Clearpool
Co-building DeFi's institutional credit network
Table of Contents
Clearpool was founded in Singapore in 2021 by three people who had spent the last decade trading institutional credit. Robert Alcorn ran APAC repo at First Abu Dhabi Bank. Alessio Quaglini was the CEO of Hex Trust. Jakob Kronbichler had been at Aspire after a stint at Rocket Internet. They saw the same gap. DeFi had no home for institutional borrowers, and retail lenders had no way to lend to them. The wholesale credit market that runs traditional finance simply wasn't on-chain yet.
Holdex partnered with Clearpool that year to co-build the protocol. The work covered capital, engineering, design, and go-to-market, and has been continuous since.
Co-building from day one
Holdex's role at Clearpool runs deeper than advisory. Vadim Zolotokrylin serves as Chief of Product and Technology, and a Holdex engineering squad runs the smart contracts and dApp end-to-end. The relationship also runs back into Holdex through Clearpool's advisory bench.
The Solidity stack lives on every Clearpool network. Audits by Hacken, CertiK, and Pessimistic show 100% contract coverage with zero Critical, Major, or Medium findings. A Svelte dApp with a shared component library powers Prime, Dynamic Pools, Credit Vaults, and Ozean from one codebase. Holdex co-authored the Clearpool Prime and Term Pools whitepapers, wrote the Prime user guide, and sourced and trained the engineering team behind the product.
The story so far
When the founders met in early 2021, all three had spent years on the other side of the trade. The institutional credit market was the largest book of business in finance, but it lived almost entirely in private agreements and bilateral counterparties. The first move was the simplest possible version of the on-chain answer: a permissionless pool, on Ethereum, where any institution could borrow USDC unsecured and any wallet could lend.
Mainnet went live on 23 March 2022. Within six weeks, Jane Street and BlockTower had opened the first permissioned pool, the first time a major Wall Street institution borrowed unsecured liquidity on a DeFi protocol. By year-end the protocol had originated nine figures of loans and started attracting the kind of compliance interest that meant the next chapter would have to be a permissioned tier in its own right.
That tier became Clearpool Prime, live on Optimism in December 2023. Prime extended the model upmarket with KYB by Securitize iD, an audit on every release, and a structure designed for institutions that needed a regulated environment around the same primitive. By early 2024 the team was already working on the layer above. Credit Vaults launched on Avalanche in April 2024 with publicly listed Banxa as the first borrower. The product expanded to Base in July, then Arbitrum (with $18M originated at launch and an Arbitrum Foundation grant), Mantle, and Polygon zkEVM through the second half of the year.
The biggest swing came at the end of 2024. Ozean, an OP-Stack Layer 2 purpose-built for tokenised RWA yield, was announced in August 2024 and shipped through 2025 with native components for stablecoin (USDX, by Hex Trust), liquidity (Oxygen), and yield (ozUSD). The first RWA Exchange-Traded Pool, Port, went live in February 2025. Maple Finance, Lido, and First Digital all came on as partners during the year.
Five years in, Clearpool has passed $930M in originations, distributed more than $5M in yields, and built a borrower roster spanning institutional trading firms, fintechs, and payment companies. The arc is convergence: TradFi credit desks and DeFi participants sharing the same liquidity environment.
Products
Dynamic Pools
Dynamic Pools are Clearpool's flagship: permissionless, uncollateralised borrowing where institutional borrowers post their own pools and any lender can supply USDC. They went live on Ethereum on 23 March 2022, with Wintermute, Amber Group, and Folkvang as the first three borrower pools. Lenders committed over $100M at launch. Six weeks later the protocol launched its first permissioned pool with Jane Street and BlockTower Capital, the first time a major Wall Street institution borrowed unsecured liquidity on a DeFi protocol.
Holdex shipped the smart contracts and the borrower/lender UI, both of which have evolved through every chain expansion since.
Clearpool Prime
Prime is the institutional, permissioned tier. KYB by Securitize iD gates participation, smart-contract audits sit on every release, and the architecture is designed for institutions that need a compliant environment. Prime launched on Optimism on 12 December 2023, with Portofino Technologies as the first borrower and Azure Tide as the first lender. It expanded to Arbitrum in July 2024, originating $18M of loans at launch and earning a grant from the Arbitrum Foundation.
Holdex co-authored the Prime whitepaper, wrote the user guide, and built the contracts and the Prime UI.
Credit Vaults
Credit Vaults bring tokenised real-world-asset private credit on-chain. Institutional lenders deposit into vaults curated by credit managers, who deploy the capital to vetted borrowers. The product launched on Avalanche on 2 April 2024, with publicly listed fintech Banxa as the first borrower and Cauris as curator. It expanded to Base in July 2024, then to Mantle and Polygon zkEVM through the second half of the year.
Holdex built the vault contracts, the lender deposit interface, and the curator dashboard.
Ozean
Ozean is an OP-Stack Layer 2 purpose-built for tokenised RWA yield, announced in August 2024 and co-developed with Caldera, Optimism, and Hex Trust. The native stack includes the Oxygen liquidity layer, USDX (Hex Trust's stablecoin) as the gas and settlement token, and ozUSD as the yield-bearing asset. In February 2025 Ozean launched Port, the first RWA Exchange-Traded Pool. Partnerships with Maple Finance, Lido, and First Digital came online over the rest of 2025.
The Holdex squad that runs Clearpool product and engineering ships the Ozean application layer end-to-end.
At scale
Clearpool became one of DeFi's most active institutional credit protocols.
The 2025 milestones came fast: a Bybit perpetual-futures listing for CPOOL, a Binance Alpha listing, and Ozean partnerships with Maple Finance, Lido, and First Digital.
In the founder's words
Since day one, Holdex has spearheaded the product development and launch of the Clearpool protocol. Thanks to Holdex's team efforts, our product has facilitated over $650 million in loans in the two years since its launch.
The result is a long-running co-build, not a launch-and-leave engagement. Holdex sits inside the product engine across the protocol, the institutional credit tier, and Ozean's RWA surface.
Links
- Site: clearpool.finance
- Prime (institutional, KYB-gated): clearpool.finance/prime
- Dynamic Pools and Credit Vaults: clearpool.finance/lending
- Ozean (RWA Layer 2): ozean.finance
- Docs: docs.clearpool.finance
- X/Twitter: @ClearpoolFin