Are Stocks Still the Most Bullish Asset in the RWA Verse?

Crypto has a habit of finding one thing that works and flooding it until the yield compresses to nothing. Nobody rings a bell at the top of a narrative, but they do leave footprints.

And the footprints in RWA are everywhere right now — in BlackRock board memos, in Nasdaq regulatory filings, and in the quiet repositioning of every major asset manager who spent 2021 calling crypto a Ponzi and is now racing to tokenize their flagship fund.

Something structural has shifted, and the people who move capital for a living can feel it even when they won’t say it publicly. The rails work, and now comes everything else.

That Quiet Moment Before Boom?

We’re at the exact inflection point that always precedes an asset class explosion — the very juncture where early infrastructure has been stress-tested, institutional legitimacy has arrived, and the addressable opportunity is so absurdly large that even capturing a single-digit percentage of it would dwarf everything built so far. There are hundreds of distinct sources of real-world yield, but the gap between those two numbers is where the next decade of RWA gets built.

Capital flows toward yield with the same inevitability that water flows downhill, and on-chain infrastructure now offers yield, liquidity, and composability that traditional rails simply can’t match.

The future isn’t just exciting because of the rising TVL numbers, but the actual things that will get tokenized. Need a forecast, ser?

Chapter One: How We Got Here — And Why Treasuries Were Just the Entry Drug

The stablecoin chart tells it all: for years, the supply moved in near-perfect inverse correlation with interest rates. Rates went up, stablecoins bled out. Made sense — why sit in USDC when you could earn 5% in a money market fund?

Then January 2024 happened: rates were still above 5%, and stablecoin supply started growing anyway. The decoupling wasn’t random, as the risk-free rate had finally arrived on-chain. Ondo, BlackRock’s BUIDL, and Centrifuge — issuers gave stablecoin holders somewhere to go without leaving crypto. Stablecoin supply grew from $130B to over $280B once real-world yield existed on-chain.

The market concentrated fast, and that concentration is now creating its own gravitational pull. The top 10 assets hold 64% of total RWA value, and 18 of the largest offers yield between 3% and 5%.

That’s the current monopolistic setup: a $280B stablecoin base earning below 5%, increasingly aware that better yield exists on-chain — and a DeFi infrastructure stack that can now absorb it. The next wave will be the mechanical consequence of capital chasing yield up the risk curve.

Chapter Two: Hundreds of Yield Sources. The Rest is the Opportunity

Of everything mappable, most hasn’t moved yet. The reasons vary, but the core tension is always the same: on-chain capital moves 24/7, settles in seconds, and can be redeployed on the same block. Off-chain assets can’t act like that.

This timing mismatch is the fundamental engineering problem of the RWAs. Deployment lag means capital sitting on-chain earns nothing until it reaches the underlying, which for private credit takes weeks, for real estate, months. Redemption lag means you can’t liquidate a commercial property on a Sunday morning because a holder wants out.

The workarounds all cost yield, and buffer pools compress blended returns. Market makers like Wintermute and Keyrock absorb the wait — and (little wonder) charge accordingly. Every bridge across the timing gap redistributes the cost of illiquidity to whoever is willing to bear it.

The assets that tokenize next won’t be the easiest, but they’ll be the ones where someone makes the timing mismatch cheap enough to ignore.

Chapter Three: Every Other Asset Class Has a Ceiling. Equities Don’t.

Here we come to the uncomfortable reality that most RWA coverage dances around: not all tokenizable assets are equal opportunities. Private credit is large but illiquid and opaque; real estate is enormous but operationally brutal to tokenize at scale. Long story short, trade finance needs an aggregation infrastructure that barely exists yet.

Equities have none of these problems. And they have something none of the others can claim: being the most democratically desired asset class on Earth. There are 8 billion people on this planet. And a meaningful percentage of them know what Apple, NVIDIA, and Tesla are. They’ve watched those stocks compound through every recession, every geopolitical shock, every rate cycle.

So now some of them understand that owning a piece of ‌ the world’s most productive companies is how wealth gets built over a generation. They just couldn’t access it! Many lacked ‌ capital or some conviction. But the main hurdle is that the infrastructure was deliberately designed to keep them out! Get a US Social Security Number, a domestic bank account, and a brokerage relationship. Then, get around the business hours in a time zone that isn’t theirs.

The global equity market is around $120 trillion. The S&P 500 alone has returned an average of 10.5% annually for the last 50 years — the most consistent, documented, and broadly understood wealth compounding machine in financial history. And most of the world has been locked out of it by paperwork! That’s the market play.

Chapter Four: Stocks On-Chain Are an Infrastructure Story

The access angle is compelling enough on its own, but it understates what stocks on-chain actually unlock. Hint: when an equity becomes a composable on-chain asset, it stops being just a stock and becomes a financial primitive — something the entire DeFi stack can build on top of. That’s a categorically different value proposition than anything available in traditional markets.

Once a tokenized RWA is listed as collateral on a lending market, holders can DO a lot. They loop in: deposit the RWA, borrow stablecoins against it, buy more of the same RWA, repeat.

For equities, this mechanic doesn’t need dividend yield to make sense — since the underlying appreciation of NVDA or SPY is itself the yield. On-chain leverage against a tokenized S&P 500 position, rebalancing continuously, composable with lending protocols and yield vaults, accessible to anyone with a wallet — that product doesn’t exist in TradFi: it simply can’t. The settlement rails are too slow, the market hours are too limited, and ‌access is too restricted.

