Templar Protocol on Stellar: Cross-Chain Lending Explained

Templar by the numbers (October 2026)

Measure	Value	Source
Templar TVL, all chains	$30.4M	DefiLlama, 9 Oct 2026
Stellar TVL	$12.0M (XLM $6.61M, deJAAA $3.78M, USDC $1.65M)	DefiLlama
Stellar USDC borrowed	$12.4M	DefiLlama "Stellar-borrowed"
Peak Stellar TVL	$13.85M (25 Sep 2026)	DefiLlama
First Stellar TVL reading	$2.1M (4 Dec 2025)	DefiLlama
Launch on Stellar	5 November 2025	Launch coverage (Bitget, Lumexo)
Markets in the registry	30 (excluding oracle and governance proxies)	NEAR list_deployments
For scale: Stellar DeFi TVL	$250.0M	DefiLlama chains

DefiLlama's methodology for Templar counts collateral plus net lending liquidity (deposits minus loans) and attributes each asset to the chain it came from. That is why borrowed Stellar USDC is reported separately: a fully borrowed lending pool adds almost nothing to TVL even when the loans are large. For Stellar lending as a whole, Blend V2 held about $144M on 8 October; see the best lending protocols on Stellar.

How to choose

• You want to earn interest on Stellar USDC: Templar's USDC markets were about 90% utilised, so rates were near the top of their normal range. The trade-off is that withdrawals depend on borrowers repaying when utilisation is that high.
• You want to borrow USDC against XLM: Templar offers about 70% LTV. Compare Blend and XOXNO, which run natively on Soroban, in Blend vs XOXNO.
• You hold deJAAA: Templar is one of the few places it can be used as collateral, at a flat 3.3% borrow rate.
• You hold BTC elsewhere and want Stellar USDC: this is the market's main use, and the one that needs no bridge on your side.
• You want the fewest dependencies: a Soroban-native lender avoids NEAR, the signing network and the bridge representation.

The model — markets on NEAR, assets on their home chains

Templar describes itself as "cypher lending". Its markets are NEAR smart contracts, each pairing one collateral asset with one borrowable asset. NEAR's chain signatures, an MPC network whose signing is controlled by NEAR contracts, let those contracts control addresses on other chains, so a user can deposit native assets from their own wallet.

Templar's FAQ explains the flow for bitcoin: the user deposits native BTC to an MPC-controlled address, a NEAR contract verifies the deposit, and the user borrows on another chain. The private key is split between MPC nodes, so no single party can move funds, and the MPC code runs in a trusted execution environment. Templar's Stellar page applies the same idea: deposit XLM or other Stellar assets "without wrapped tokens or bridging" and borrow stablecoins.

The on-chain configuration adds detail the marketing leaves out. Inside the NEAR markets, Stellar XLM, USDC, PYUSD and deJAAA are represented as multi-tokens on intents.near issued by v2_1.omni.hot.tg, HOT's omnichain bridge (DefiLlama's adapter labels them this way). From the user's side there is no bridge to operate, but the market's accounting does rely on that representation staying correctly backed by assets on Stellar.

The Stellar markets and their parameters

Every market's rules are readable on NEAR. Each sets a maintenance collateral ratio for new borrowing, a lower ratio at which liquidation starts, an interest-rate curve, and how interest is split between lenders and Templar. The Stellar USDC markets differ mainly in how much they let you borrow.

Market (collateral → borrow)	Borrow up to	Liquidation at	Borrowed (9 Oct)	Rate
XLM → Stellar USDC	142.9% ratio (~70% LTV)	133.3% (75%)	$1.29M	~8.0%
deJAAA → Stellar USDC	107% (~93% LTV)	105% (~95%)	$3.20M	3.3% flat
BTC → Stellar USDC	117.6% (85%)	111.1% (90%)	$3.07M	~6.3%
WBTC (Ethereum) → Stellar USDC	119.9%	115%	$4.69M	~7.3%

Smaller markets lend Stellar USDC against ZEC, XRP, CETES, USTRY, solvBTC, ADA, DOGE, LTC and FXRP, but none had more than $70K borrowed. The XLM market is a second deployment; an earlier XLM market holds about $18K of loans.

The XLM and bitcoin markets use a kinked curve: the rate rises gently to 8% (6% for BTC) at 90% utilisation, then steeply, reaching about 32% at 100% in the XLM market. With utilisation at 89.5% (XLM), 90.1% (BTC) and 90.7% (WBTC), they sat right at the kink. The deJAAA market instead charges a flat 3.3% and was 98.8% utilised.

