There has been a changing of the guard in the rankings of the $3.4 billion tokenized Treasuries market.
Asset manager Hashnote’s USYC token has reached a market capitalization of more than $1.2 billion and has grown fivefold in size in the past three months, data from rwa.xyz shows. It toppled the $450 million BUIDL issued by asset management giant BlackRock and tokenization firm Securitize, which had been the largest product by size since April.
USYC is the symbolic representation of the Hashnote International Short Duration Yield Fund, which invests in reverse repurchase agreements on U.S. government-backed securities and Treasury bills in custody at the Bank of New York Mellon, according to the company’s website.
Hashnote’s rapid growth underlines the importance of connecting tokenized products with decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and presenting their tokens as building blocks for other products – or composability, in crypto jargon – to scale and gain broader adoption. reaches. It also shows crypto investors’ interest in return-generating stablecoins, which are increasingly backed by tokenized products.
For example, USYC has benefited immensely from the meteoric rise of the nascent decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Usual and its asset-backed, yield-generating stablecoin, USD0.
Usual aims to gain market share from centralized stablecoins such as Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC by redistributing a portion of the revenue from the stablecoin’s supporting assets to holders. USD0 is currently mainly backed by USYC, but the protocol aims to add more risk-weighted assets to reserves in the future. It recently announced the addition of Ethena’s USDtb stablecoin, which is built on top of BUIDL.
“The bull market caused a massive influx into stablecoins, but the core problem with the largest stablecoins remains: they lack rewards for end users and don’t provide access to the yield they generate,” said David Shuttleworth, partner at Anagram. “Additionally, users do not gain access to the protocol’s equity by holding USDT or USDC.”
“The appeal of Usual is that it redistributes the revenue to the users along with ownership in the protocol,” he added.
The protocol, and with it the USD0 stablecoin, has raked in $1.3 billion in recent months as crypto investors looked for on-chain return opportunities. Another major growth catalyst was the protocol’s governance token (USUAL) airdrop and stock exchange listing on Wednesday. USUAL began trading on Binance on Wednesday and easily outperformed the shaky broader crypto market, gaining about 50% since then, according to CoinGecko data.
BlackRock’s BUIDL also saw rapid growth earlier this year, powered by DeFi platform Ondo Finance, making the token the main reserve of its own yield-earning product, the Ondo Short-Term US Government Treasuries (OUSG) token.
