TL;DR:
Resolv and Centrifuge announced the deployment of up to $100 million in JAAA, a tokenized version of Janus Henderson’s AAA-rated credit fund, as leveraged collateral within Aave Horizon. The transaction is, to date, the largest real-world asset (RWA) deal executed in the DeFi ecosystem.
Resolv is the protocol behind the stablecoin USR, with a total value locked (TVL) of $162 million. The protocol will incorporate JAAA —built on Centrifuge‘s tokenization infrastructure, which manages a TVL of $1.35 billion— not as a simple reserve, but as active collateral within Aave‘s lending markets. With nearly $28 billion in TVL according to DeFiLlama, Aave is the largest existing DeFi protocol. Aave Horizon is its branch oriented toward financial institutions.
The structure of the deal connects different layers of the ecosystem. Capital flows from Resolv USR, passes through Centrifuge’s tokenization infrastructure and reaches Aave Horizon’s leverage layer, ending in AAA assets managed by Anemoy and Janus Henderson. “The DeFi market is not going to replace traditional finance, it’s going to scale by integrating with it,” said Tim Shekikhachev, co-founder of Resolv Labs.
The strategy allows Resolv to capture the spread between traditional credit yields and on-chain borrowing rates, while diversifying the protocol’s return sources. According to Shekikhachev, when crypto yields fall with leverage cycles, tokenized credit such as JAAA acts as a counterweight anchored in global macroeconomic conditions.
Nadim Chamoun, head of business development at Centrifuge Labs, stated that this mechanism will be the next phase of tokenization: utility at scale. The global RWA market currently surpasses $25 billion in distributed value and has recorded 7% growth over the past month, according to data from RWA.xyz.
