Soil

About Soil (SOIL)

What Is Soil (SOIL)?

Soil is a real-world asset credit protocol. It connects stablecoin holders on-chain with borrowers and credit strategies off-chain, so the yield a depositor earns comes from institutional lending, treasury instruments, and corporate debt rather than from token emissions or leveraged crypto trading.

SOIL is the protocol's token. It captures a share of protocol revenue through staking, boosts returns for depositors who lock it, and is subject to a buyback-and-burn program that has measurably reduced its supply.

One point needs settling first, because the ticker collides. This page describes the Soil protocol at soil.co, whose token is the ERC-20 contract on Polygon at 0x43c73b90e0c2a355784dcf0da12f477729b31e77. A contract read on September 11, 2026 confirms that address returns the name "Soil" and the symbol "SOIL" with 18 decimals. A separate and entirely unrelated token also uses the SOIL ticker, issued by a Swiss food company around a soil-degradation awareness campaign and traded on a different network. The two share nothing but a word.

Official sources:

• Soil
• Soil Protocol App
• Soil on XRPL
• SOIL token on PolygonScan
• Soil on X

Who Founded Soil? (History)

Soil was built by a team drawn from Central and Eastern European finance rather than from crypto-native backgrounds, which is unusually traditional for a DeFi protocol. Jakub Bojan is chief executive, with a background in mergers and acquisitions at Ernst and Young and PwC. Nick Motz is chief investment officer and previously founded Mount TFI, a licensed Polish asset manager focused on private debt. Mateusz Mach is chief technology officer and founded the blockchain development firm Nextrope. Mike Maciuk is chief marketing officer and co-founded the fintech lender Flexee.

The protocol launched as a debt marketplace: established companies could obtain financing on-chain, and stablecoin holders could lend into pools with defined terms. Soil now describes itself as a vault curator operating within the ORQO ecosystem, with ORQO Asset Management responsible for asset selection, risk segmentation, and allocation. In February 2026 it launched a compliant RWA-backed yield product on the XRP Ledger aimed at holders of RLUSD, Ripple's stablecoin.

How Soil Works

The mechanics are simpler than most DeFi and closer to a fund structure than to an algorithmic money market.

1. Depositors choose a vault Vaults are segmented by liquidity and risk. A liquid tier holds treasury strategies and conservative institutional lending and is designed for access and capital preservation. A credit tier targets a higher return through managed credit strategies spanning real estate, corporate lending, and trade finance, and carries lockups or notice periods in exchange.

2. Capital is deployed off-chain Deposited stablecoins are allocated by the asset manager into real-world credit. Underwriting and borrower diligence happen through regulated partners rather than through an on-chain credit score.

3. Yield returns in the deposited asset Returns are paid in the same asset a user deposited. There is no reward token being printed to manufacture a headline rate.

4. SOIL holders share in the outcome Rather than minting new tokens as staking rewards, the protocol distributes a portion of actual earnings to SOIL stakers, and buys back and burns SOIL from revenue.

The consequence is that Soil is not trustless in the way a lending market like Aave is trustless. The credit risk lives off-chain, and so does the entity relationship that enforces repayment.

Key Ecosystem Components

• The XRP Ledger deployment supporting RLUSD and native XRP
• EVM deployments across networks including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, Base, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Mantle, and Fraxtal
• ORQO Asset Management, the licensed entity handling allocation and underwriting
• The SOIL token contract on Polygon, together with its staking and boost mechanisms

SOIL Token Utility

SOIL is used for:

• Staking, which distributes a share of protocol revenue to stakers
• Boosting, where locking SOIL raises the effective yield a depositor earns in a vault
• Capturing value through buyback-and-burn funded by protocol earnings

The supply picture is worth checking against the contract rather than taking on trust, and here the contract supports the claim. Reading the deployed bytecode on Polygon on September 11, 2026 shows:

• The nominal token allocation is 100,000,000 SOIL, spread across community, investor, and treasury buckets.
• The contract's reported total supply is now below that figure by roughly one million tokens. Burns here reduce the ERC-20 total supply rather than parking tokens at an inert address, so the reduction is real.
• The contract exposes burn and burnFrom and exposes no mint function at all. Once the initial supply was created it cannot be increased.
• The contract is Ownable, with owner, transferOwnership, and renounceOwnership present. Ownership had not been renounced at the time of the read.

