Building the First Permissionless DeFi Prime Broker (Q4 Progress + Q1 Roadmap)

Integrated venues, unified risk, one-click strategies, and the path to real-world spending from an on-chain portfolio.

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.

I’ll link a few conversations below that do a good job explaining what P0 enables for DeFi users relative to the status quo.

One more small but important baseline: we 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. This week we’re shipping features that materially level up the Strategies experience.

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.

d) 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.

It’s also important to be direct about where we are: risk work is never done, and Brutus v1 is still the bare necessities.

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.

Brutus deserves its own spotlight. I’ll write more in a separate post, but it’s important to note the progress we’ve made since launch.

e) 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)

Prime brokerage started as an sophisticated concept, but the infrastructure we’ve built can enable something broader: using your multi-venue on-chain portfolio in real life without constantly selling positions or moving funds around.

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.

This is how your DeFi portfolio can start to function more like a bank account—you no longer need to keep idle cash off-chain to pay bills.

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 (target end of month):

• One-click entry into strategies even if you don’t already hold the assets
  Under the hood, our engine swaps into the assets that compose the strategy for you. You just specify your exposure parameters (e.g., how levered you want to be) and enter in one click.
• Debt swap + collateral swap, enabling exposure changes and cost-of-capital improvements mid-position without unwinding and rebuilding
  Strategies will only get more powerful once we add derivatives venues.

d) Staking Page (February)

Project 0 runs some of the most performant, high-yielding validators on Solana. But getting access to those yields has been fragmented: either mint our LST ($LST), or manually find our validators (Project 0 Horizon and Project 0 Meridian) inside wallet staking UIs and stake natively.

Next month we’re shipping a full staking page—and the key unlock isn’t just UI.
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)

Strategies are rate trades. Rates move. When they move, position health changes.
The current status quo is staring at the screen: constantly logging in to check whether you’re earning more than you’re paying in interest, and manually rebalancing if market conditions flip.

We’re shipping notifications in late January / February 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 (not “check Kamino, then check P0, then do the math”)

This significantly reduces the stress cost of trading rates through Project 0.

5) Roadmap: dominate lending coverage, then expand into derivatives

We’ve been intentional about rollout order. We started with lending markets because that’s where most sticky capital sits—and where fragmentation creates the biggest capital efficiency and UX penalties. Our goal is to make that capital more productive by unlocking one-click cross-venue rate, carry, and basis trades—boosting yield.

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. Work is underway now, and our current target is to have this ready for production in March.

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)

Basis and rates trades have been major drivers in DeFi. I expect Solana to see a step-change in basis trading activity in 2026.

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.

The main challenge in derivatives is staying on pace with the venues users love. Beyond Solana incumbents, we’ll add new venues with attention to teams like Bulk, Phoenix, and Bullet, plus cross-chain venues like Hyperliquid, in order of user demand.

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 (which we view as the largest growth surface).

That plan remains intact. After Jupiter Lend is live in production—when Kamino, Drift, and Jupiter are integrated—we’ll turn more attention to token design and share details in separate posts.

Tokens are a consequential product and growth integration. We’ll move carefully.

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.

In 2026, the team is focused on scaling Brutus, accelerating application development, and expanding third-party integration coverage.

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. If that’s you (or someone you know), please get in touch.

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 0.xyz.