Borrowing in DeFi has always meant accepting a floating rate. You open a loan on Aave at 5%, build a position around it, and a week later a wave of demand pushes utilization past the kink and your rate is 15%. Nothing about your trade changed. Its cost did.

Borrow Fixed Rate

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The problem: variable rates break plans

Lending markets price money by utilization. When borrowers pile in, rates climb steeply to pull in new supply, and they stay elevated until the market rebalances. That design keeps lending pools solvent, but it pushes all of the rate risk onto the borrower.

For a short trade, that is a nuisance. For anything with a longer horizon, it is a deal breaker. A leveraged position that pencils out at 5% can bleed out at 15%. A strategy whose return depends on the spread between what you earn and what you pay can flip negative overnight. And nobody wants to finance something real with a payment that can triple without warning.

The solution: fixed rate loans on Kairos

Kairos now lets you borrow at a fixed rate, using Aave's liquidity.

You pick an asset, a term, and your collateral. In one transaction, Kairos supplies your collateral to Aave, borrows on your behalf at Aave's variable rate, and pairs the loan with a Kairos interest rate swap that pays you Aave's variable borrow rate in exchange for a fixed rate you lock in today. The variable leg of the swap tracks exactly the rate your loan accrues, so the two cancel out. What is left is the fixed rate you saw when you clicked borrow.

A few things worth knowing:

Your loan lives on Aave. You get Aave's deep liquidity and its battle-tested lending contracts. Kairos is not a new place to park your collateral.
The fixed rate is paid up front. The cost of fixing the rate for the full term comes out of the borrowed amount, so there is no second deposit to make.
Already borrowing on Aave? You can lock the rate on an existing loan from your portfolio without opening a new one.
The rate is fixed; the collateral is not. Your position is still an Aave loan, so if your collateral falls far enough, it can still be liquidated. Keep a healthy buffer.

What a fixed rate unlocks

Strategies with a known cost of capital. When your borrowing cost is fixed, a carry trade, a looped yield position, or a basis trade becomes a question you can actually answer up front: does what I earn beat what I pay? You no longer have to price in the chance that a utilization spike erases your edge halfway through.

Real world purchases. Borrowing against crypto to buy a car, put a down payment on a house, or fund a business works best when the payment is predictable. A fixed rate lets you budget for a loan the way you would with a bank, without selling your assets to get there.

Treasury and balance sheet planning. DAOs, funds, and businesses that borrow on chain can match a fixed liability to their plans instead of rebalancing every time the market moves.

Get started

Fixed rate borrowing is live at kairosswap.com/borrow. Choose your asset and term, see your fixed rate before you sign, and borrow in one transaction.

Variable rates were a limitation of early DeFi, not a law of it. With Kairos, you choose which one you want.