firewall() = 0x310A2694…E01; per EXAIP-26 an allower "has the right to revoke the permissions granted to a user", after which debt is repaid without penalty and "The assets that are not used to repay the debt will be locked" — though the proposal also says "If the user is allowed to interact with the protocol again in the future, the assets will be unlocked. This decision is not final and can be revoked by the allower." What the proposal does not say is that lock() force-closes fixed deposits at the early-exit discount with zero min-output, and unlock() returns variable-pool shares, not the original term. Optimism is permissionless (its Auditor has no firewall() at all) and holds essentially the entire fixed-deposit book. Finally, EXAIP-32 (created 16 May 2026, voting closed 22 May 2026, 1,453,565 For / 8,469 Against) splits the org into a DAO-governed protocol layer and a corporate NewCo running the Exa App and Exa Card; GitHub activity is overwhelmingly on the app. The fixed-rate market is stable, audited and maintained — but it is not where this team is spending its attention.

Verify before signupParameters page (https://docs.exact.ly/guides/parameters), re-fetched 28 September 2026 (HTTP 200, "Last updated 24 days ago"). The fee that lands on a fixed DEPOSITOR is section "G. Variable Rate Pool Fee" (lettered F in August): "δ = 10%", where δ "is the fraction of the fixed interest rate fees retained by the Variable Rate Pool upon leaving the Fixed Rate Pool." The Earnings Accumulator page (https://docs.exact.ly/guides/features/earnings-accumulator, same date) names who pays it: "It's the fee charged to the fixed depositors once they supply assets to a fixed rate pool that the variable pool suppliers will retain for initially providing liquidity." Same Parameters page: "A. Reserve Factor", "η = 5%"; "B. Treasury Fee", "The treasury fee refers to the percentage of interest rate charges paid by borrowers that the protocol retains for its treasury.", rendered as 20% under "Treasury Fee on OP Mainnet" and 0% under "Treasury Fee on Ethereum Mainnet"; no Base treasury-fee rate is published. Borrower late penalty, section "L. Penalty Rate" (lettered K in August): "DailyPenaltyRate = 0.45%", "The daily penalty rate fee is charged to fixed interest rate borrowers who didn't pay their loans on time.", with the page's worked example "the penalty fees will be $4.5 (0.45%*10*$100)". Read on-chain 2026-09-28: OP MarketUSDC 0x6926B434CCe9b5b7966aE1BfEef6D0A7DCF3A8bb (block 157,509,261) returns backupFeeRate() 100000000000000000 (10%), treasuryFeeRate() 200000000000000000 (20%), reserveFactor() 50000000000000000 (5%) and penaltyRate() 52083333333 per second (0.45% a day) — the published values; Base MarketUSDC 0x61EDAcB54aA8a689013682529df8914C87692E4b (block 51,913,985) returns the same four, including a 20% treasury fee the page does not publish for Base; Ethereum MarketUSDC 0x660e2fC185a9fFE722aF253329CEaAD4C9F6F928 (block 26,077,514) returns treasuryFeeRate() 0, matching the page, but reserveFactor() 100000000000000000 (10%) against the published 5%.

Weighted criteria

What happens at maturity32%

Is the rate actually fixed, and who can change it26%

The price of leaving early24%

Who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses18%

Methodology

How this category is reviewed

Reviewed on what happens at maturity, is the rate actually fixed, and who can change it, the price of leaving early, and who owes you the fixed leg if the strategy misses.

The order on this page is the published ranking for this category. Every criterion, weight and source behind it is on the methodology page.

Frequently asked

Questions people ask before choosing fixed-rate yield

What happens if I just hold past the maturity date?

It depends entirely on the venue, which is why this question carries 32% of the weight — more than any other on this page. At the documented end, a protocol publishes an explicit no-deadline and no-accrual statement with a worked example: the position stops earning at maturity and can be claimed whenever, with nothing lost by being slow. At the undocumented end, nothing published tells a holder what happens if they hold past maturity and take no action, which for a dated instrument is the most consequential silence there is. A fixed-rate position is not like a savings balance you can ignore — it has an ending, and whether that ending is written down is a property of the product, not a detail of the interface.

Is the rate actually fixed, or just quoted?

Both exist in this pool, and the difference is not visible on a landing page. A rate fixed by contract at deposit is a different instrument from one quoted and settled later, and separately from either, the protocol fee sitting on top may not be fixed at all. On one venue no numeric protocol fee rate appears anywhere across a nineteen-page documentation corpus or its public API, and the fee is an admin-settable on-chain parameter whose only ceiling is 10,000 basis points — one hundred percent. An unpublished rate and a revocable one are separate problems; that is both at once, and it is scored as such rather than as a missing FAQ entry.

How much does it cost to get out before maturity?

More than it used to, because the category has consolidated hard. The deepest venue here saw its TVL fall from roughly $8.41bn in August 2025 to about $1.18bn a year later — an 86% decline — and it is still by a wide margin the only place with enough depth to exit a meaningful position into. Exactly one protocol in this pool grew over the same period, up 89.6% year on year, and even that sits 21.9% below its own January 2026 peak. So read the mechanism and the market separately: one venue publishes a redemption invariant that verifies on-chain to the decimal and has almost nobody to trade against, which is a clean fixed rate you can enter and cannot leave.

Why is the headline APY not scored on this page?

Because a fixed rate is a promise with a date, and the size of the number tells you nothing about whether the promise holds. The sibling page ranking stablecoin yield states the same discipline in its own methodology — the headline APY is shown as a dated fact and never scored — and the reasoning is stronger here: an advertised fixed rate you cannot exit, whose fee is changeable, and whose maturity behaviour is undocumented, is worse than a smaller rate with all three written down. This page scores the mechanism, the exit and the obligor, and shows every published rate as a dated fact beside them.

Reviewed28 September 2026Method4 criteriaCategoryfixed_rate_yield

Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research