This is why stocks on-chain are more than that; they are a surface-area story. Every tokenized equity that lands on-chain with proper composability becomes the foundation for dozens of products that couldn’t exist before. The leverage loops, the tranched structures, the yield decomposition, the cross-collateralisation — none of it works without the underlying asset being on-chain first. And no underlying asset has more natural demand than the stocks people already want.

Chapter Five: the Architecture That Makes It Real

RWA stocks done right are what this infrastructure looks like when it’s actually built correctly. 1:1 backed, audited at a 100% score with no critical issues, on track to be the first MiCAR-compliant built natively for DeFi.

The distribution problem that haunts every other RWA category — 33 of 35 non-stablecoin RWAs above $50M have fewer than 2,000 holders — is structurally inverted for tokenized equities. The demand base is the billions of people already on-chain, already holding stablecoins, already one product away from holding NVDA, SPY, or MSFT.

Non-US residents represent the largest addressable market for tokenized equities, and they’re not waiting for a traditional brokerage to expand their compliance program. They don’t need onboarding, but strive to try out the product.

That’s what makes stocks the most bullish item in RWA, because the demand already exists, pre-formed, on-chain, waiting. Every other tokenizable asset class has to find its holders. Tokenized equities already have theirs.

The One Out of 33

Every asset that comes on-chain makes the next one easier to bring, and the infrastructure to support it more valuable.

Treasuries proved the rails, and private credit proved you could handle complexity. Now comes the asset class that was always the most obvious candidate — the one billions of people already want, and have been systematically prevented from accessing for decades.

Stocks were always meant to go on-chain. Of the 33 ways this plays out, most of them have equities at the center. When you strip away the noise, the cycle rotation, and the narrative churn, stocks were always the most important financial asset in human history.

Putting them on-chain doesn’t alter what they are, but it changes who gets to own them. That’s the whole game.

The 33 Next Directions: What Gets Tokenized Next was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stellar is quietly becoming one of the more interesting infrastructures for tokenized assets and global payments. But there is a major disconnect between network adoption and XLM economics.

Disclaimer: This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or professional advice. We do not recommend any buying, selling, or holding of digital assets.

All views are the author’s own. Digital assets involve high risk and volatility, and readers should conduct their own research before making any decisions.

This report is not sponsored by any mentioned companies.

Business Model Analysis

Stellar has a very clear positioning as a financial blockchain infrastructure: fast and cheap transactions, native asset issuance, DEX and historical focus on payments create a good technological base for RWA. What is particularly interesting is that Stellar is not simply trying to “add RWA” to an existing network — asset tokenization fits well with Stellar’s ​​original concept as an infrastructure for transferring financial value.

Stellar’s ​​strength is the institutional use case. For tokenized bonds, funds, stablecoins and other financial assets, low transaction costs and fast settlement may be more important than the maximum number of DeFi applications.

However, the main problem with the investment case is that technological advantage does not yet equal economic advantage. Stellar competes not only with other blockchains, but also with specialized RWA platforms and financial infrastructures, which may have stronger regulatory relationships, distribution and institutional sales.

Therefore, the key question for CQS is whether Stellar can turn good infrastructure into a large-scale business with real economic activity. This is something that has not yet been proven as strongly as in the most successful blockchain ecosystems.

Business Score 8.2/10

Financial Metrics

Stellar’s ​​financials show a very interesting but contradictory picture. On the one hand, TVL grew from $76 million in 2025 to $208 million, and the number of transactions increased from 320.9 million to 444.5 million. This confirms that the network’s usage is expanding.

On the other hand, Revenue and Fees show the opposite picture: the current $43.6 thousand is significantly lower than the $287.3 thousand in 2025. That is, the growth in usage is not yet converted into revenue growth. This is one of Stellar’s ​​main weaknesses in our model.

Of particular importance is the relationship between network scale and Revenue. With a TVL of over $200 million and a Market Cap of over $5 billion, the protocol generates only tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. This means that the current valuation is largely based on the future potential of the network, and not on its current ability to generate economic cash flow.

Treasury at $3.1 billion is a very strong asset, but it needs to be treated separately from operating Revenue. A large treasury creates financial stability and a resource for ecosystem development, but in itself does not prove Product-Market Fit.

The main conclusion: Stellar has real use, but does not yet have adequate monetization. For CQS, this is a fundamental difference between “the network is used” and “the network creates economic value.”

Financial Score 6.7/10

Tokenomics

The tokenomics of XLM are one of the most problematic blocks of the Stellar investment case. Unlike BNB, where the entire maximum supply is already circulating, Stellar has a significant gap between circulating supply and max supply: 34.3 billion out of 50 billion tokens. So, approximately 31% of the maximum supply is not yet in circulation.

This creates a potential supply overhang. Even if Stellar’s ​​business grows, the additional supply may partially absorb the created economic value and restrain the token’s appreciation.

The second fundamental drawback is the lack of a buyback or dividend/revenue-sharing mechanism. The holder of XLM does not have a direct right to a part of the economic result of the network. Therefore, value capture occurs mainly through the demand for the use of the token itself, and not through participation in cash flow.

Thus, Stellar has a useful token, but not ideal investment tokenomics. For us, this is an important distinction: a good blockchain ≠ automatically a good token.

