The recent collapse of UST has once again demonstrated that many of the so-called stablecoins in the web3 world today are tied to high-risk and often unsustainable assets. As decentralized finance attempts to expand its reach, it appears to be in dire need to find alternative sources of yields.

During the last DeFi summer, the yields on USDC across lending protocols ranged from 4-6%, says Md Halim, founder of DeFi startup ZeFi. At times, the yields went as high as 9%.

“As the value of Bitcoin and Ethereum appreciated, the demand for loans against them skyrocketed, prompting higher yields. But now as we grapple with fear and uncertainty in the markets, lots of large funds/whales have suffered losses," he said. "This has caused a cascading effect on players who loaned to them. The lenders in turn are liquidating their collateral to recoup the loans, leading to a further decline in the prices of BTC/ETH and other assets. That’s reflected in the contraction of TVL in DeFi procotols in terms of absolute units of assets locked.”

The message is clear: “If you’re a crypto person, you also need access to safer assets,” says Arun Devarajan, founder and chief executive of MoHash.

Devarajan’s startup, MoHash, is working to address this gap by tapping the real world’s yields. The startup is building a decentralized finance protocol that will tap global capital and liquidity for alternative assets in fast growing economies.

“We are enabling access to fast growing economies, and whose growth has meaning … it’s not tied to the fluctuations in the crypto market. Crypto has one great use case of trading, but it swings with the wind. There’s a lot more things you can do with the same infrastructure and we are trying to expand what it can do by bringing high-yield, regulated assets,” he said.

MoHash has been working to solve this challenge for a year and has assembled several experienced tech and finance individuals from firms such as Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Oliver Wyman, India Stack and Samsung.