About

Notional Finance is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that offers fixed rate lending and leveraged yield strategies. Users can earn interest by lending their assets at fixed interest rates, borrow crypto by depositing collateral, and earn leveraged yield by borrowing crypto to invest in DeFi yield strategies. The platform also allows users to provide liquidity to earn incentives, interest, and trading fees.

History

Notional was conceived in November 2019 at a hackathon in San Francisco by Teddy Woodward and Jeff Wu. The founders met and shared a similar vision of robust, fixed-rate lending and borrowing markets on Ethereum. Fixed-rate lending plays a critical role in traditional financial lending markets because it enables users to minimize risk and plan effectively for the longer term. Some of the largest lenders in traditional finance, like pension funds or retirees, have long-dated liabilities, and fixed rate lending helps them be sure that they can meet their future obligations. Borrowers also prefer fixed interest rates because they remove a significant source of risk from long-term investments and operations. Whether a business is investing in a new factory or a family in a new home, fixed interest rates provide the certainty needed to make large upfront investments with borrowed capital.

The Notional founders felt that the nascent decentralized finance ecosystem needed the ability to facilitate longer-term lending markets in order to achieve its goal of creating an alternative global financial system that could match the utility of the traditional system. Woodward and Wu founded Notional officially in January 2020 and began full-time development of the project. One year later, the Notional team deployed the first version of the system live to the Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol quickly attracted assets and attention from the DeFi community.