What are STBL's three-token system (USST, YLD, STBL), and what does each do?
The three tokens are functionally completely independent:
USST: Dollar stablecoin with the same functional positioning as USDC or USDT. 1:1 dollar peg, usable for payments, transfers, DeFi collateral. Key characteristic: it carries no yield attributes — holding USST doesn't automatically increase your balance, making it compliant with GENIUS Act's 'no direct yield payment' requirement.
YLD: Yield NFT representing ownership of the continuously generated interest from the underlying RWA assets (like BENJI, BUIDL) locked when you minted USST. Hold YLD, and interest accrues in the background. YLD can be held until the underlying asset matures for full redemption, or sold early on YLD-supporting markets (equivalent to selling future interest at a discount).
STBL: Governance token — not a stablecoin. Holding STBL lets you participate in protocol governance (voting on which collateral types to accept, fee adjustments, etc.) and benefit from protocol revenue sharing (the protocol uses 20% of reserve yield to buy back STBL). STBL price fluctuates like other crypto assets — it surged 455% in 24 hours after launching in September 2025, then retreated sharply. This is a high-risk governance token, not a stable store of value.
One-sentence summary: USST for spending, YLD for earning, STBL for voting.
If STBL claims to 'give yield back to users,' can I use the STBL protocol now?
As of June 2026, STBL is still in deployment phase — not a mature product ordinary users can directly use. Some realities:
Currently available: The STBL governance token ($STBL) is listed for trading on Binance Alpha, Kraken, and Bybit. If you just want to trade the STBL token itself, that's possible now.
Coming soon: STBL's partnership with OKX's X Layer Layer-2 network is expected to launch mainnet in June 2026, after which institutional and compliant users can begin minting USST. But minting USST requires first holding whitelisted RWA assets (like Franklin Templeton BENJI, BlackRock BUIDL) — assets that require institutional investor qualifications or accredited investor status. For ordinary retail users, the short-term barrier to directly using the STBL protocol remains high.
Longer-term inclusive vision: Collins says STBL's ultimate goal is enabling banks, brands, and platforms to use STBL as underlying infrastructure to issue their own white-label stablecoins, letting those institutions' users indirectly benefit from STBL's yield distribution. But this requires partner deployment and user habit cultivation — not achievable within 2026.
Short-term recommendation: If you just want stablecoins to generate yield, sUSDS (~4% annualized, directly available on Sky's official site) or USDC deposits on Aave (3-7%) are more mature, immediately usable options. No need to wait for STBL to launch before considering them.
The stablecoin market has a secret it never mentions: more than $230 billion in global stablecoin circulation generates over $10 billion annually in Treasury interest, and virtually all of it flows into the pockets of Tether and Circle — not the users holding these stablecoins. Tether's 2025 net profit reached $10 billion, making it, by profit per employee, more profitable than any S&P 500 company on earth.
Now, one of the people who best understands this business model — Tether co-founder Reeve Collins — has decided to publicly challenge it. In a recent interview on the Podcast 'On the Margin,' Collins directly named the structural flaw of the Stablecoin 1.0 model and declared the central premise of the Stablecoin 2.0 era: give the interest back to users. The STBL protocol he is building is his tool for delivering on this claim.
Collins describes Tether's business model as 'elegantly disturbing': users hand dollars to Tether, Tether issues equal amounts of USDT. In 2013, this seemed like a neutral technical tool — just making dollars flow on blockchain. But it concealed a critical design choice: Tether takes users' dollars and buys short-term US Treasuries, pocketing the 4-5% annual interest, with none ever distributed to USDT holders.
During the low-rate era, this wasn't obvious — 2% interest might barely cover Tether's operating costs. But since the Fed's aggressive rate hikes starting 2022, US short-term Treasury yields have stayed persistently in the 4-5% range, making the problem impossible to ignore. With Tether's approximately $180 billion in reserves, annual interest earnings exceed $9 billion — money theoretically generated by users' principal.
Collins calls this 'Stablecoin 1.0's rent-extraction model.' He doesn't deny Tether created enormous value — making USDT the world's most important crypto trading medium, letting hundreds of millions seamlessly hold and transfer digital dollars. But he believes the model needs updating. Stablecoins shouldn't just be tools for issuers to extract spreads — they should be financial infrastructure where communities share in the returns.
STBL Protocol's core mechanism separates 'stability' and 'yield' — two attributes previously bundled in a single token — into two independent instruments.
When users deposit yield-bearing RWA assets (like Franklin Templeton's BENJI, BlackRock's BUIDL, or Ondo's USDY) into the STBL protocol, it automatically mints two things: a stablecoin called USST (dollar-pegged 1:1, freely usable for payments, DeFi collateral, cross-border transfers); and a yield NFT called YLD (representing the continuously accruing interest from the underlying RWA assets — holdable until maturity or tradeable on secondary markets).
This design resolves the fundamental contradiction of traditional stablecoins: you no longer have to choose between 'using it' and 'earning from it.' USST carries no yield attributes when circulating (so it functions like cash, without triggering interest calculations on every transfer); YLD quietly accumulates after you deposit assets, ready for redemption or sale when you need it.