Token Score 5.8/10

Valuation

After the decrease in Market Cap from approximately $11.5 billion in 2025 to $5.5–5.7 billion today, Stellar’s ​​valuation has become much less aggressive. This is positive from the Grantham perspective: we don’t want to buy a strong narrative at any price.

However, XLM still has a difficult intrinsic value problem. With the current Revenue of $43.6 thousand, it is impossible to justify a multi-billion capitalization using traditional business valuation methods. So, the investor is actually paying for Stellar’s ​​future scaling, and not for the current cash-generating business.

TVL, transactions and RWA adoption give reason for optimism, but so far it is not enough to call XLM clearly undervalued. For this, it is necessary to see a transition from “growth in usage” to “growth in economic monetization”.

Therefore, I would not call the current valuation cheap, but potentially interesting, provided that the RWA thesis is realized. This is a fundamental difference.

Valuation Score 7.0/10

Final Review

Stellar is an interesting example of a situation where the quality of the infrastructure is ahead of the quality of the investment economics of the token. The network has a strong technology foundation, a significant treasury, TVL and transaction growth, and a logical positioning in payments and RWA.

But the numbers show an important problem: the growth in usage is not yet translating into growth in Revenue. This means that Stellar has not yet proven its ability to capture the economic value that its infrastructure creates.

This is where the main difference between Stellar and BNB Chain arises. BNB has a large-scale economic activity and a much stronger value capture mechanism for the token. Stellar still has potential, but much of that value remains at the network level, not the XLM token.

From Grantham’s perspective, this means: Stellar deserves attention, but investors should not pay today for an economic outcome that has yet to appear.

What is positive (✅):

• Strong positioning in payments + RWA.
• TVL growth: $76m → $208m.
• Transaction growth: 320.9m → 444.5m.
• Very large Treasury — $3.1 billion.
• Low cost and speed of settlement.
• Native asset issuance and DEX.
• Logical fit for tokenized financial assets.
• Significant Market Cap correction relative to 2025.

Main concerns (🔴):

• Revenue only $43.6k with a Market Cap of over $5.5 billion.
• Lack of buyback/dividend/value-sharing.
• 15.7 billion XLM not yet circulating.
• Discrepancy between the scale of network activity and monetization.
• Strong competition from Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain and specialized RWA platforms.
• Most of the valuation is based on future RWA adoption.

Answers to key questions:

Would I own the business outright?

Yes, but not at any cost.

Stellar has an interesting infrastructure with real use cases in payments and RWA, a strong balance sheet and a good technology base. As a business platform it deserves attention.

But today I would not call it as proven an economic machine as BNB Chain. The main reason is weak monetization relative to the scale of the network.

Would I buy the token under current economics?

Rather not — or only as a speculative/value opportunity with high risk.

XLM has real utility, but the current token economics do not provide a strong enough mechanism for accumulating value.

With a market cap of around $5.7 billion, the investor is essentially betting on Stellar’s ​​future scaling in RWA and payments. This could be a very profitable scenario, but it is not yet confirmed by the current financial monetization.

What would need to change for an A+ rating?

• Revenue should start to grow along with TVL and transaction activity.
• Stellar should demonstrate large-scale institutional RWA adoption.
• XLM should gain a stronger value capture mechanism from network growth.
• Dilution risk from the remaining 15.7B XLM should decrease.
• Need to see that RWA/payments create sustainable economic demand, not just transaction activity.
• Stellar should establish a competitive advantage over Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and specialized RWA platforms.

THE RESEARCHER

Stellar RWA: The Blockchain With a $3.1B Treasury — But Where Is the Value Capture? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five Solana wrappers on one company, one issuer-designated conversion route, and nine weeks of swap-level flow through it. Public data only, no position taken.

I first looked at SpaceX before the listing, when access arrived before the stock. A listing-day follow-up mapped how similar tickers led to different claims and records. This time I follow the on-chain wrappers after the event.

Something large appears in a market. The immediate story is that money moved toward it.

That reflex is common in “record volume” headlines. We can see that one market got quieter and another got busier. Whether the second got busier because of the first is the migration claim, and it is difficult to verify.

Two episodes made me distrust it.

USDC, March 2023. Circle disclosed $3.3bn of reserves stuck at Silicon Valley Bank; USDC traded to roughly $0.88. The next day Curve printed the highest daily volume in its history, about $6.03bn. Read as activity, a record day. Read as liquidity, the opposite: USDT drained toward a single-digit share of the 3pool while USDC and DAI ballooned past 46%. The busiest pool was the exit — and it reversed.

Terra, May 2022. Roughly $50bn of UST and LUNA went to zero in a week. Badev and Watsky, covering 44 blockchains for the Federal Reserve, found the reverse of a walk to safety: chains sharing more bridges with Terra were less likely to gain relative TVL share over the next six weeks, the odds of losing share rising roughly 40% per shared bridge. The bridges worked as transmission channels, not reallocation infrastructure.

What the Evidence Must Show

Reallocation needs a source, a destination, and a path between them. Two markets moving in opposite directions establish only the first two. Without linked transactions, the migration claim remains an inference.

A visible path shows only that reallocation is possible — Terra shows that the same path can carry a shock instead. Volume is not depth either: volume counts events, while depth determines what can be executed. Curve had record volume with a deteriorating pool on the same day. Holder counts can mislead for the same reason; a market can add holders while its book thins.

