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About Birch Hill
Birch Hill is an institutional-grade credit infrastructure provider operating onchain. Its core business involves acting as a curator on lending protocols such as Morpho, where it creates and manages vaults for secured lending against Real World Assets (RWAs). The company's current flagship product is the RWA USDC vault, which facilitates borrowing against tokenized real-world collateral.
The company's core competency lies in its risk management framework, which includes continuous monitoring of collateral quality, liquidity conditions, and pricing integrity. It also provides auditable reporting trails for regulatory and client compliance purposes. This positions Birch Hill as a bridge between traditional finance credit standards and decentralized finance efficiency.
The primary market pain point Birch Hill addresses is the lack of institutional-grade risk infrastructure in decentralized lending. While onchain credit markets offer transparency and efficiency, they often lack the rigorous underwriting, monitoring, and reporting standards required by institutional capital. Birch Hill fills this gap by applying traditional credit discipline to onchain markets.
Regarding recent developments, the company announced a $2.5 million pre-seed round in February 2026. Since then, it has onboarded as a curator on Morpho and launched its first vault. As of early September 2026, the RWA USDC vault shows approximately $101,900 in total value locked with a supply APY of 5.20%. These figures indicate the project is in its early operational stage, with the vault recently launched and still accumulating deposits.
Birch Hill was founded as an institutional-grade digital asset yield provider, completing a $2.5 million pre-seed round co-led by ParaFi Capital and Castle Ventures. The company focuses on bridging traditional finance and on-chain credit markets, building structured products, risk management frameworks, and compliance infrastructure for institutional allocators. Its core work includes underwriting real-world asset (RWA) collateral, developing vault-based credit strategies on platforms like Morpho, and establishing governance standards for tokenized credit. These milestones mark its evolution from a niche DeFi participant into a regulated-oriented infrastructure layer, addressing the gap between legacy capital markets and decentralized lending protocols.
Over the past six months (2026-03-04 to 2026-09-04), Birch Hill has made significant strides in institutional onchain credit. In Q2 2026, Birch Hill partnered with Groma to launch the first institutional market for tokenized REIT equity, enabling holders of GromaCoin (GRO) to borrow USDC against their real estate-backed collateral. The market is built on Morpho's lending protocol, with Yearn curating the USDC vault and Birch Hill providing risk management, compliance, and institutional access. This marks the first time tokenized REIT equity serves as collateral in a programmatic, whitelisted lending market.
Additionally, Birch Hill engaged with the SEC in August 2026 to discuss regulatory frameworks, signaling its commitment to operating within existing rules while planning to register as an investment adviser for actively managed vaults. The company also launched its first onchain product—the Birch Hill RWA USDC Vault on Base—and completed a $2.5M pre-seed round.
Looking ahead, Birch Hill's roadmap focuses on expanding tokenized equity lending markets for structured real estate, adding more real-world collateral types, and building a compliant institutional credit infrastructure. The company aims to bridge TradFi capital with onchain efficiency, prioritizing capital preservation and regulatory alignment.
Connor Flanagan (Co-founder & COO): Previously at BlackRock's Aladdin platform, led integrations and risk analytics; then Senior Ecosystem Lead at Flipside; co-founded Unit Zero Labs (acquired by Birch Hill), focusing on tokenomics and risk frameworks. Now leads institutional DeFi lending protocol Benchmark.
Bhavin V. (Co-founder & CEO): Previously at BlackRock and Cerberus Capital Management, then founded Halo Capital; co-founded Unit Zero Labs. Now drives institutional-grade digital asset yield infrastructure.
Jack Forlines (CTO): Previously at BlackRock, then data specialist at Flipside; co-founded Unit Zero Labs. Now CTO, overseeing technical architecture and data engineering (e.g., Stabledash).