Collateral: XLM, deJAAA and bitcoin

On Stellar, DefiLlama counts two collateral assets: about 34.2M XLM, worth $6.6M, and about 3.6M deJAAA, worth $3.8M. deJAAA tracks the Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO fund, a tokenised fund of AAA-rated loan securitisations, which is why Templar lets it borrow at 93% LTV.

A low-volatility, interest-bearing collateral borrowed against at 3.3% is a classic carry trade: if the fund yields more than 3.3%, borrowers can loop deposits for leveraged exposure to the fund. The deJAAA market is almost entirely borrowed, so new loans need new lenders. For the general case, see RWAs as DeFi collateral; for tokenised funds on Stellar, see the best RWA platforms on Stellar.

The bitcoin markets explain most of the borrowing. About 70 BTC and 126 WBTC back roughly $7.8M of Stellar USDC loans. These borrowers come from other chains to Stellar's USDC liquidity, so Stellar lenders on Templar are largely financing bitcoin holders, at 6–7% a year.

What lenders earn and where interest goes

Lenders deposit Stellar USDC into a market and earn the interest its borrowers pay, minus Templar's share. Each market sets "yield weights": in the XLM and bitcoin markets suppliers get four parts to Templar's one (80/20); in the deJAAA market 19 to one (95/5). Withdrawal fees were set to zero.

At the 9 October rates, that works out to supplier yields of roughly 6% in the XLM market and 3% in the deJAAA market before any incentives. Templar's FAQ also mentions origination fees, liquidation bonuses and incentive programmes paid through Merkl and points. The main Stellar markets charged no origination fee; older NEAR markets charge 0.1%.

High utilisation is good for lender income and bad for lender liquidity. At 90% utilisation, only a tenth of the deposits sit idle to pay withdrawals; at 98.8% in the deJAAA market, almost none do. The steep curve above 90% exists to pull utilisation back down by making borrowing expensive, but that takes borrowers acting on it.

Liquidations and oracles

Positions that fall below the liquidation ratio can be liquidated by anyone, with each market capping the liquidation spread: 10% for XLM and bitcoin, 2.5% for deJAAA. Templar's FAQ describes partial liquidations that restore a position to health rather than closing it, and prices from Pyth and RedStone through a proxy oracle with freshness checks.

Each market names its own oracle proxy contract on NEAR (for example proxy-oracle-ixlm-ixlmusdc-1.v1.tmplr.near), and the FAQ says the proxy was audited by Halborn and applies circuit breakers. As always, collateral is only as safe as its price feed; a thinly traded asset with a manipulable feed is how Stellar's largest lending loss in 2026 happened, described in Blend's 2026 incidents. For Stellar oracle options, see oracles on Stellar.

Risks

• Signing network and bridge representation. Deposits depend on NEAR's MPC network and on the HOT-issued tokens inside the markets staying fully backed. A failure in either would hit every chain at once.
• NEAR dependency. Market logic, liquidations and accounting run on NEAR. A NEAR outage or contract bug affects Stellar positions even when Stellar is working normally.
• Liquidity for lenders. The main USDC markets were 90–99% utilised on 9 October, so large withdrawals may have to wait for repayments.
• Tight deJAAA margins. A 107% requirement leaves little room if the fund's price or its oracle moves.
• Young deployment. Templar has been on Stellar since November 2025, and its Stellar TVL has grown nearly sixfold since December, so its parameters have not been tested by a severe drawdown.

How Templar fits into Stellar lending

Blend and XOXNO run their lending markets as Soroban contracts on Stellar itself. Templar instead brings Stellar assets into markets on NEAR and connects them to collateral from Bitcoin, Ethereum and other chains. That makes it complementary rather than a direct rival: its distinctive business is lending Stellar USDC to bitcoin holders and to deJAAA carry trades. Like the Sentora-run vaults covered in Stellar DeFi Hub explained, it is one of the newer protocols that have added to Stellar's TVL in 2026.

The takeaway

Templar is useful if you want Stellar USDC against bitcoin or deJAAA, or want to lend USDC to the people who do. It is cross-chain lending with the bridge handled for you, not removed: the markets live on NEAR and the assets are represented there. Price that extra layer into the yield, and watch utilisation before depositing anything you may need back quickly.

Sources: DefiLlama protocol and chains endpoints, 9 October 2026; DefiLlama-Adapters projects/templarfi source; NEAR RPC view calls to v1.tmplr.near (list_deployments) and every market (get_configuration, get_current_snapshot), 9 October 2026; templarfi.org FAQ and Stellar page; Bitget and Lumexo coverage of the 5 November 2025 Stellar launch. Dollar values of borrowed amounts assume USDC at $1.