Frax

Frax started in 2019 as Decentral Bank, founded by Sam Kazemian, Travis Moore and Jason Huan, and launched its FRAX stablecoin in December 2020. The original design was fractional-algorithmic: part of each FRAX was backed by USDC, the rest by the value of the FXS token. After Terra's UST collapse, governance voted in 2023 to back FRAX fully with collateral, and in early 2025 the stablecoin was relaunched as frxUSD. Kazemian remains the public face and main architect.

TVL figures from DefiLlama. The whole group is a fraction of its 2022 peak, when FRAX supply was above $2.5 billion. Frax has no registered operating company that we could identify; governance runs through votes of locked FRAX holders and the core team.

Frax Ether launched in October 2022 with a design no other large staking protocol copied. You deposit ETH and get frxETH one-for-one. frxETH is meant to track ETH and earns nothing by itself. If you want staking yield you deposit frxETH into the sfrxETH vault (ERC-4626), whose exchange rate rises as validators earn. Frax runs the validators itself.

The point of the split: every holder who leaves ETH as plain frxETH gives up their share of rewards to sfrxETH holders, which is why sfrxETH's quoted yield ran above Lido's for much of 2023. The cost is that people hold the wrong token. Rewards are split 90% to sfrxETH, 8% protocol fee and 2% to an insurance fund meant to keep frxETH over-collateralised against slashing (Frax docs).

To exit, sell on a DEX or join the redemption queue: you deposit frxETH, receive a transferable NFT ticket, and claim ETH 1:1 with no fee once its timestamp passes. The original queue let you cash a ticket early for a penalty; the frxETH V2 design, where the wait follows Ethereum's validator exit queue, drops that option (Frax docs). In July 2026 governance opened a temperature check on letting holders of locked ETH positions exit early for a 4% penalty (Bitcoinist). For how Frax Ether compares with other staking tokens, see our Frax Ether card.

We found no material depeg of frxETH in 2024 or 2025. Frax's target band is 0.99–1.01 ETH per frxETH, and public pool data shows it trading within a few tenths of a percent of 1.00, with brief lows around 0.996. sfrxETH does not have a peg to ETH at all; its price should rise steadily against frxETH, so a chart of sfrxETH/ETH going above 1 is the yield, not a break.

What has changed is depth. With frxETH supply down to about 61,400 in September 2026, a large seller now moves the pool price further than in 2023, and the redemption queue is the only route to exactly 1 ETH. Frax stablecoins are a different story: the old FRAX token did break its peg in March 2023, falling to about $0.88 when USDC, its main collateral, depegged after Silicon Valley Bank failed.

frxUSD launched in early 2025 as the rebuilt Frax dollar. Each token is backed by reserves held through enshrined custodians, tokenised Treasury and money-market products that frxUSD can be minted and redeemed against. The first was BlackRock's BUIDL fund, tokenised by Securitize (PR Newswire); In September 2026 Frax announced an integration with Superstate's tokenised Treasury products. Frax does not hold client dollars at a bank itself; the banking sits with those fund managers.

Frax markets frxUSD as built for the GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law signed in July 2025, but Frax is not a licensed US issuer and we found no approval or charter for it. The practical scale is small: about $102 million of frxUSD against more than $180 billion of USDT. Recent growth has come from integrations, including a Robinhood Crypto pool and Curve PegKeeper pools in September 2026.

On 29 April 2025 Fraxtal's North Star hard fork renamed Frax Share (FXS) to Frax (FRAX) and made it the gas token of Fraxtal, replacing frxETH in that role. FXS on Fraxtal converted 1:1 automatically; FXS on Ethereum has to be bridged to Fraxtal to convert. The old stablecoin that used the FRAX ticker became frxUSD, so "FRAX" in anything written before 2025 means the dollar token, and in anything after means the governance token.

CoinGecko still lists the token under its old id, as "Frax (prev. FXS)", and it trades at a small fraction of its 2021–2022 highs. Price and supply are on the FRAX market page.

On security: Frax's own contracts have not been exploited as far as we could find. The two incidents on record are a hijack of its domain names in November 2023 and the 2023 USDC-driven depeg of the old FRAX stablecoin; the GMX theft hit FRAX held inside another protocol. Cross-chain transfers of Frax tokens run on LayerZero, which adds that bridge's own risk.