Article source: WOO.
Background: Stablecoins have become a battleground.
Cryptocurrency has long been perceived as highly volatile, with tokens easily surging or plummeting, seemingly unrelated to 'stability.' Stablecoins are mostly pegged to the dollar and can serve not only as chips to exchange for other tokens but also for payment functions. This segment has an overall market cap exceeding $200 billion and is relatively mature within the crypto market.
However, the most common USDT and USDC in the market are both centralized institutions, together accounting for nearly 90% of the market share, and other projects also want 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 using stablecoins for payment services, mostly backed by dollars 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, evolving through iterations from the types of underlying collateral to anchoring mechanisms. The development of decentralized stablecoins has gone through several iterations, with Ethena pioneering the use of futures arbitrage + staking to generate yields with USDe, opening users' imaginations for yield-generating stablecoins. The market cap of USDe stablecoin is also the third highest in the entire market, reaching $5.9 billion. Recently, Ethena partnered with BlackRock to launch the USDtb stablecoin, which generates yields from RWA, effectively avoiding the risk of funding rates turning negative, ensuring stable returns during both bullish and bearish markets, and completing the overall product line, making Ethena a market focus.
In light of Ethena's success, more income-generating 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 source of returns come from? Let's explore with WOO X Research.
Source: Ethena Labs
USUAL: Strong team background, token design has Ponzi attributes.
RWA income-generating stablecoin, with the underlying income asset being short-term government bonds, the stablecoin being USD0, and after staking USD0, generating USD0++ with $USUAL as staking rewards. They believe that stablecoin issuers are currently too centralized, similar to traditional banks, rarely distributing value to users. USUAL aims to make users co-owners of the value generated by the project, returning 90% of the value generated to users.
Regarding the background of the project, CEO Pierre Person has been a French member of parliament and served as a political advisor to French President Macron. The Asia-Pacific executive Yoko is a former fundraiser for the French presidential election, indicating that the project has strong political and business connections in France. The key to RWA is transferring real assets on-chain, and the level of regulatory and governmental support is critical to the project's success. It is evident that USUAL has strong political and business relationships, which is a significant moat for the project.
Returning to the project mechanism itself, the USUAL token economics have Ponzi attributes, not merely serving as a mining token, with no fixed issuance volume. The issuance of USUAL is linked to the TVL of USD0 (USD0++), creating an inflation model, but the issuance volume will vary according to the protocol's 'income growth,' strictly ensuring that 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, and this conversion ratio, the Minting Rate, will be highest at the start after the TGE, following a gradually declining exponential curve, aimed at rewarding early participants and creating token scarcity later on, driving the intrinsic value of the token up.
In simple terms, the higher the TVL, the less USUAL is emitted, and the higher the value of a single USUAL.
The higher the USUAL price -> incentivizes staking USD0 -> increases TVL -> reduces USUAL emissions -> increases USUAL price.
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 has also partnered with Ethena to accept USDtb as collateral and subsequently migrate some of the supporting 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 establish an sUSDe treasury for USD0++ bond product holders, allowing Usual users to earn sUSDe rewards while maintaining their basic exposure to Usual. This will enable Usual users to leverage Ethena's rewards while increasing Ethena's TVL. Finally, Usual will incentivize and enable the swapping of USDtb-USD0 and USDtb-sUSDe, increasing liquidity between core assets.
Recently, they have also opened USUAL staking, with rewards shared among stakers being 10% of the total supply of USUAL, currently yielding an APY of up to 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: Credit Asset Tokenization
USDz issued by Anzen currently supports five chains, including ETH, ARB, MANTA, BASE, and BLAST, with underlying assets being a private credit asset portfolio. After staking, USDz can obtain sUSDz, which provides RWA yields.
The underlying assets partner with the U.S.-licensed brokerage Percent, with portfolio risk exposure primarily in the U.S. market. The maximum proportion of a single asset does not exceed 15%, and the portfolio is diversified with 6-7 assets, currently yielding 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 received $4 million in seed funding, with participation from Mechanism Capital, Circle Ventures, Frax, Arca, Infinity Ventures, Cherubic Ventures, Palm Drive Ventures, M31 Capital, and Kraynos Capital. They successfully raised $3 million in a public offering using Fjord.
In terms of ANZ token design, a ve model is used, allowing ANZ to lock up and stake to obtain veANZ, gaining a share of protocol revenue.
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 by using ETH as collateral, over-collateralized and secured by RPL to maintain price peg, allowing staking of USR to earn stUSR for returns.
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.
Generating USR with ETH, Resolv uses a delta-neutral strategy, with most collateral stored directly on-chain and staked. Some collateral is held by institutions as futures margin.
On-chain collateral is 100% deposited in Lido, with the shorting collateral margin ranging from 20% to 30%, which means using 3.3 to 5 times leverage. Of this, 47% is on Binance, 21% on Deribit, and 31.3% on Hyperliquid (using Ceffu and Fireblocks as CEX custodians).
Source of returns: On-chain staking and funding rates.
Base 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 the TVL of stUSR and RLP.
The risk premium calculation formula is $20,000 * 30% = $6,000, allocated to RLP.
It can be seen that RLP receives more profits, but if the funding rate is negative, it will be deducted from the RLP pool, and RLP risks are also higher.
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%
