Cryptocurrency has long been seen as high volatility, with tokens easily rising and falling, seemingly having little to do with 'stability.' Stablecoins are mostly pegged to the USD, serving not only as chips for exchanging other tokens, but also suitable for payment functions. This segment's total market cap exceeds 200 billion USD, making it relatively mature in the cryptocurrency market.
However, the most common USDT and USDC in the market are both centralized institutions, with their combined market share nearing 90%. Other projects are also looking to grab a piece of this pie. For example, the Web 2 payment giant PayPal launched its own stablecoin pyUSD in 2023 to get ahead; recently, XRP's parent company Ripple also issued RLUSD in an attempt to challenge the stablecoin market.
The above two cases are more about the payment use of stablecoins, mostly backed by USD or short-term government bonds, while decentralized stablecoins emphasize yield, anchoring mechanisms, and composability with DeFi.
The market's desire for decentralized stablecoins has never diminished. From DAI to UST, the variety of collateral types and anchoring mechanisms have seen several iterations in the development of decentralized stablecoins. Ethena pioneered the concept of using arbitrage + staking to generate returns with USDe, which opened users' imagination for interest-bearing stablecoins. USDe's market cap is currently the third largest, reaching 5.9 billion USD. Recently, Ethena partnered with BlackRock to launch the USDtb stablecoin, which offers returns from RWA. This product mitigates the risk of funding rates turning negative and can stabilize income during both bull and bear markets, completing Ethena's product line and making it a focal point in the market.
In light of Ethena's success, more interest-bearing stablecoin-related protocols are emerging in the market, such as Usual, which recently announced cooperation with Ethena; Anzen, built on the Base ecosystem; and Resolv, which uses ETH as collateral. What are the anchoring mechanisms of these three protocols? Where do the underlying returns come from? Let's take a look with WOO X Research.
Source: Ethena Labs
USUAL: Strong team background, token design has Ponzi-like attributes
RWA interest-bearing stablecoins are backed by short-term government bonds, with the stablecoin being USD0. After staking USD0, you receive USD0++ as a reward in $USUAL. They believe that current stablecoin issuers are too centralized, similar to traditional banks, and rarely distribute value to users. USUAL aims to make users co-owners of the project, returning 90% of the generated value to users.
Regarding the project background, CEO Pierre Person has been a Member of the French Parliament and a political advisor to French President Macron. The Asia-Pacific executive Yoko was the fundraising head for the previous French presidential election, and the project has strong political and business connections in France. The most important aspect of RWA is transferring real-world assets onto the blockchain, where regulatory and government support is key to the project's success. Clearly, USUAL has strong political connections, providing a powerful moat for the project.
Returning to the project mechanism itself, the USUAL token economics have Ponzi-like attributes, not merely as a mining token with no fixed issuance amount. The issuance of USUAL is tied to the TVL of staked USD0 (USD0++), forming an inflation model, but the issuance amount will vary based on the protocol's 'revenue growth,' strictly ensuring the inflation rate matches the protocol growth rate.
Whenever a USD0++ bond token is newly minted, a corresponding proportion of $USUAL will be generated and distributed to various parties. This conversion ratio, the Minting Rate, will be highest at the beginning after the TGE, and will gradually decline along an exponential decay curve, aiming to reward early participants and create token scarcity in the later stages, driving up the intrinsic value of the token.
In simple terms, the higher the TVL, the less USUAL is issued, and the higher the value of a single USUAL.
The higher the USUAL price -> incentivizes staking USD0 -> increases TVL -> reduces USUAL issuance -> increases USUAL price
USD0's market value increased by 6.6% in the past week, reaching 1.4 billion USD, surpassing PyUSD, and USD0++ APY also reaches 50%
Recently, Usual also partnered with Ethena to accept USDtb as collateral and subsequently migrate part of the supported assets of stablecoin USD0 to USDtb. In the coming months, Usual will become one of the largest minters and holders of USDtb.
As part of this collaboration, Usual will establish a sUSDe treasury for USD0++ bond holders, allowing Usual users to earn sUSDe rewards while maintaining exposure to Usual. This will enable Usual users to utilize Ethena's rewards while increasing Ethena's TVL. Finally, Usual will incentivize and enable the swaps between USDtb-USD0 and USDtb-sUSDe, increasing liquidity between core assets.
They also recently opened USUAL staking, with rewards sourced from stakers sharing 10% of the total supply of USUAL, with current APY reaching 730%.
Usually:
Current Price: 1.04
Market Cap Rank: 197
Circulating Market Cap: 488,979,186
TVL: 1,404,764,184
TVL/MC: 2,865
Source: usual.money
Anzen: Tokenization of credit assets
USDz issued by Anzen currently supports five supply chains, including ETH, ARB, MANTA, BASE, and BLAST, backed by a private credit asset portfolio. USDz can be staked to earn sUSDz, providing returns from RWA.
The underlying assets are in cooperation with the US-licensed brokerage Percent, with the portfolio risk exposure primarily in the US market, with no single asset exceeding 15%. The portfolio is diversified across 6-7 types of assets, and the current APY is approximately 10%.
Partners are also well-known in traditional finance, including BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Moody's Ratings, and UBS.
Source: Anzen
In terms of financing, Anzen raised 4 million USD in a seed round from Mechanism Capital, Circle Ventures, Frax, Arca, Infinity Ventures, Cherubic Ventures, Palm Drive Ventures, M31 Capital, and Kraynos Capital. They successfully raised 3 million USD through public offerings using Fjord.
In the design of the ANZ token, a ve model is used, allowing ANZ to lock in staking to obtain veANZ and receive a share of protocol revenue.
Source: Anzen
ANZ:
Current Price: 0.02548
Market Cap Rank: 1,277
Circulating Market Cap: 21,679,860
TVL: 94,720,000
TVL/MC: 4,369
Resolv: Delta Neutral Stablecoin Protocol
Resolv has two products under its brand, USR and RLP.
USR: A stablecoin minted with ETH as collateral, over-collateralized and secured by RPL to maintain its price peg. USR can be staked to earn stUSR.
RLP: USR has over 100% collateral, with the excess collateral supporting RLP. RLP is not a stablecoin; the amount of collateral needed to mint or redeem RLP tokens is determined based on the latest RLP price.
To generate USR, Resolv uses a delta-neutral strategy, with most collateral stored on-chain and staked directly. Part of the collateral is held by institutions as futures margin.
100% on-chain collateral deposited in Lido, with the shorting collateral margin between 20%-30%, using leverage of 3.3 to 5 times. Among them, 47% is on Binance, 21% on Deribit, and 31.3% on Hyperliquid (using Ceffu and Fireblocks as Cex custodians).
Sources of income: On-chain staking and funding rates
Basic Reward (70%): stUSR + RLP Holders
Risk Premium (30%): RLP
Assuming the collateral pool achieves a profit of $20,000:
The basic reward calculation formula is $20,000*70%=$14,000, distributed proportionally based on stUSR and RLP's TVL.
The risk premium calculation formula is $20,000*30%=$6,000, allocated to RLP.
It can be seen that RLP receives more revenue sharing, but if the funding rate is negative, funds will be deducted from the RLP pool, making RLP riskier.
Recently Resolv launched on the Base network and also introduced a points program where holding USR or RLP can earn points, laying the groundwork for future token issuance.
Relevant Data:
stUSR: 12.53%
RLP: 21.7%
TVL: 183M
Collateral Rate: 126%
