Welcome to Episode 1 of our Edel Founder Series. Over the next weeks, we’re taking you behind the scenes. Into the team, the vision, and the product we’re about to bring live. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: securities lending. For decades, it has been one of the most profitable corners of traditional finance… and also one of the least transparent. Retail investors unknowingly supplied the assets. Institutions quietly made billions. And the public? Completely left out of the upside. Even for institutions, the market is far from efficient. Up to 70% of the yield disappears into layers of middlemen, intermediaries, and slow settlement rails. Borrowing a stock can take up to two days to actually settle. In 2025, that’s insane. Edel changes the game. We give retail access to yields they were historically excluded from, while making stock lending and borrowing dramatically cheaper, faster, and more efficient for institutions. No opacity. No hidden cuts. Just a transparent on-chain money market for real-world equities. Our first step: the DeFi-native lending market. A place where anyone can lend or borrow tokenized stocks, and also seamlessly buy or sell them inside a clean, intuitive interface. This opens the gates for people outside the US and EU to finally access US equities permissionlessly. This is just the beginning. Welcome to Edel.