On reserve asset selection, STBL goes beyond just Treasuries. Collins announced a partnership framework with Hamilton Lane's SCOPE Fund, a private credit fund targeting approximately 7-8% annual returns. Combined with the lower yields of Treasuries, the blended reserve target is approximately 5% — significantly above what most pure T-bill stablecoins like sUSDS (~4%) offer. Per STBL's design, 80% of this 5% flows back to USST minters, with ~20% supporting protocol operations and governance token (STBL) buybacks.
Understanding STBL's design requires placing it within the GENIUS Act regulatory framework. The US Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act has a core prohibition for stablecoin issuers: they cannot pay yield directly to holders. The logic: once a stablecoin pays interest, it shifts from 'monetary instrument' to 'investment instrument,' requiring securities regulation.
This relatively limited impact on USDC and USDT — since they don't pay interest anyway. But for native yield-bearing stablecoins like sUSDS and sUSDe, this prohibition directly threatens their business model. If you hold sUSDS, its daily automatic appreciation may be viewed under the GENIUS Act as 'directly paying yield to holders.'
STBL CEO Avtar Sehra argues STBL's dual-token architecture precisely circumvents this issue. USST itself carries no yield attributes — it's a plain, non-appreciating dollar stablecoin compliant with GENIUS Act requirements. YLD is designed as a 'regulated security,' requiring KYC whitelisting to hold, existing as a compliant yield investment instrument. This lets STBL allow the same user to simultaneously hold a compliant stablecoin (USST) and a compliant yield instrument (YLD) — without crossing the line of 'paying yield to stablecoin holders.'
From another angle, the GENIUS Act may actually become a tailwind for STBL. The Act requires all stablecoin issuers to use High-Quality Liquid Assets (HQLA) as reserves and undergo monthly independent audits — pressure on opaque issuers like Tether, but precisely the advantage of protocols like STBL that inherently rely on on-chain verifiable RWA reserves. STBL CCO Joe Vollono said at Consensus 2026: the GENIUS Act will push the entire stablecoin market from 'hold to earn' toward 'use to earn' — exactly STBL's core narrative.
Any DeFi-familiar reader seeing STBL's 'yield splitting' mechanism will have an immediate reaction: isn't this just Pendle?
Pendle Finance is DeFi's most mature yield trading market, with a core mechanism of splitting yield assets into PT (Principal Token) and YT (Yield Token), letting users separately trade 'certain principal recovery' and 'future yield expectations.' Users can already deposit sUSDe, sUSDS, aUSDC and other yield-bearing stablecoins into Pendle, split them into PT and YT, and trade them on secondary markets. This bears strong resemblance to STBL's 'USST handles circulation, YLD handles yield' in financial engineering terms.
STBL's differentiation lies in level and positioning. Pendle provides split-trading services on top of 'already-existing yield assets' — serving DeFi veterans who first need to hold sUSDe or sUSDS before going to Pendle to trade PT/YT. STBL aims at something more foundational: building yield-splitting directly into the stablecoin minting mechanism from the start, and enabling banks, brands, and sovereign institutions to issue their own white-label stablecoins (called Ecosystem-Specific Stablecoins, ESSs) on this infrastructure. Collins' vision isn't a DeFi trading protocol — it's the issuance infrastructure for the next generation of stablecoins.
Another key difference is maturity dates. Pendle's PTs have explicit expiry dates, with YT value going to zero at maturity — standard interest rate derivative design suited for traders doing fixed-income strategies. STBL's YLD is currently designed to continuously accumulate yield during the holding period with no forced expiry, making it more like a 'yield ownership certificate' than a maturity instrument — closer to long-term holding than rate trading.
If STBL's model ultimately takes hold and scales, the impact on the existing stablecoin landscape could be profound. The key question isn't 'can STBL succeed?' but 'can this model become the industry standard?'
For Tether (USDT): STBL's rise is the most direct ideological challenge to Tether's business model. Tether's $9B+ annual reserve interest income is, in STBL's narrative framing, precisely 'the money that should have been returned to users.' But given USDT's network effects — $230B+ circulation, the world's deepest trading pair liquidity, emerging market penetration — Tether's moat remains difficult to dislodge short-term. Collins himself hasn't positioned STBL as a 'kill USDT' tool; his target is providing the next wave of stablecoin issuers (institutions, brands, governments) with better underlying infrastructure.
For USDC and sUSDS: Circle's compliance advantage under GENIUS Act remains, but if calls for 'stablecoins must pay users yield' gain regulatory traction over the long term, Circle's non-yield-paying model will face competitive pressure. Sky's sUSDS faces a more immediate challenge: if GENIUS Act ultimately restricts direct yield-paying stablecoins, sUSDS will need to redesign its yield distribution architecture.
For you as a stablecoin holder: short-term, STBL remains an early protocol — USST's market depth and acceptance is far below USDC or USDT. But this debate has already changed the stablecoin market's discourse: more and more people are asking 'why doesn't the stablecoin I hold pay interest?' That question itself is the strongest driving force behind Stablecoin 2.0. Watch STBL's mainnet performance on OKX's X Layer and the specific GENIUS Act impact on yield-bearing stablecoins once fully enacted — these will be the most important stablecoin market developments to track in the next 12 months.