That is a genuinely deflationary structure with a hard ceiling, which is rarer than the marketing language around it would suggest. The remaining centralization point is the owner key, not the supply.

What Makes Soil Unique?

• Yield is sourced from off-chain credit and treasury strategies, so it is not structurally dependent on crypto market activity
• Staking rewards come from revenue rather than inflation, which removes the usual dilution treadmill
• Burns are executed against the token's total supply and are verifiable on-chain
• The XRPL deployment targets a stablecoin ecosystem most RWA protocols have ignored

How Soil Differs from Similar Protocols

Ondo Finance tokenizes treasury and money-market exposure and distributes it as a token users hold directly. Soil operates as a vault curator, keeping the strategy mix behind the vault rather than issuing a one-to-one wrapper for a single instrument.

Centrifuge pushes asset origination itself on-chain, with pools tied to specific originators and tranched exposure. Soil delegates origination and underwriting to a licensed asset manager and presents the user with a small number of risk tiers instead.

Maple Finance and Goldfinch both built institutional credit markets on-chain and both learned hard lessons from borrower defaults during the 2022 credit cycle, which is exactly the risk category Soil operates in. The distinction Soil draws is the regulated manager in the middle, and readers should weigh whether that is a meaningful protection or a different kind of dependency.

Use Cases of Soil

• Earning yield on stablecoins from institutional credit rather than from crypto leverage
• Earning yield on RLUSD or XRP while keeping assets denominated on the XRP Ledger
• Locking SOIL to boost the return on a deposit
• Staking SOIL for a share of protocol revenue

How Soil Is Secured

On-chain, security rests on the vault and token contracts and on whatever access controls govern them. The SOIL token itself is a straightforward burnable ERC-20 with no mint path, which limits the damage an owner key can do to the supply.

Off-chain is where the real exposure sits, and no amount of contract auditing addresses it. Repayment depends on borrowers honoring obligations, on the asset manager's underwriting quality, and on the enforceability of the legal structures wrapping each loan. Real-world asset protocols do not fail through reentrancy; they fail through defaults, and the recovery process is a legal one measured in months.

Risks and Considerations

• Credit risk is the primary risk, and a default is settled in court, not by a liquidation engine
• Off-chain performance cannot be verified from the blockchain; depositors rely on reporting
• Notice periods and lockups on the higher-yield tier mean capital is not immediately redeemable
• The SOIL token contract retains an owner key, and ownership has not been renounced
• The protocol has repositioned from a lending marketplace to a curated vault model, so strategy can change again
• RWA yield products face evolving securities and lending regulation across jurisdictions
• Ticker collision with an unrelated token is a live source of user error

Why Soil Matters

Most on-chain yield is circular: it comes from other crypto users borrowing, or from a token being printed. Soil is part of a smaller category trying to import genuine external cash flows on-chain, with a token structure that is unusually honest about it, since rewards come from revenue and burns actually reduce supply. The category's track record is mixed and the underwriting question stays open, but the design is a real attempt at the problem rather than a restatement of it.

Where Can You Buy Soil (SOIL)?

SOIL trades on a limited set of centralized exchanges and on decentralized venues on Polygon. Liquidity is thinner than for large-cap assets, so check the venue and the contract address before trading.

Major Centralized Exchanges (CEX)

SOIL has been available on venues including:

• Gate
• MEXC
• Bitget

Storage Options After Purchase

SOIL can be held:

• On an exchange, which is custodial
• In any EVM-compatible self-custody wallet configured for Polygon
• On a hardware wallet through compatible wallet software

Add the token by its Polygon contract address rather than by searching the ticker, and send only over Polygon. Because an unrelated token shares the SOIL symbol on another network, verifying the contract address is not optional here.

Related Coins

• Ondo Finance
• Centrifuge
• Maple Finance
• Goldfinch Protocol
• Polygon Ecosystem Token