The OnRe Core Vault on Accountable makes OnRe's uncorrelated reinsurance-backed yield available on Ethereum for the first time.

We caught up with Ayyan Rahman, co-founder and chief growth officer of OnRe, to discuss the launch, DeFi's maturation, and what comes next for the growing onchain reinsurance platform.

Bringing Reinsurance Yield to Ethereum

The new OnRe Core Vault gives Ethereum users exposure to yield generated through OnRe's reinsurance underwriting business.

While the protocol's settlement layer and token ecosystem remain on Solana, the new vault enables Ethereum users to access exposure to OnRe's reinsurance underwriting business through Accountable's vault infrastructure and RockawayX's curation expertise.

According to Rahman, the goal is to combine the strengths of both ecosystems.

"Users are able to leverage the best of both worlds," he said. "You're getting uncorrelated premiums from OnRe's underwriting business while utilizing Ethereum's infrastructure to scale exposure to our ecosystem on Solana."

Reinsurance Wasn't Built for DeFi

While RWAs have become one of crypto's fastest-growing sectors, Rahman argues that many discussions oversimplify what it takes to bring traditional assets onchain.

The main challenge, he says, is transforming assets that were never designed for instant liquidity into products that can operate inside decentralized markets.

"Historically we are taking an asset that has five- to ten-year time horizons and trying to provide liquidity on the day of," Rahman said.

That creates a fundamental tension between traditional financial markets and DeFi. With reinsurance, specifically, contracts often span years, capital commitments can remain locked up for long periods, and claims can take months or years to fully settle. Crypto users, meanwhile, are accustomed to immediate settlement, instant withdrawals, and continuous liquidity.

Rahman says bridging those bridges those expectations involves redesigning governance structures, reporting frameworks, capital management processes, and risk systems to operate in a transparent and liquid environment.

"You're taking something that's existed for hundreds of years and adapting it to a technology that's less than a decade old," he said.

And Rahman believes solving this challenge unlocks benefits that extend beyond simply bringing a new asset class to crypto.

One of the longstanding constraints in reinsurance is capital formation. Traditional reinsurance funds typically raise capital during specific fundraising windows. If new opportunities emerge after those windows close, managers are often limited by the amount of capital they have already secured.

"Historically in the reinsurance space, you would be limited to just the amount of capital that you raised for January 1st," Rahman explained.

OnRe's model changes that dynamic. Because capital can enter the protocol continuously, the available pool of deployable capital can expand alongside demand.

"As more people mint, we're able to grow the amount of capital we have available to deploy," he said.

The result is something that more closely resembles an open-ended fund structure than a traditional reinsurance vehicle. For Rahman, this is one of the clearest examples of crypto solving a real financial problem rather than simply creating a new speculative asset.

The payoff is an asset class that behaves differently from most opportunities available in crypto today. Unlike many yield-generating strategies, reinsurance premiums are not directly tied to crypto prices, equity markets, or interest-rate cycles.

"We think it's one of the more resilient forms of yield available in DeFi," Rahman said.

From Reinsurance Protocol to Onchain Asset Manager

One of the most notable themes from the conversation was how OnRe's vision is evolving.

While the company began as a reinsurance-focused protocol, Rahman increasingly sees its future as a broader capital allocation platform serving the insurance and reinsurance industries.

"We're becoming less of just a reinsurance business and more of a capital partner," he said.

That expansion is already underway.

OnRe continues to add underwriting expertise while building relationships with brokers, specialty insurers, reinsurance firms, and insurance-linked securities funds. Instead of participating in a single segment of the market, the protocol is positioning itself as infrastructure that can allocate capital across multiple opportunities within the broader reinsurance ecosystem.

The transition resembles how traditional asset managers operate.

Instead of managing one strategy, they identify opportunities across a market and deploy capital where risk-adjusted returns appear most attractive. Rahman believes onchain asset managers will increasingly follow a similar model.

Why Vault Managers Are Becoming Asset Managers

Our discussion also touched on how vaults themselves are evolving.

Early DeFi vaults focused largely on optimizing lending strategies, liquidity mining incentives, and stablecoin opportunities.

Rahman believes the next generation of vaults will increasingly resemble structured investment products.

As more real-world assets move onchain, managers like RockawayX will compete based on sourcing, underwriting, risk management, and portfolio construction rather than simply chasing the highest APY. That evolution may eventually eliminate the distinction between DeFi vault managers and traditional asset managers altogether.

"I think vault managers will soon just be called asset managers," Rahman said. "And vaults will be called structured products."

The shift is already becoming visible across crypto, with investors increasingly asking how yield is generated, what risks are involved, and whether the returns are sustainable, instead of just chasing returns.

Is DeFi Dead?

Toward the end of the conversation, Rahman addressed one of crypto's most debated questions.

Is DeFi dead?

His answer was both yes and no.

The version of DeFi that dominated previous cycles (driven by incentives, unsustainable token emissions, and headline-grabbing APYs) is fading.

But Rahman sees that as a sign of progress rather than decline.

"I think it's safe to say DeFi as we knew it is dead," he said.

What is replacing it, however, will be far more durable; for OnRe, that creates an opportunity.

As the industry matures, Rahman believes the strongest projects will be those built around real economic activity, as opposed to financial engineering.

The launch of the OnRe Core Vault on Accountable represents one step in that direction, bringing reinsurance-backed yield to Ethereum while offering a glimpse into what the next generation of onchain asset management could look like.

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