A Visible Path Through Five Wrappers

On 12 June 2026 SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq — priced at $135, opened at $150, and closed at $160.95. For four months beforehand, claims on the same exposure were already trading on Solana. The plumbing is public: every wrapper is a mint address with issuer-controlled metadata, every swap a transaction. If migration is measurable rather than inferred, it should be measurable here.

It is messier than the ticker suggests. Nine Solana mints carry a SpaceX-like symbol and four are squats — including three named “SpaceX” reporting pool reserves of $454M to $1.25bn against five-figure daily volume. Identifying the substitute set already requires information the ticker does not carry. I froze the canonical-mint list before comparing the post-IPO outcomes; inclusion required issuer-attributable on-chain metadata or issuer documentation, not a volume cutoff.

The five canonical wrappers do not form one market:

• SPACEX (PreStocks) is pre-IPO economic exposure through an SPV. The holder can swap into SPCXx or any other token, but must act before 12 March 2027. Unconverted tokens expire worthless.
• tSpaceX (Tessera) is a loan participation right, not a security. Redemption waits for the SPV to divest the underlying exposure; the holder cannot trigger it.
• SPCX (Backpack Securities) represents a real share held 1:1 in regulated custody. The holder can reach the actual share through ACATS/DTCC.
• SPCXx (Backed) and SPCXon (Ondo) both use issuer primary markets, but access differs sharply. Backed requires KYC and a $5,000 minimum. Ondo starts at $1 and excludes US holders.

On a screen, these are five ways to own SpaceX. In the plumbing, one can expire, one waits on the issuer, one reaches the real share, and two depend on primary-market access.

These differences existed before the IPO. The event made their consequences easier to observe.

The Designated Path Carried 3.5% of Supply

PreStocks names the conversion target itself — SPCXx, by mint address—with a deadline of 12 March 2027, after which unconverted tokens expire worthless. Conversion happens “through normal trading,” so the route is a public swap venue, and a pool for exactly that pair appeared at 16:23 UTC on listing day.

Here the path is visible, and net flow through it was small.

Gross flow into SPCXx over nine weeks: 1,586 tokens. Gross flow back: 1,283. Net: 303 tokens, or 3.5% of supply.

Four-fifths of the traffic on the conversion route was offset by flow in the other direction. The cumulative line goes negative on four days, peaks at 5.1% of supply on 12 July, then drifts back to 3.5%. A cumulative total that falls is not a one-way conversion queue; the route also carried two-way trading.

Possible explanation, not verified here: traders may have been trading around the lockup discount. PreStocks discloses that underlying shares unlock in tranches over six months and that the token trades at a market-priced discount until they do. The swaps do not identify trader intent.

Gross volume counts both directions, so I do not treat it as one-way reallocation.

Supply says something separate, and the two numbers should not be netted against each other. SPACEX cumulative net mint-minus-burn was 5,623.03 tokens on 11 June and 5,622.76 on 14 August—−0.27 tokens across the whole post-IPO period. Whatever trading occurred, it was not accompanied by a material contraction in observed net issuance.

That is not the same as “97% unconverted.” Holders were free to swap into anything else, and those exits appear in neither figure. The evidence supports two separate facts: small net flow along the designated path, and almost no change in observed net issuance.

The designated route never carried most of the flow either: SPCXx was 11.3% of all SPACEX selling in the event week, 43.2% during settling, 15.8% recently. The issuer’s “or any other token” is doing real work.

Nor was it where post-IPO trading concentrated. In the event week, Backpack’s SPCX—the only one redeemable into an actual share—traded $23.47M against SPCXx’s $3.28M. That says where activity gathered, not where SPACEX holders went. The two measurements should remain separate.

The IPO Did Not Empty the Neighbourhood

A 3.5% net flow is small but not zero. Did the IPO drain the market around it? SPACEX activity moved in that direction: 1.32× baseline during the anticipation window, 0.47× during IPO week, 0.02× through late June and July, and 0.01× by August.

The control group breaks that explanation. Anthropic’s and xAI’s pre-IPO tokens — companies that did not go public — fell to 0.02× over the same windows, closely enough that Panel B shows two lines on top of each other. Five Backed xStocks held as controls finished at 1.10× baseline; the two xStock peers at 1.69×.

Note: SPYx reached 12.6× baseline in the event week, against a control median of 1.6×. A broad-index reaction to the IPO is plausible but not verified. The group result uses the median, so this observation does not determine it.

In this sample, the split followed issuer families more closely than exposure to SpaceX. One issuer’s product line went quiet; tokenized equities on the same chain, venues, and token standard did not. The data do not identify why PreStocks went quiet.

Possible explanation, not verified here: one possibility is an issuer-level liquidity or distribution shock — for example, a market maker reducing inventory across several PreStocks products. I do not have historical LP attribution or issuer-side traffic data to test that mechanism.

The timing also disagrees with an immediate IPO effect. SPACEX was still above half its baseline during listing week; the larger decline came later. The untied wrapper followed another path: tSpaceX held 0.80× through the settling window, a 40× gap against SPACEX, and only fell to 0.22× five weeks later.

A mechanism in which the SpaceX listing emptied its own substitutes cannot explain why Anthropic’s pre-IPO token died at the same rate on the same schedule.

What the Wrapper Terms Allowed

The cleanest fact in the exercise is the flat blue line. tSpaceX was minted once, 1,190.0000 tokens on 9 February, and stood at 1,189.9971 on 14 August—a decline of 0.003 tokens, or 0.0002%, spread across about two dozen dust-sized burns. No redemption of any economic size occurred, straight through the SpaceX IPO.

