Background: Stablecoins have become a battleground
Cryptocurrency has always been perceived as highly volatile, with tokens easily experiencing surges and drops, seemingly having little to do with 'stability.' Stablecoins are mostly pegged to the dollar, serving not only as chips to exchange for other tokens but also for payment services. This sector has an overall market cap exceeding $200 billion, making it a relatively mature sector in the crypto market.
However, the most common USDT and USDC in the market are both centralized institutions, with their combined market share accounting for nearly 90%. Other projects also want to grab this large pie. For instance, the Web 2 payment giant PayPal launched its own stablecoin pyUSD in 2023 to pre-position itself; recently, XRP's parent company Ripple also issued RLUSD in an attempt to challenge the stablecoin market.
The above two cases are more about using stablecoins for payment services, mostly backed by dollars or short-term government bonds as collateral, while decentralized stablecoins emphasize yield, anchoring mechanisms, and compatibility with DeFi.
The market's desire for decentralized stablecoins has never waned, from DAI to UST, from the types of collateral backing to anchoring mechanisms, the development of decentralized stablecoins has gone through several iterations. Ethena pioneered the use of term arbitrage + staking to generate yield with USDe, opening users' imagination for interest-earning stablecoins. The market cap of USDe stablecoin is also the third largest in the market, reaching $5.9 billion. Recently, Ethena partnered with BlackRock to launch the USDtb stablecoin, which provides returns from RWA. This product mitigates the risk of funding rates turning negative, allowing stable income during both bull and bear markets, filling the overall product line, making Ethena a focal point of market attention.
In light of Ethena's successful case, more and more interest-earning stablecoin-related protocols are emerging in the market, such as: Usual, which recently announced a partnership 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 their returns come from? Let's take a look with WOO X Research.
Source: Ethena Labs
USUAL: Strong team background, token design has Ponzi-like properties
RWA interest-earning stablecoins, backed by short-term government bonds, stablecoins are USD0, earning USD0++ after staking USD0, using $USUAL as staking rewards. They believe that current stablecoin issuers are too centralized, similar to traditional banks, rarely distributing value to users. USUAL aims to make users co-owners of the project, returning 90% of the value generated to users.
Regarding the background of the project, CEO Pierre Person has been a Member of the French Parliament and also served as a political advisor to French President Macron. The Asia-Pacific executive Yoko is a former fundraiser for the French presidential election. The project has good political and business relations in France, and the most important aspect of RWA is transferring real assets on-chain, where regulatory and governmental support is crucial for the project's success. It is evident that USUAL has good political and business relations, which is a strong moat for the project.
Returning to the project mechanism itself, the USUAL token economics has Ponzi-like properties, not only functioning as a mining token, with no fixed issuance volume. The issuance of USUAL is linked to the TVL of USD0 (USD0++), forming an inflation model, but the issuance amount will vary according to the protocol's 'revenue growth', strictly ensuring the inflation rate < protocol growth rate.
Whenever new USD0++ bond tokens are minted, a corresponding proportion of $USUAL will be generated and emitted to all parties, and this conversion ratio, the Minting Rate, will start at its highest after the TGE, following a gradually declining exponential curve, aimed at rewarding early participants and creating token scarcity in the later stages, driving up the intrinsic value of the tokens.
In simple terms, the higher the TVL, the less USUAL is emitted, and the higher the value of a single USUAL.
USUAL The higher the coin price -> Incentive staking USD0 -> TVL increases -> USUAL emissions decrease -> USUAL coin price increases
USD0's market cap increased by 66% in the past week, reaching $1.4 billion, surpassing PyUSD, with USD0++ APY also reaching 50%
Recently, Usual also reached a partnership with Ethena, accepting USDtb as collateral, and subsequently migrating part of the supported assets of the 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 set up an sUSDe vault for USD0++ bond product holders, allowing Usual users to earn sUSDe rewards while maintaining basic exposure to Usual. This will enable Usual users to take advantage of Ethena's rewards while increasing Ethena's TVL. Ultimately, Usual will incentivize and enable the swapping of USDtb-USD0 and USDtb-sUSDe, increasing liquidity between core assets.
Recently, they also 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 ranking: 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 chains, including ETH, ARB, MANTA, BASE, and BLAST, backed by a private credit asset portfolio. USDz can be staked to obtain sUSDz, which earns RWA returns.
The underlying assets collaborate with the U.S. licensed brokerage firm Percent, with portfolio risk exposure mainly in the U.S. market, and a single asset's maximum proportion does not exceed 15%, diversifying into 6-7 assets, currently with an APY of about 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 in seed funding, participated by Mechanism Capital, Circle Ventures, Frax, Arca, Infinity Ventures, Cherubic Ventures, Palm Drive Ventures, M31 Capital, and Kraynos Capital. It successfully raised $3 million through a public offering using Fjord.
In the design of the ANZ token, a ve model is used, allowing ANZ to lock up and stake to obtain veANZ and receive protocol revenue sharing.
Source: Anzen
ANZ:
Current price: 0.02548
Market cap ranking: 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, USR and RLP,
USR: A stablecoin minted using ETH as collateral, over-collateralized, while RPL secures the price peg, allowing USR to be staked to earn stUSR.
RLP: USR has over 100% collateral, with the excess collateral used to support RLP. RLP is not a stablecoin; the amount of collateral required to mint or redeem RLP tokens is determined based on the latest RLP price.
Resolv generates ETH for USR, using a delta-neutral strategy, with most collateral directly held on-chain and staked. Some collateral is held by institutions as futures margin.
On-chain collateral is 100% deposited in Lido, with shorting collateral margins ranging from 20% to 30%, meaning using 3.3 to 5 times leverage, with 47% on Binance, 21% on Deribit, and 31.3% on Hyperliquid (using Ceffu and Fireblocks as CEX custodians)
Source of income: On-chain staking and funding rates
Base reward (70%): stUSR + RLP holders
Risk premium (30%): RLP
Assuming the collateral pool realizes a profit of $20,000:
The basic reward calculation formula is $20,000*70%=$14,000, and it is distributed based on the proportion of 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 a larger share of the profit, but if the funding rate is negative, funds will be deducted from the RLP pool, increasing RLP risk.
Recently, Resolv launched on the Base network and also introduced a points program, where holding USR or RLP can earn points, paving the way for future token issuance.
Related data:
stUSR: 12.53%
RLP: 21.7%
TVL: 183M
Collateral rate: 126%
