NAVI Protocol said it has officially launched NAVI Prime, a curated credit marketplace that the team calls its largest product overhaul in the three years since the protocol went live. The release covers both a rebuilt front-end architecture and a shift in risk controls from a unified shared pool model to isolated curated vaults.
According to the project, NAVI Prime is the first DeFi protocol in the Move ecosystem to put an isolated-risk pool model into practice. The product uses Isolated Risk Vaults, allowing professional curators to set up separate liquidity pools around specific assets or strategies. Users can choose vaults managed by different curators based on their own risk tolerance, a structure designed to avoid the cross-contagion risk found in traditional pooled lending markets.
NAVI’s position in Sui lending
NAVI Protocol launched on the Sui mainnet in 2023 and was among the earliest native DeFi protocols in that ecosystem. Public data cited by the project shows its historical peak total value locked exceeded $1 billion, while cumulative users passed 1.1 million. NAVI said that during the early phase of the Sui ecosystem, it accounted for nearly 40% of market share and has remained a core player in Sui lending.
How NAVI Prime is structured
Unlike earlier unified lending pools, NAVI Prime separates risk into individual vaults. That lets markets be configured around specific assets and strategies, with returns tailored at the vault level. The project said Prime took more than four months to develop and has completed more than three independent security audits. Mysten Labs, the Sui development team, also took part in ecosystem coordination during the product’s release cycle.
In its market comparison, the team pointed to Morpho in the Ethereum ecosystem as a proven example of the curated model. The source material says Morpho used a similar path to build TVL in the multi-billion-dollar range in a relatively short period and has become an important piece of institutional lending infrastructure on Ethereum. One of the main questions around NAVI Prime is whether NAVI can use this upgrade to bring more institutional capital into the Move ecosystem.
Exclusive lending partnership for hashiBTC
NAVI Prime has also been set as the exclusive lending partner for hashiBTC, or HashiBTC. The project said Prime will provide what it describes as a safe and reliable institutional-grade venue for Bitcoin lending products within the hashiBTC ecosystem.
NAVI said the combination of Prime’s isolated architecture and HBDC is intended to reduce systemic risk when BTC is used as collateral. The goal, it said, is to offer the technical base for institutional Bitcoin lending where counterparties are auditable and risks can be isolated.
What the market is watching
The source article cited industry statistics saying DeFi total value locked briefly rose above $200 billion during the current cycle, lifting institutional requirements for on-chain risk management. The advantage of unified pool models in capital efficiency has already been tested by the market. But once larger institutional money enters, cross-liquidation risk from commingled positions becomes a key concern.
From a broader industry view, the source says Morpho now manages more than $5 billion in TVL through a curated model and has drawn interest from traditional asset management giants. Against that backdrop, NAVI’s move to bring isolated-risk pools into the Move ecosystem is being framed as a step toward institutional-grade financial infrastructure on Sui. With activity on the Sui network recently picking up, the market will be watching whether Prime can combine HBDC’s Bitcoin liquidity with strategies from professional curators and follow a TVL growth path similar to Morpho’s.
NAVI has opened applications for curators and asset issuers and said it plans to expand the list of eligible collateral assets gradually through a whitelist mechanism.
About NAVI Protocol
According to the project description in the source material, NAVI Protocol is a DeFi infrastructure protocol in the Sui ecosystem that launched in 2023. Its historical TVL peak topped $1 billion, cumulative users exceeded 1.1 million, and it once contributed nearly 40% market share during Sui’s early phase. NAVI describes Prime as the core product in its transition toward institutional-grade, risk-segmented lending infrastructure.