What is tenor?

Tenor is a decentralized finance project built on Stellar, a blockchain network, that lets people turn a floating, unpredictable interest rate into a fixed one, or trade on where interest rates are heading. It targets a gap the authors identified in Stellar's DeFi ecosystem: lending pools and yield-bearing assets already exist, but the rate you earn from them can swing week to week, and there was no way to lock in a guaranteed return or bet directly on rate changes. The core idea is splitting a yield-bearing asset into two separate tokens once you pick a maturity date. One token, called the principal token, always redeems for exactly the original asset value at maturity, making it attractive to savers who want a predictable, fixed return. The other, the yield token, collects all the interest the asset earns until that maturity date, which suits traders who want to speculate on whether rates will rise or fall. The two tokens can always be recombined back into the original asset. Tenor is built from three connected pieces. The tokenizer is the core contract that splits deposits into these two token types. A pricing pool trades the principal token against a stable token, with its price gradually rising toward full value as the maturity date approaches, which is what lets the fixed rate stay steady over time. A carry vault automates the whole process for everyday users: deposit once, and the vault buys the cheapest principal tokens, holds them, and pays out the locked return automatically at maturity. The project is currently live on the Stellar Testnet, meaning it uses test funds rather than real money, with a web app where users connect a Freighter wallet, get free test tokens from a built-in faucet, and see live numbers pulled directly from the underlying smart contracts. The contracts are written in Rust using the Soroban smart contract framework, and the project includes documentation covering the technical architecture and the underlying rate math. It is aimed at developers and crypto-savvy users interested in fixed-income style products within decentralized finance.