That is consistent with the architecture. Tessera’s on-chain metadata describes a loan participation right held through a Cayman segregated portfolio, with redemption triggered by “divestment of the underlying exposure.” The holder cannot initiate it. No divestment occurred, so no redemption occurred — the routes that were available and the routes that were used are the same set.

The terms tell us which exits holders could initiate, but they cannot by themselves explain why SPACEX and tSpaceX later traded differently; issuer and liquidity-provider effects remain mixed together.

The difference is not only legal. I recorded Jupiter quotes for four of the five wrappers every half hour for a week — 311 captures — at $1,000, $10,000 and $50,000, in both directions. SPCXon is absent because its mint could not be confirmed against issuer-controlled metadata, so it never entered the frozen universe. A quoted $10,000 buy cost 5–21 bps for SPCX, SPCXx and tSpaceX, and 788 bps for SPACEX. At $50,000 the ordering spread to SPCX 14 bps → SPCXx 75 bps → tSpaceX 115 bps → SPACEX 4,664 bps: a 300-fold range across four claims on one company.

The more useful number turned out to be how often the trade was possible at all, and on which side.

Jupiter returned a routable $50,000 buy quote for SPACEX in every one of the 311 captures. It returned a routable $50,000 sell quote in 13% of them, and returned none for a $10,000 sell in 19% of them. A quote to buy into the expiring wrapper was always available; a quote to get out at size usually was not.

That asymmetry is the part a single-direction measurement hides, and it matters here more than the headline basis points, because the trade this wrapper’s holders face before March 2027 is the sell. The three wrappers with a working exit route quote both directions at comparable cost. The one with a deadline does not.

The direction runs the other way for some neighbours — OPENAI and ANDURL, tracked alongside, returned no routable $50,000 buy quote in any capture, while a routable $50,000 sell quote existed in every one. Pool inventory is the obvious candidate; this panel does not identify the cause.

(These quotes are the 7–14 August book; historical quotes cannot be reconstructed.)

Where the Evidence Stops

The route was visible, sanctioned by the issuer, and open on a public venue for nine weeks. Net flow through it remained small, and observed net issuance barely changed. Meanwhile, wrappers with no IPO also lost activity. These observations do not support a simple migration story; they do not identify the mechanism behind the wider decline.

The public trail stops in three places.

• Depth during the event. Jupiter quotes are live-only, so historical executable depth cannot be reconstructed after the fact. The charts measure activity, participation, or supply. The basis-point comparison is the 7–14 August book, not the June book; that week was recorded prospectively for exactly this reason, and the recording continues for the next event.
• Activity outside Solana DEXs. SPCXx also trades on Kraken and Bybit; Backpack’s token trades on its own exchange. The direction of the resulting coverage bias is unknown.
• Why PreStocks went quiet. The control group isolates the mismatch. It does not explain it.

The window is also incomplete. tSpaceX was still falling in the last interval, and net flow on the designated route was still drifting down in August.

Closing

These wrappers were easier to put on one screen than to treat as one market. They differed in who could redeem, what redemption delivered, when it could happen, what a fixed-size trade cost — and whether it could be routed at all. The issuer-designated pair made one exit visible, but most of its gross flow was offset in the other direction.

A route tells us what holders can do, not what they did. If one market loses activity while another gains it, I would call that an activity shift until transactions connect the source to the destination.

Appendix: Sources

• Market data: Dune dex_solana.trades and tokens_solana.transfers; live Jupiter quotes captured every ~32 minutes from 7–14 August 2026 (311 captures). The data-processing Gist contains the frozen universe configuration, Dune SQL, the depth collector, the transformation scripts, and the processed CSVs behind every figure. Plotting code is not included.
• Wrapper terms: PreStocks, Tessera tSpaceX metadata, and Backpack on SPCX.
• SpaceX IPO: CoinDesk and CNBC.
• Comparison cases: Federal Reserve, Interconnected DeFi: Ripple Effects from the Terra Collapse; CoinDesk, Curve’s $500M stablecoin pool hammered as traders flee USDC.

This post was originally published on my personal blog: https://egpivo.github.io/2026/08/30/markets-are-full-of-roads.html.

Markets Are Full of Roads. That Doesn’t Mean Capital Takes Them. was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two tokens. One structure. And a third model most comparisons never put in the table.

Search “usdt vs usdc” and you will get roughly the same answer eleven times in a row.

USDT for liquidity. USDC for regulation. Hold both. Done.

That answer is not wrong. It is just half of one.

The half everyone gets right is the surface layer: market share, order book depth, which ticker your compliance lead nods at.

The half almost nobody writes about is structural. And in 2026, it is the half that decides what your dollars are actually doing while you hold them.

Here is the part that keeps getting skipped.

The USDT vs USDC scoreboard, in thirty seconds

The raw stablecoin comparison is not complicated:

• USDT: roughly $184B in circulating supply, about 59% of the market
• USDC: roughly $75B, about 24%
• Together: around 83% of every stablecoin dollar in existence
• Total stablecoin market cap: hovering between $303B and $308B through mid-2026, up from $27B at the end of 2020
• Settlement volume: stablecoin transactions hit a record $33T across all tokens in 2025, up 72% on the prior year

One number is worth pausing on. USDT holds about 59% of supply but drives closer to 74% of onchain trading volume. It is not just bigger. It moves harder.

