DeFi users don’t live on one venue. But DeFi positions are still managed as isolated pockets of collateral, which forces inefficiency and blocks portfolio-level strategies. Project 0 changes that: one portfolio, unified margin, unified credit, and unified risk across the venues you already use.
In this post: why DeFi prime brokerage matters, what we’ve built since launching Project 0 in September, what’s next in Q1 (and beyond), and how our team is evolving to meet user demand.
A TL:DR of this article is:
- Launch Sep 2025
- Credit market deposits have grown to $175M+
- Live cross-margin footprint includes 6 markets on Project 0 and Kamino
- Immediate expansion: Drift lending markets, Strategies v2, Pay, Dark Mode
- PnL is live (portfolio-level performance across venues)
- Next: Jupiter Lend (target March), then token work, then derivatives integration
1) What a DeFi prime broker is (and isn’t)
In traditional finance, prime brokers sit between capital and venues, managing financing, margin, and risk across a portfolio. It’s bespoke and relationship-driven. It’s centralized and often opaque. Access is gated. Terms vary by client. And for most participants, the system is effectively unauditable.
A DeFi prime broker should change what “prime” means: open-source, permissionless, auditable, equal access, and transparent risk. Those properties matter because they allow retail and institutions to participate within the same system under the same rules. However, this only matters if we solve real problems.
DeFi was meant to make finance composable. It has instead made finance more fragmented. Anyone can create a venue optimized for a specific purpose. Each venue comes with its own risk framework, architecture, and UX. Even two teams building similar products on the same chain can create siloed ecosystems. In a permissionless environment, fragmentation flourishes.
Most active DeFi users don’t use one venue. In traditional finance, many people might use one trading app and one bank (plus maybe a retirement account). In DeFi, it’s normal to have balances across many venues — using 5+ venues doing to achieve different niche use-cases is normal.
Fragmented collateral is a hidden tax: on capital efficiency, liquidation risk, rates, and the user experience. Until now, there hasn’t been a clean way to remove that tax without giving up control to centralized systems. Project 0 is infrastructure to remove it, paired with an opinionated application that showcases what becomes possible.
Project 0 is not a lending aggregator. It is not a single lending venue. It is not a managed vault product where a centralized manager captures arbs and fees. And it is not closed or permissioned.
2) Education + Media
DeFi has iterated heavily on existing primitives. Generalized, permissionless prime brokerage is still new. That means education matters.
Project 0 introduces a new primitive: permissionless, generalized, open-source DeFi prime brokerage that integrates third-party venues. DeFi users have been asking for cross-venue capital efficiency, portfolio-aware margin and risk, and professional execution surfaces without custody tradeoffs. P0 is built to provide that.
I joined Talking Tokens, 11am, 0xResearch, spoke on the floor of the NYSE, gave a keynote at Solana Breakpoint, and did shows like CryptoNews and DevnTell to explain this primitive and why it matters.
Early on, this education has helped position Project 0 as one of the fastest-growing DeFi products on Solana in Q4 2025 — post-launch — even with limited functionality and a young application.
We also shipped docs. Docs aren’t the product, but they matter as a single reference point for how P0 works, how integrations behave, and how portfolio margin/risk is structured. We’ll keep expanding them over time.
3) What we shipped since launch (Sep 2025 - Today)
a) Core: the Project 0 credit market
The base credit layer powering borrowing/lending and portfolio margining within P0 grew rapidly from inception in September 2025, even with limited integrations. Project 0 now has $175M+ in deposits.
Over a ~2 month period pre-deleveraging, growth averaged above $1M/day in net inflows before broader crypto markets delevered in late Q4. This deposit base is a critical liquidity foundation as new integrations and portfolio configurations come online.
b) Integrations: unified margin with Kamino (multiple markets)
In Q4, we shipped support for assets within Kamino’s Main, Maple, Jito, JLP, and Marinade markets. Including the Project 0 market, that means we’re already providing cross-margin across 6 separate DeFi markets through Project 0. This proves DeFi-native prime brokerage can run in production. And we’re still early: today this is primarily spot assets in lending markets; soon it expands beyond that.
c) Strategies (v1): compress multi-venue trades into one-click execution
In Q4, the traditional vault-manager model in DeFi showed real stress. Vaults have attracted billions in AUM by letting curators run strategies across lending protocols and charge fees to depositors who want active management. But as sophisticated players compress venue-level spreads, managers often feel pressured to take more risk to keep yields high. In Q4, some strategies experienced losses due to collateral and leverage dynamics, which put vault depositors underwater.
Project 0 launched Strategies (v1) to invert that model. Strategies surfaces rate, carry, and basis trades uniquely accessible through P0’s prime brokerage infrastructure — and lets users capture them in one click. No manager in-between. No management fees. No opacity on what the strategy is or where the yield comes from.
For the first time in DeFi, users can deposit on (for example) Kamino’s Maple market and use that deposit to collateralize a borrow on Project 0’s credit market — against their Kamino position — without treating those positions as isolated silos. Strategies v1 is still early, but we’ve already seen it drive an uptick in usage.
d) PnL (live): a single source of truth across venues
Fragmented collateral is painful, but so is fragmented accounting. If you’re running positions across Kamino + Project 0 (and soon Drift), you’ve been manually accounting for PnL across multiple venues, with per-venue positions that depend on separate venue positions to be profitable. This is not easy, and as position weightings change, this becomes a nightmare.
