Why now?
There’s a clear inflection point in the evolution of on-chain capital markets. Three structural forces are converging, creating the need for infrastructure like Inception:
1. Curator-led Environments are Growing
A few years ago, less than 1% of DeFi’s TVL flowed through curator-led vaults. Today, over 21% of total TVL is allocated to protocols where third parties manage vault design and rewards.
Protocols like Morpho, Symbiotic, Spectra, and EigenLayer are not competing for TVL as vertically integrated products, they’re acting as permissionless vault frameworks. As more capital flows into these ecosystems, users and institutions need a way to access and compose exposure across them without getting trapped in siloed experiences.
2. Institutional Capital is Being Onboarded Onchain
In 2020, institutional involvement in DeFi meant buying into blue-chip vaults or LP positions. By 2024, institutions are issuing on-chain products themselves:
Tokenized T-bills
Structured credit
Custom basis trade vaults
Permissioned staking pools
This means institutions are playing the role of curators, and they need infrastructure that supports design, issuance, and liquidity abstraction at scale.
3. RWAs and DeFi-native rewards are merging
Today’s highest-performing vaults combine real-world and on-chain components.
A single product might include:
A tokenized short-term bond (RWA)
A restaking wrapper on a shared security infrastructure
A looping mechanism through a lending protocol
A liquidity provisioning strategy via a DEX
This layered design is powerful, but without modular infrastructure, it’s inaccessible to most users and hard to manage even for power users.
In Summary
Curated DeFi is where the market is heading, but access and composability haven’t kept up with its growth.
Inception exists to solve this. By unifying access to the best curated vaults and standardizing reward composition through inTokens, the protocol gives users a way to interact with DeFi’s next phase without having to rebuild the plumbing themselves.
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