Concentration, not the ranking, is the real story. Liquidity, exchange support and payout coverage all cluster around the top two, which is why almost every integration starts with one of them.

Tether vs USD Coin: the divergence nobody called in 2023

For the first time on record, the two largest dollar tokens are moving in opposite directions.

• USDC supply grew 72% year over year in 2025. USDT grew 36%.
• USDC has cleared $2.55T in transactions so far in 2026, against USDT’s $1.49T. That is the first time it has led on adjusted volume.
• USDT is still 2.4x larger by market cap, and still wins outright on order book depth.
• In Morgan Stanley’s survey work, 77% of institutional firms reported using USDC against 59% for USDT.

Then add MiCA. Several major exchanges trimmed or dropped USDT support for EEA users. That is a distribution fact, not an opinion, and it explains a good chunk of the growth gap.

The two issuers are also drifting apart in what they are building toward. Circle keeps wiring itself into regulated finance, clearing $68M across eight entities in under 30 minutes in March 2026.

Tether keeps building payment rails where the banking system is thin. Same peg, two different futures.

USDT won distribution. USDC won the paperwork. Neither of them won the thing most holders quietly want.

The half everyone gets right: which stablecoin to use, and when

The standard advice holds up. Keep it.

• Active trading, emerging market corridors, deepest pairs: USDT
• Regulated rails, EEA and US fintech stacks, enterprise settlement: USDC
• Most desks running both: hold both, and stop agonising over it

Nothing above is controversial. That is the problem. A comparison that ends there assumes the two tokens are structurally different. They are not.

Both are fiat-backed. Both hold reserves off-chain. Both publish attestations rather than live proof. Both retain a freeze function. USDT and USDC are two configurations of one model.

The half everyone misses: neither one pays you, and neither one legally can

This is where the conversation stops being about branding.

The GENIUS Act was signed into law on July 18, 2025. Section 4(a)(11) is blunt: no permitted payment stablecoin issuer may pay a holder any form of interest or yield, whether in cash, tokens or other consideration, solely for holding the token.

The Federal Register rulemaking and the Richmond Fed summary both restate it the same way.

Meanwhile, the reserves behind those tokens are extremely productive:

• Tether’s U.S. Treasury holdings exceed $122B, placing it around 17th among all holders worldwide
• Circle reported $770M in revenue for Q4 2025, with EBITDA up 412%

Read those together. The collateral behind your stablecoin earns every day. You do not. Under a payment stablecoin framework, that is the design, not a loophole.

Exchange “rewards” programmes exist as a workaround. The OCC has proposed extending the prohibition to affiliates and third parties, which turns that workaround into a live policy question rather than a settled product feature.

The reserves behind your stablecoin generate a return every single day. The only open question is who collects it.

The comparison column nobody adds: the freeze function

Every centralised stablecoin contract ships with a blacklist function. It is used, and the two issuers use it very differently.

• Tether has blacklisted 9,597 addresses and frozen roughly $4.2B in USDT
• Circle has blacklisted about 372 addresses and frozen roughly $109M in USDC
• The largest single action on record: about $344M frozen in April 2026, coordinated with OFAC before the sanctions designation was published
• In 2025, only 3.6% of blacklisted USDT addresses were later unfrozen

One January morning in 2026, Tether froze around $182M across five Tron wallets. That single day exceeded every dollar of USDC Circle has ever frozen.

Speed cuts the other way too: when a North Korea-linked group drained a Solana protocol in April 2026, Circle drew criticism for taking more than six hours to freeze roughly $232M in stolen USDC.

Circle acts mostly on court orders. Tether acts on law enforcement requests, often faster. Neither philosophy is wrong.

Both are worth knowing before you pick a settlement token, and the full onchain audit of every freeze is public reading.

USDT vs USDC vs USDS: the third structural model

USDS is not a third fiat-backed token with a different logo. It is a different answer to the same question.

• Backing is onchain and overcollateralised. You verify Protocol Collateral yourself, at any hour, without waiting for a monthly report
• Risk parameters are set in public through Sky Governance, by SKY token holders, on the record
• Yield does not stop upstream. Supply USDS to sUSDS and the position accrues through the Sky Savings Rate
• You do not have to choose sides. Convert USDC or USDT into USDS at a strict 1:1 ratio through the Peg Stability Module, with zero fees and no slippage
• The yield has a visible source. It comes from the Sky Agent Network: independent capital allocators that draw USDS liquidity under governance-set limits and pay for that access

That last point is the whole argument. In the fiat-backed model, the return on the reserves is the issuer’s business model.

In this one, the return routes back through Sky Protocol to holders of the yield-generating token.

The trade-offs are real and worth stating plainly. Overcollateralised means capital efficiency is lower by design.

Onchain means smart contract risk is a genuine line item, which is why the contracts are audited on a rolling basis by firms including ChainSecurity, Cantina and ABDK.

And the Sky Savings Rate is variable, calibrated by governance rather than fixed by anyone’s promise.

What the third model looks like at scale

Structure is easy to claim. Here is the audited version, from the Q2 2026 quarterly report published by Sky Frontier Foundation on July 23, 2026:

• $107.35M in Gross Protocol Revenue for the three months to June 30, up 10.5% year over year
• $33.29M in Protocol Surplus, the fifth consecutive positive quarter
• $5.52B in sUSDS supply at quarter end, up 149% year over year, the largest rate-bearing stablecoin by supply
• $250M+ in cumulative Sky Savings Rate distributions, a milestone crossed on June 29, 2026
• $14.15B in Total Protocol Collateral and $11.48B in stablecoin supply on the live dashboard today

Every one of those figures is checkable. That is the point of the model. If you want the plain-language version first, start here.

