Clearpool Introduces Ozean: The Blockchain for Real-World Asset (RWA) Yield

5 min readAug 19, 2024

Clearpool is excited to unveil Ozean, the first Real-World Asset (RWA) yield chain built on and supported by Optimism. Ozean revolutionizes DeFi by seamlessly integrating RWAs in a compliant and user-friendly manner, enabling users to earn native yield on-chain automatically. Clearpool’s native token, $CPOOL, will power the Ozean ecosystem with a new, innovative staking mechanism to reward $CPOOL stakers. As part of Optimism’s Superchain, Ozean is built on the OP Stack and will contribute a portion of its revenue to the Optimism Collective.

Ozean is powered by Caldera’s Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform. Caldera has one of the fastest-growing ecosystems on Ethereum and its industry-leading solutions ensure that we can deliver a unique, high-performance, and reliable experience to our users.

Unlocking the Power of DeFi for RWAs — a Multi-Trillion Dollar Opportunity

Real World Assets (RWAs) are projected to represent a $16 trillion market opportunity by 2030, yet the current RWA Total Value Locked (TVL) is only $4 billion (0.03%). This discrepancy arises from several issues: real-world yield is often captured by stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether rather than end users, RWA protocols lack composability, and DeFi applications suffer from poor user experience, deterring TradFi and retail investors. Ozean addresses these challenges by unlocking the power of DeFi for RWAs, paving the way for broader participation and growth.

Essential RWA Infrastructure for Blockchain Financial Markets

Ozean is a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 featuring an optional compliance layer, designed to foster interoperability among permissioned protocols. This enables the creation of a robust ecosystem where RWAs can be traded or used as collateral with enhanced functionalities. Ozean provides the essential infrastructure for the institutional adoption and development of blockchain financial markets.

Automatically Earn Native Yield

Ozean users can earn native yield on their stablecoins. When stablecoins are bridged to Ozean, they can be converted into Ozean’s native stablecoin, USDX, issued by Hex Trust, a licensed digital asset custodian, and backed by treasury bills or equivalent. $USDX can be locked for $ozUSD, which is a yield-bearing stablecoin. This innovative mechanism ensures that yield is automatically rebased and passed back to users, offering a significant and unique advantage over other chains.

Oxygen — RWA Liquidity Layer

Oxygen (O2) is an innovative liquidity layer that consists of tokenized treasuries, the most liquid crypto assets like BTC, ETH, and yield-bearing tokens on the Ozean chain. It offers a unified basket of assets for swaps, lending, and collateral, with weekly rebalancing to maintain target weights. O2 accrues value through yields from lending protocols and tokenized treasuries, and it can be staked to earn fees and leveraged. This unique layer also supports stablecoin issuance and lending backed by RWAs, boosting liquidity and enhancing financial flexibility in the Ozean ecosystem.

Seamless Compliance with a Web2-like Experience

The Ozean chain has a unified compliance layer, gas abstraction, and a native custodial wallet that includes full account abstraction. The wallet simplifies blockchain interactions, providing a Web2-like experience while integrating key yield opportunities and functionality available on the Ozean chain.

“After many months of hard work, we are excited to finally introduce Ozean, a groundbreaking development in RWAs that will take Clearpool to the next level,” commented Jakob Kronbichler, CEO & Co-founder of Clearpool. “By unlocking the power of DeFi for RWAs, Ozean not only addresses existing challenges but also unlocks a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity providing critical infrastructure for the institutional adoption of RWAs in financial markets. We believe Ozean will set a new standard for on-chain RWA yield, enabling its enormous potential.”
“We’re excited that Clearpool has chosen to build Ozean on the OP Stack,” said Smit Vachhani, Head of DeFiat Optimism Unlimited. “Ozean’s real-world asset chain will bring more DeFi capabilities to the Superchain, which will benefit developers and users alike.”

Custom Gas Token — USDX

To further simplify the user experience, the stablecoin, $USDX, will serve as the chain’s native gas token, eliminating the need for additional ETH/gas tokens in users’ wallets. When users deposit USDC, USDT, or DAI into Ozean, they will receive the gas token $USDX at a 1:1 ratio.

Native Yield Curve and Advanced Financial Instruments

Ozean introduces a unique native yield curve where users can lock $ozUSD on Ozean and exchange it for a duration token that provides a “duration yield” (e.g., USDX6M = 5.35%). This on-chain yield curve facilitates the development of a broad range of financial instruments, including FX swaps, IRS, CDS, and swaptions.

Enhanced Compliance and Composability

Ozean addresses the challenges of compliance and interoperability in DeFi. With an opt-in compliance layer, users only need to onboard once. Protocols can set their KYC requirements, represented by a Decentralized ID token linked to the user’s address. This approach allows anonymous and permissioned users to coexist, unlocking the substantial potential for a thriving trillion-dollar RWA ecosystem.

Ozean’s Native Wallet

Ozean’s custodial wallet addresses common issues with current wallets, such as on-ramping crypto, securely storing seed phrases, paying gas fees, and managing multiple transactions. It offers user-friendly fiat-on-ramping options and integrated access to RWA yield opportunities. Transactions are batched into a single click, with zero transaction fees for users, subsidized by the network and dApps.

$CPOOL: Powering the Ozean Ecosystem

The $CPOOL token will govern both Ozean and the Clearpool protocol. A new, innovative staking mechanism will be launched to reward $CPOOL stakers with:

L2 sequencer fees on blockspace/transactions
Yield from staked $USDX treasuries (20bps)
Enhanced yield on ozUSD by staking both CPOOL and USDX simultaneously.

Grants for projects building on the chain will support ecosystem growth on Ozean. Quarterly buybacks using revenue from the Clearpool protocol will continue to buy back and burn $CPOOL.

The Clearpool protocol will continue to remain and pioneer RWA lending and DeFi credit, with $590 million in total loans originated since launch. Stay tuned for more details about the launch of Ozean and its ecosystem partners, unlocking the power of DeFi for RWAs.

About Clearpool

Clearpool is the leading decentralized finance credit marketplace. A permissionless protocol enables institutions to raise unsecured liquidity directly from DeFi markets, while a separate fully permissioned platform, Clearpool Prime, further meets the compliance needs for wholesale borrowing and lending of digital assets by institutional market participants. Launched in March 2022, Clearpool has originated over US$590 million in loans with a growing user base spanning both crypto and TradFi institutions such as Wintermute, Jane Street, Fasanara Digital, CoinShares, and others. The protocol launched on the Ethereum mainnet in March 2022, followed by the expansions to Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Mantle Network, Flare Network, Base and Arbitrum.