Why We Invested in Concrete and Glow

At a glance, Concrete might seem like another DeFi protocol offering higher yields and cross-chain capabilities. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll realize it’s aiming to rewrite the playbook on how users interact with on-chain credit. Concrete is building what we believe will be the new standard for credit in DeFi, a system where users don’t have to piece together complex strategies across fragmented platforms. Instead, they get automated yield generation, unified margin accounts, and liquidation protection all in one seamless flow.

This isn’t just about better borrowing or earning, it’s about creating a credit layer that’s intelligent, protective, and composable from day one. Whether you’re farming EigenLayer points with leverage, hedging a funding trade, or just looking to safely borrow against volatile assets, Concrete’s architecture handles the complexity behind the scenes. Users are left with a smooth, intuitive interface that unlocks the full potential of their capital, no spreadsheets, no panic over liquidation thresholds, and no need to jump between protocols. This is the credit engine DeFi should have had all along, and with Concrete it’s finally here.

On Solana, this same vision takes form through Glow, a fully native protocol designed for fast, composable DeFi. Glow introduces on-chain margin accounts that let users earn yield, borrow against their deposits, and execute leveraged trades, all within a single smart contract wallet. The brilliance of Glow lies in its simplicity through Glow Recipes, users can execute complex strategies like delta-neutral LRT farming, pair trades, or leveraged long positions in just a few clicks.

DeFi today is powerful, but it's fragmented, inefficient, and frankly intimidating for most users. Borrowing is still expensive and overcollateralized. Yield strategies require constant monitoring and juggling. And liquidations? They're brutal, often leaving users wrecked while bots profit off their losses.

Concrete doesn’t just patch over these problems. It rearchitects them from the ground up by combining four essential DeFi primitives, Earn, Borrow, Protect, and Trade into one tightly integrated system. The result is a credit layer where capital can move intelligently, yield can be automated, and risk can be actively managed, not just endured.

Earn

Concrete's Earn Vaults are the beating heart of the ecosystem. Users can deposit assets like ETH, USDC, or LSTs such as LBTC into these vaults and earn yield through actively managed strategies. Instead of locking funds into rigid vaults, users receive Liquid Vault Tokens (LVTs), tokenized yield-bearing receipts that remain composable across DeFi. You can use LVTs as collateral, margin them in lending markets, or even trade them on secondary markets. Think of them as the DeFi-native equivalent of a money market fund share—productive, liquid, and versatile.

Earn is also where Concrete’s B2B infrastructure shines. Top protocols like EigenLayer and Lombard are already partnering with Concrete to optimize yield distribution across AVSs or offer custom vault strategies to their user bases. For protocols seeking yield-maximizing vaults with plug-and-play integration, Concrete becomes a powerful backend.

Borrow

Most DeFi lending markets are isolated pools with fixed parameters. Concrete changes that with a more flexible, cross-market borrowing experience. It integrates with external money markets like Aave and Compound, allowing users to access the best real-time borrowing rates across chains. It will also offer its own money market, the go-to destination for borrowing against Concrete-issued derivatives such as LVTs.

This dual approach gives users choice, rate optimization, and a unified interface to manage loans across platforms. Borrowing becomes smarter, cheaper, and more capital-efficient. And by embedding Concrete Protect directly into the borrowing flow, users get liquidation insurance built in from the start.

Protect

Liquidations are one of DeFi’s biggest UX failures. On protocols like Aave or Compound, liquidation bots ruthlessly race to grab undercollateralized positions, often leaving users with slashed assets and little recourse. Concrete flips this dynamic with Protect, an active credit protection engine that steps in before liquidation thresholds are hit.

Here’s how it works. If your position gets close to liquidation, Concrete uses a flash loan to pay off the debt instantly, charges a small fee, and closes the position safely. You keep your assets. In many cases, users don’t even realize how close they were to liquidation. It’s handled automatically in the background. The protocol earns revenue from these protection fees, creating a more sustainable business model that doesn’t rely on mercenary liquidators.

Even better, this protection layer allows money markets to onboard riskier or more exotic collateral, like long-tail tokens or newer LSTs, without exposing themselves to bad debt. 

Trade
This is the most forward-looking component, but also one of the most exciting. Concrete doesn’t just tokenize yield via LVTs. It also enables the tokenization of loans themselves. Imagine being able to sell a debt position or the rights to future yield without repaying the loan. Or imagine a secondary market for credit risk: shorting a high-risk borrower, hedging liquidation exposure, or buying discounted protected loans.

That’s what the Trade layer unlocks. It turns passive positions into tradable, liquid instruments. Think of it as the early days of CDS, credit default swaps, but on-chain, transparent, and programmable.

This will take time to reach full adoption, but the infrastructure is being built now. As liquidity deepens and traders seek new primitives to express market views or hedge risk, we believe Concrete will become the foundational layer for an entirely new class of on-chain credit derivatives.

Why This Matters
In isolation, each of these features is powerful. But it’s their composability that makes Concrete so differentiated. LVTs from Earn can be margined in Borrow. Loans in Borrow can be protected with a click through Protect. Protected loans can be traded in the Trade layer, creating liquidity on previously locked capital. It’s a self-reinforcing loop where each part strengthens the others.

Concrete’s architecture makes the experience modular, clean, and user-centric, all while plugging into existing ecosystems like Morpho, EigenLayer, and Lombard.

Put simply, Concrete turns DeFi from a set of disconnected tools into a unified system for automated yield, flexible borrowing, and intelligent risk management. This is the credit layer DeFi has been waiting for.

We’ve long held the belief that Solana will eventually require its own DeFi-native infrastructure. Its high throughput and low latency enable products that simply can’t be built on EVM. But culturally and technically, Solana is a different beast. Concrete recognized that too, which is why they didn’t just fork the EVM stack, they acquired Jet Protocol and rebranded it as Glow, a new Solana-native lending protocol that brings Concrete’s credit vision to life in a distinctly Solana way.

Most lending protocols on Solana today, whether they’re built on traditional pooled models or newer permissionless rails, tend to isolate positions. You lend in one pool, borrow from another, and your margin is siloed and inflexible. Glow changes that completely. It introduces on-chain margin accounts, allowing users to manage collateral, borrowings, and trades across multiple strategies under a single account structure all while staying composable with the rest of the Solana ecosystem.

But Glow isn’t just for advanced users or power traders. With Glow Recipes, they’ve taken complex credit strategies and abstracted them into one-click experiences. Want to leverage long sSOL and farm re-staking points? There’s a Recipe for that. Want to do a delta-neutral hedge trade and farm perpetual funding fees? One click. You can even execute pair trades like longing one asset and shorting another, with simple UI flows. This level of strategy abstraction, combined with Solana’s low-latency infrastructure, makes Glow feel more like a prime brokerage product than a traditional lending protocol.

As users increasingly straddle both EVM and Solana ecosystems, Concrete and Glow form a two-pronged approach to yield and credit that we believe will be dominant on both sides of the chain divide.

Concrete and Glow represent a rare convergence of innovation, execution, and market timing. They’re not trying to be the “everything app”, they’re building financial infrastructure that everything apps will plug into. For us, this wasn’t just a bet on better yields or smarter credit markets, it was a bet on a new standard for how capital is borrowed, protected, and grown across crypto.

We're proud to back them, and we’re excited to support them as they help define the next chapter of DeFi.