Three questions that beat any stablecoin comparison table

Forget the ticker for a second and ask:

1. Can I verify the backing myself, right now, without waiting for a report?
2. Who receives the yield that backing produces?
3. What happens to my balance if someone I have never met files a request?

USDT and USDC answer question one with an attestation, question two with “the issuer”, and question three with a freeze function. Those are legitimate answers. They are just answers, not defaults.

So which stablecoin should you actually use in 2026?

Honestly? Probably both, for the jobs they are good at. USDT for depth. USDC for regulated rails. That advice has survived three cycles.

But if a dollar of yours is sitting still rather than moving, “which centralised issuer do I trust more” is the wrong question. The better one is whether it needs to sit idle at all.

Two tokens dominate the market. Only one comparison column tells you where the yield goes.

Now your turn. Which column actually decides it for you: liquidity, regulation, freeze risk, or where the yield lands? Drop it in the responses. I read every one, and the disagreements are usually more useful than the agreements.

This piece is published by Sky Frontier Foundation for educational purposes. Nothing here is financial advice. Protocol figures should be verified against the live dashboards before use.

USDT vs USDC: The Comparison Everyone Gets Half Right was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Something shifted on Hyperliquid in 2026 that most crypto traders still haven’t fully clocked. It’s not a new token, not a new chain — it’s a category of trading that barely existed twelve months ago and is now the platform’s single biggest source of volume: tokenized real-world assets.

In Q2 2026, RWA perpetual contracts generated $213 billion in trading volume on Hyperliquid, accounting for 32.2% of everything traded on the platform — up from just 1.8% in Q4 2025. For one week in July, RWAs actually overtook every crypto category combined, hitting over half of total weekly volume. If you’re trading crypto perps and haven’t looked at this yet, here’s what’s going on and how it actually works.

Learn more about Hyperliquid, how it works and how to use it below

Understanding Hyperliquid: How On-Chain Perpetual Futures Actually Work

The Mechanism: HIP-3

The entire category exists because of HIP-3, a permissionless market-deployment framework Hyperliquid rolled out in October 2025. Before HIP-3, launching a new market on Hyperliquid required central approval. After HIP-3, any team can stake HYPE tokens and deploy its own perpetual market — competing on liquidity and pricing without asking permission.

That single change is what let tokenized stocks, commodities, and indices show up on Hyperliquid at real scale. The dominant builder right now is Trade.xyz, run by Hyperliquid’s own tokenization arm Hyperunit, which controls something like 91% of total HIP-3 open interest. Deployers like this earn a meaningful cut of the fees generated in their markets — up to 50% in some arrangements — which is the incentive that’s driving so many teams to build RWA markets so fast.

Worth flagging as a trader, not just a spectator: because deployers keep so much of the fee revenue, this RWA boom hasn’t flowed straight through to HYPE token buybacks the way you might assume. Gross protocol revenue and buyback dollars have actually diverged over the past few quarters. Volume growth and token-holder value aren’t the same thing here, and it’s easy to conflate them if you’re only looking at the headline numbers.

What’s Actually Tradeable

The catalog has expanded fast. Right now, HIP-3 RWA markets cover:

• Individual tokenized stocks — Tesla, Google, and reportedly up to 300 equities and ETFs across sectors like AI, defense, and energy
• Commodities — gold, silver, platinum, copper, uranium, and crude oil, with WTI and Brent trading as distinct contracts
• Stock indices
• Synthetic pre-IPO exposure to notable private companies
• A smaller, newer bucket of sovereign debt and regional market instruments

Since June 2026, single stocks have pulled ahead of commodities as the largest RWA category, now representing about 61% of all RWA volume. Commodities are close behind, especially oil and silver, which have seen sharp inflows tied to macro and geopolitical volatility — the kind of news that breaks on a Sunday night when traditional markets are shut.

Begin trading RWA on Hyperliquid with a fee reduction via signing up here

How the Trading Mechanics Work

If you’ve traded perps on Hyperliquid before, most of this will feel familiar:

• Collateral is typically USDC or USDT, same as standard perps
• These are perpetual contracts — no expiry date, held as long as funding allows
• Funding rates periodically transfer between longs and shorts to keep the contract price tethered to the real-world asset price
• Leverage is available, but max leverage and margin requirements vary by the specific deployer-run market
• Markets trade 24/7, even when the underlying stock exchange or commodity market is closed

That last point is the whole story, honestly. It’s the reason RWA perps exist — positioning on breaking news instantly instead of waiting for Monday’s open — and it’s also the newest kind of risk crypto-native traders haven’t really had to price in before.

The Risk Side Deserves Equal Airtime

A few things worth sitting with before you size a position:

Weekend and after-hours gap risk. The perp trades continuously; the underlying stock or commodity doesn’t. You can be holding a position that gets marked against news the “real” market hasn’t opened to price in yet.

Deployer concentration. A huge share of HIP-3 liquidity sits with one builder. That’s not inherently bad, but it is a single point of failure worth knowing about.

This category is genuinely unproven under stress. Volume comparable to Bitcoin’s is a real number, but nobody’s watched these specific markets behave through a sharp liquidity event yet. Depth and open interest look strong in a calm-to-bullish stretch; that’s a different test than a real drawdown.

