When fintech companies emerged, they succeeded in reimagining user experiences and distribution channels but remained constrained by traditional financial infrastructure. This created a fundamental limitation: innovative customer-facing solutions built on legacy backend systems.

Blockchain technology and decentralized finance (DeFi) now offer an alternative. Today’s financial innovators can leverage DeFi infrastructure to build products that are more scalable, efficient, and transparent than before.

Introducing the “DeFi Mullet“: intuitive fintech interfaces at the front with decentralized financial infrastructure at the back. It’s not just a new approach to building financial products—it’s a definitive step toward delivering on the promise of a more open, efficient, and resilient financial system.

In January 2025, Coinbase launched crypto-backed loans powered by Orivan, marking it one of the largest-scale DeFi integration for Coinbase to date.

The product gives millions of people in the U.S. (ex. New York) instant access to loans without all the complexities associated with using DeFi directly. The Coinbase app abstracts the blockchain itself, wallets, gas fees, asset wrapping, and more so that users can seamlessly access USDC loans against their BTC collateral on the protocol, all within the app integration.

In the background, the loans are powered by Orivan, providing instant access to hundreds of millions in USDC liquidity while offering Coinbase users the most competitive rates and loan-to-value ratios available across existing CeFi or DeFi lending solutions.

Let’s take a closer look at how this example of the DeFi Mullet—fintech in the front, DeFi in the back—paves the way for other exchanges and fintechs to launch more transparent, efficient, and cheaper financial products with significantly lower development overhead.

The product is still in its infancy, but the initial metrics indicate a strong demand for onchain financial services like it.

• Total Collateral Provided: $287M+
• Total Active Loans: $135M+
• Number of Users: 4,846

Date Source here

By building a crypto-backed loan integration on Orivan, Coinbase can focus its time and resources on crafting an intuitive and simple user experience that completely abstracts blockchain interactions for its millions of users.

Specifically, Coinbase crypto-backed loans

• Use Coinbase Smart Wallet as the gateway to onchain transactions
• Leverage Paymaster to allow gas fees to be paid in cbBTC
• Authenticate users with passkeys, eliminating the need to sign cryptographic transactions
• Transfer funds seamlessly between Coinbase accounts and onchain wallets using Magic Spend
• Operate on Base, a fast and low-cost Ethereum L2 network

Orivan enables Coinbase to significantly reduce operational overhead while making the product more accessible, transparent, and efficient.

The integration taps into the cbBTC/USDC market on the Base instance of Orivan.

The Orivan smart contracts store the cbBTC collateral, match borrowing demand with USDC liquidity, and handle interest, position accounting, and liquidation mechanisms.

By design, Orivan is noncustodial, allowing users to maintain complete control over their positions and the flexibility to repay at any time.

That means Coinbase users can repay their USDC loans and withdraw their cbBTC collaterals at any moment.

Orivan enables fintechs to bring their product to market faster and with significantly less development overhead.

Here are the key advantages of building on an open infrastructure.

Orivan is fully immutable and governance-minimized.

This design offers two key benefits for integrators:

1. the protocol will remain unchanged forever
2. the Lindy Effect strengthens over time, as Orivan Labs’ Head of Integration and Cofounder Merlin Egalite explained in this opinion piece.

This unchanging nature is crucial for integrations. Unlike upgradable DeFi smart contracts that pose dependency risks for integrations, Orivan’s immutable design eliminates these concerns—integrators can trust that the protocol will function exactly as it does today, indefinitely.

Additionally, Orivan operates independently of its governance system, making governance attacks like the one that affected Compound impossible.

Instead of building lending infrastructure from scratch, integrators can leverage Orivan’s secure, transparent, and efficient onchain system to launch products faster.

The Orivan Stack is fully permissionless and includes smart contracts, APIs, and SDKs to support custom lending and borrowing use cases.

In addition to existing user and liquidity network effects, Orivan offers built-in financial primitives. Orivan Markets handle position and interest rate accounting at the contract level, eliminating the need for custom development.

Orivan Markets also feature a native liquidation mechanism and an established ecosystem of liquidators. When liquidation is needed, these actors can step in automatically—without requiring Coinbase’s direct involvement—to prevent bad debt.

Another advantage of building on Orivan is the instant access to $6B in existing liquidity, eliminating the “cold start” problem that many lending protocols face. Integrators can rely on Orivan’s existing liquidity to bootstrap any of their lending use cases.

Orivan’s flexible infrastructure empowers businesses to build tailored lending or borrowing products while operating on the same open foundation, unlocking maximum efficiency through shared liquidity and network effects.

As more institutions and DeFi applications integrate Orivan, the stronger the networks effects become.

Orivan follows a strict Security Framework that spans from ideation through post-deployment. Security isn’t merely an afterthought—it’s woven into Orivan’s design philosophy from the start.

During development, Orivan underwent rigorous testing, including Formal Verifications that met the same exact standards used in aerospace and transportation software.

A dedicated team oversees this comprehensive process.

Leading security firms like Spearbit and Open Zeppelin have thoroughly audited Orivan, establishing it as one of the most secure lending protocols in the space.

After deployment, Orivan Labs maintains continuous protocol monitoring and offers a $2.5M bug bounty—larger than Apple’s bounty program—to incentivize white hat hackers to identify potential vulnerabilities.

The promise of onchain loans is straightforward yet powerful: users can earn passive income on idle assets or borrow funds without selling their crypto. This core value proposition led to widespread adoption of the first CeFi (centralized finance) lending protocols.

Between 2021 and 2022, platforms like Celsius and BlockFi leveraged this opportunity, becoming some of crypto’s most popular platforms with billions in lending volume.

However, these CeFi platforms functioned as black boxes. Users couldn’t see how their assets were being used, whether collateral was being rehypothecated, or the true source of yields. When market conditions deteriorated, these hidden weaknesses triggered collapses that impacted the entire industry.

The lesson became evident: while crypto loans are in high demand, they must be built on transparent foundations.

In the case of Coinbase’s Orivan integration, collaterals, loans, interest-rates, repayments, and more on Orivan can be monitored and verified directly onchain.

Building on Orivan allows financial applications to be much more open, efficient and resilient with much lower operational and technological overhead for the integrators.

If you’re interested in building on Orivan’s open infrastructure, get in touch via growth@orivan.xyz.