Symbiotic launches Core V2 for shared collateral markets

Symbiotic released Core V2 on Wednesday, converting its protocol from a restaking model to a shared collateral markets platform. The upgrade lets capital committed to Symbiotic vaults be pooled and deployed into external lending protocols when not required for active obligations.

Under Core V2, vault funds can be routed into lending pools such as Aave and Morpho to earn yield. When a vault needs liquidity for redemptions or enforcement, the framework automatically recalls the funds from those lending protocols. Each vault’s rules — including allocation limits, accepted collateral types and loss conditions — are defined and enforced onchain for that specific vault.

Symbiotic estimates that pooling collateral across multiple users and products improves capital efficiency by as much as 70% compared with isolated liquidity pools. The architecture is designed to let one pool of capital support several onchain applications, including insurance coverage, credit guarantees and tokenized real-world assets (RWA) vaults.

The first product launched on Core V2 is Liquid Lane, a shared capital layer for faster settlement of tokenized assets. Liquid Lane enables a single vault to service redemptions across multiple tokenized funds through a competitive market while the underlying capital continues to earn yield. The mechanism lets issuers and investors swap tokenized funds, private credit products and other RWAs for stablecoins much faster than standard onchain redemption windows, which can take weeks or months.

Midas joined Liquid Lane as its first issuer. Fasanara Capital, the institutional manager behind the tokenized credit fund mGLOBAL, served as the initial curator. Onchain asset manager KPK also joined as a vault curator. Nexus Mutual plans to use Symbiotic to expand insurance capacity, while Cap is employing the platform to scale institutional credit guarantees.

A Symbiotic representative described the upgrade as the project’s transition into collateral markets and said the team will focus on building infrastructure and products for those markets. Hugh Karp, founder of Nexus Mutual, commented that shared collateral can support larger insurance markets by allowing delegated capital to sit behind Nexus Mutual as reinsurance capacity, with first-loss and second-loss exposures defined separately.

Symbiotic raised $29 million in a Series A round in April 2025 led by Pantera, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and more than 100 angel investors, including individuals from Aave, Polygon and StarkWare. The company previously raised a $5.8 million seed round co-led by Paradigm and cyber.Fund.

Before Core V2, Symbiotic’s primary activity focused on restaking, which allowed staked assets to secure additional protocols. The new release reorients the protocol to shared collateral services that let multiple DeFi applications access and share capital while preserving separate onchain risk controls and automated enforcement.