None of this is a reason to avoid RWA markets — it’s a reason to size into them the way you’d size into any fast-growing, early-stage product: with respect for how new the infrastructure actually is.

Where It’s Headed

Some industry estimates put RWA trading at up to 75% of Hyperliquid’s total volume by 2027. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has described the shift as a genuine structural change in crypto markets — a move away from purely crypto-native speculation toward trading claims on real-world value, entirely on-chain.

Whatever the exact trajectory turns out to be, this isn’t a side experiment anymore. I’ve been tracking Hyperliquid’s product evolution closely, including a deeper walkthrough of the platform’s core perpetuals mechanics if you want the fuller picture before trading RWA markets specifically.

This piece is for informational purposes only and isn’t financial advice. Perpetual futures and crypto trading carry real risk — always DYOR.

Real-World Assets Are Quietly Taking Over Hyperliquid — Here’s How the Trading Actually Works was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Franklin Templeton is expanding its tokenized fund business in Asia through a new partnership with HashKey Exchange.

On August 25, 2026, HashKey added the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund (grBENJI) to its Earn Channel for eligible professional investors in Hong Kong.

The launch gives investors access to a blockchain-based version of Franklin Templeton’s U.S. government money-market fund, as demand for tokenized Treasury products continues to grow.

What Is grBENJI?

grBENJI is linked to Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), also known through the BENJI token ecosystem.

Franklin Templeton launched the fund on April 6, 2021. It was among the first U.S.-registered mutual funds to use a public blockchain for transaction processing and ownership records.

The underlying investment strategy remains traditional.

The fund invests primarily in U.S. government securities, cash and repurchase agreements backed by government securities or cash. It aims to provide income while maintaining liquidity and a stable $1 share price.

That makes BENJI different from a stablecoin such as USDT or USDC. BENJI represents an interest in a regulated money-market fund, while stablecoins are primarily designed to maintain a digital currency peg.

How Large Is Franklin’s Tokenized Fund?

Franklin Templeton’s official fund data shows $753.24 million in total net assets as of June 30, 2026.

The fund’s recent yield has remained above 3%. As of August 2026, Franklin reported a 7-day current yield of 3.56%.

The figure can change as short-term interest rates and portfolio conditions change, so investors should treat the yield as a point-in-time figure rather than a fixed return.

The fund is part of a much larger asset-management business. Franklin Templeton reported $1.80 trillion in preliminary total assets under management as of July 31, 2026.

Who Can Buy grBENJI on HashKey?

The HashKey launch is currently focused on eligible professional investors in Hong Kong.

Through HashKey’s Earn Channel, eligible investors can access the tokenized fund through a regulated digital-asset platform.

This is important because Franklin Templeton already has the fund and blockchain infrastructure. HashKey adds the distribution channel in Asia.

In other words, the partnership connects a traditional global asset manager’s tokenized investment product with a regulated digital-asset marketplace.

Why Is This Launch Important?

The timing is significant.

Tokenized Treasury and money-market products have become one of the fastest-growing areas of the real-world asset market. Investors can gain exposure to traditional short-term government assets while using blockchain-based infrastructure for ownership and transactions.

Franklin Templeton has also continued to engage with U.S. regulators over its blockchain-based fund infrastructure.

On August 12, 2026, SEC staff issued a no-action letter addressing certain custody arrangements involving Franklin Templeton’s OnChain Funds. While the letter does not represent blanket SEC approval for tokenized funds, it shows that regulators are increasingly examining how traditional funds can operate with blockchain-based infrastructure.

Tokenized Treasury Market Reaches $15.64B

The HashKey launch comes as the tokenized U.S. Treasury market continues to expand.

According to the RWA.xyz data in the supplied research, the combined market for tokenized U.S. Treasury bills, notes, bonds and Treasury-focused money-market funds reached approximately $15.64 billion as of August 24, 2026.

The market included:

• 87 products
• 66,031 holders
• $15.64 billion in market value

The market was around $6.51 billion in July 2025, meaning it has grown approximately 140% in one year.

This rapid expansion has attracted competition from major financial institutions and digital-asset firms.

BENJI vs. BUIDL, USYC and Ondo

Franklin Templeton is competing with several major tokenized Treasury products.

BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, and Ondo Finance’s OUSG and USDY are among the better-known products in the market.

BlackRock’s BUIDL has an AUM of roughly $2.6 billion based on the supplied data, while Circle’s USYC is around $3 billion.

Franklin’s advantage is its early start. BENJI launched in 2021, giving the firm several years of experience with blockchain-based fund infrastructure before tokenized Treasuries became a major institutional trend.

What Does the HashKey Partnership Mean?

The Franklin Templeton-HashKey launch is less about creating another crypto token and more about expanding access to tokenized traditional assets.

Franklin brings the regulated investment product and established tokenization infrastructure. HashKey brings a regulated digital-asset distribution platform in Hong Kong.

For investors, the proposition is simple:

U.S. government money-market exposure + dollar-denominated yield + blockchain infrastructure.

As the tokenized Treasury market moves beyond the experimental stage, partnerships like this could help determine whether tokenized funds become a mainstream part of institutional finance.

For Franklin Templeton, the HashKey launch marks another step in taking BENJI from an early blockchain-based fund experiment to a broader institutional financial product in Asia.

Why Franklin Templeton’s BENJI Expansion Could Matter More Than You Think was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.