Nunchi Yield Exchange (YEX)

Yield Deserves its Own Exchange

For a decade, the story of crypto has been written in the language of price. We track the parabolic ascent and gut-wrenching fall of tokens, measuring success and failure in dollars. Price is the visible, visceral, and dominant narrative. But beneath this chaotic surface lies a more powerful, unseen force that governs the entire system: yield.

Yield is the silent architecture of finance. It is the funding rate that dictates the cost of leverage, the staking APR that represents the time-value of security, and the T-Bill rate that serves as the global baseline for risk itself.

While price is a snapshot in time, yield is a continuous stream—the gravitational pull that shapes every strategy, every portfolio, and every market. And yet, for all its importance, yield remains a fragmented, illiquid, and largely untradable asset class. We can observe it, react to it, and build strategies around it, but we cannot trade it directly.

This is the fundamental piece of missing infrastructure in decentralized finance. The time has come to build a dedicated Yield Exchange (YEX).

Yield Fragments

Today, anyone seeking to express a view on yield is forced into a world of immense complexity and capital inefficiency. The landscape is a collection of disconnected silos:

• Funding Rates live exclusively inside perpetual exchanges, requiring clunky, multi-leg basis trades to hedge or speculate.

• Staking APRs are locked within Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), forcing users to take on unwanted price risk to get exposure to the yield.

• "Risk-Free" Rates from tokenized T-Bills exist in yet another silo, disconnected from crypto-native rates.

This fragmentation forces sophisticated participants to use duct-tape solutions. They are constantly exposed to risks they don’t want (price beta) to get exposure to the factor they do (yield). The market lacks a clean, standardized, and capital-efficient instrument to hedge, speculate, and build with yield itself.

A Yield Exchange (YEX) to Turn Time into an Order Book

A Yield Exchange is not another DEX for tokens. It is a venue where the underlying asset being traded is the rate of return itself. Its core instrument is the perpetual yield swap, which we call a Yield Perpetual.

Think of it like a standard perpetual contract, but instead of tracking the price of Bitcoin, its index tracks a yield—for example, the annualized 8-hour funding rate for BTC-PERP, or the live 3-month U.S. T-Bill yield.

The mechanics are elegant and powerful:

• Trading a Rate: The order book is denominated in basis points (bps). You can place a limit order to "buy" the BTC funding rate at a 10% annualized yield or "sell" it at 12%.

• Streaming PnL: Your Profit and Loss are calculated based on the change in the yield, measured by the change in a cumulative index. A position is a bet on the direction of the rate, and your PnL streams to you in real-time as the live yield moves.

• No Expiries: These are perpetual instruments, eliminating the "roll risk" and management headaches associated with traditional futures, allowing for long-term hedging and carry strategies.

A YEX consolidates yield discovery from dozens of fragmented sources into a single, unified order book of time. It creates a clean, liquid, and composable primitive for the most important force in finance.

A New Universe of Strategies, Unlocked

The moment yield becomes a tradable asset, sophisticated strategies become accessible to everyone, not just the most capital-rich funds.

• For DAO Treasuries & Protocols: A DAO holding a large LST position can short the staking-yield perp to convert its volatile, floating reward stream into a fixed, predictable income.

• For the Basis Trader: The messy, three-legged basis trade is collapsed into a single instrument. A trader can now go long the spot asset and short the funding-rate perp, creating a clean carry position with dramatically lower capital requirements.

• For the Liquidity Provider: An LP in an ETH/USDC pool can hedge their implicit yield exposure from impermanent loss by going long an ETH funding-rate perp, creating a more stable return profile.