To remedy this, we shipped P0 PnL, and it’s live now. PnL is built on new data pipelines into our integrated venues and calculates all-in performance, including:
- Native yield + emissions/incentives earned on venues like Kamino or Drift
- Open positions on Project 0, including strategy legs
- Debt costs when you’re running levered strategies
- Native asset appreciation, separate from lending yield (e.g., assets like JLP can appreciate vs USDC independently of the lending rate you’re earning on top)
The result: a single place to understand whether you’re actually making money when your exposure is scattered across venues — without doing spreadsheet math.
e) Brutus (v1): intelligent risk engine
Brutus is our risk engine underpinning the margin + credit parameters in production across integrated markets. You can’t scale unified margin without a risk system designed for multi-venue portfolios.
Today, production risk variables on P0 are still updated statically using outputs from Brutus. In 2026, we intend to pioneer dynamic systems that update automatically in response to market conditions.
Unified margin expands the surface area where things can break. We’ve laid a foundation that we’re comfortable operating in production — but there’s a long roadmap ahead in deeper modeling, monitoring, and automation. We’ll keep tightening and iterating from here.
f) Dark Mode
One of our top requests has been Dark Mode. We shipped it this week.
4) What’s next (Q1+)
a) Drift lending markets (January)
We’re adding Drift’s lending markets to P0 in January, marking our 3rd venue and 7th+ market integrated into P0’s unified margin, risk, and credit. This expands the strategy capture surface area immediately by introducing Drift-native, risk-adjusted rates to trade against Kamino and Project 0.
We’ll be monitoring deposits into Drift through P0 from day one. The Drift integration has been audited by Accretion.
b) P0 Pay (this month)
Pay enables you to spend against an on-chain portfolio — without switching cards, without giving up credit card points, without consolidating into one venue, and without giving up your yield or exposure. At month-end, Pay takes a borrow against your multi-venue portfolio and off-ramps the borrowed proceeds to the account you use to pay your bills. You can repay that on-chain borrow whenever you want.
c) Strategies v2 (January)
Strategies v1 showed users want one-click yield via sustainable rate, carry, and basis trades. As Project 0 expands to more venues, the opportunity set expands too — so we’re giving Strategies more powerful tooling.
Shipping now:
- Leveraged directional trades (including cases where you can get paid to be levered long)
- Smarter account creation, enabling multiple strategies with overlapping assets without getting blocked by collateral constraints
Shipping later in January:
- One-click entry into strategies even if you don’t already hold the assets
- Debt swap + collateral swap, enabling exposure changes and cost-of-capital improvements mid-position without unwinding and rebuilding
d) Staking Page (February)
We’re going to enable users to borrow against native stake (not just LSTs). That means:
- You can stake to any validator (not just Project 0 validators)
- Keep your position as native stake, and still collateralize it productively in DeFi
- Users with existing large native stake positions can use this immediately — no validator migration required
e) Notifications (late January / February)
We’re shipping notifications so users with active positions across venues on Project 0 can relax and get alerted when action is needed:
- Notifications when relevant interest rates change
- Clear signaling when rebalancing is required
- Portfolio-level coverage across integrated venues
5) Roadmap: dominate lending coverage, then expand into derivatives
a) Jupiter Lend next: work started, production target in March
Jupiter Lend is the second-largest lending venue on Solana and an important hub of capital. With Kamino, Drift, and Jupiter Lend live, Project 0 will have the vast majority of Solana DeFi lending TVL integrated into its prime system.
Each new venue increases the number of possible cross-venue trades. And because Kamino, Drift, and Jupiter will each have different risk-adjusted rates per asset, traders will have ongoing opportunities to trade these rates against one another through Project 0.
b) After Jupiter: derivatives (the biggest prime brokerage unlock)
I want to enable a user to go long BTC in Kamino’s spot market (earning BTC lending yield), and short BTC perp on Drift (earning funding in up markets), and then lever the combined basis position through Project 0 — with unified portfolio risk, margin, and UX.
I also want to enable basis trades with interest rate markets like Exponent or Rate-X. These trades have not been possible without unified margin, unified risk, and a unified execution surface. Project 0 will make them permissionless and generalizable in 2026.
6) The token: meaningful protocol utility
From day one, the plan has been to introduce a token only once it can be genuinely meaningful to protocol growth and operations — after we integrate the majority of Solana lending TVL, and before scaling into derivatives. That plan remains intact. After Jupiter Lend is live in production, we’ll turn more attention to token design and share details in separate posts.
7) Team and execution: pushing the pace
In Q4 we promoted key team members into roles including CTO, CPO, Head of Data, Director of Product Engineering, and Lead Product Engineer to increase execution velocity and structure around our goals.
We’re hiring a senior Data Engineer — ideally with Solana-native experience — to join our data and risk teams with a focus on Brutus and data pipelines for integrated venues.
8) Closing
Project 0 today is the largest DeFi prime broker in crypto, and we’d like to be 10x larger by the end of the year.
My ask: share Project 0 with people who can benefit from multi-venue unified margin, and tell us where we fall short. If you’re using 2+ DeFi venues and Project 0 doesn’t give you better risk, rates, capital efficiency, and UX, we want to know — because that means there’s something we need to fix.
Try Project 0, Pay, and Strategies at app.0.xyz.