Cryptocurrencies have long been perceived as highly volatile, with tokens prone to sharp rises and falls, seemingly having little to do with 'stability'. Stablecoins are mostly pegged to the dollar, not only serving as a medium to exchange for other tokens but also suitable for payment functions; this sector has an overall market cap exceeding $200 billion, making it relatively mature within the crypto market.
However, the most common USDT and USDC on the market are both centralized institutions, with their combined market share approaching 90%. Other projects also want to grab a piece of this pie. For example, the Web 2 payment giant PayPal launched its own stablecoin pyUSD in 2023 to secure a position; 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, evolving from DAI to UST, with various types of collateral and anchoring mechanisms. The development of decentralized stablecoins has undergone several iterations, with Ethena pioneering the use of cash-and-carry arbitrage + staking to generate the interest-bearing stablecoin USDe, which has a market cap of $5.9 billion, making it the third-largest stablecoin in the market. Recently, Ethena partnered with BlackRock to launch the USDtb stablecoin, which offers returns from RWA, avoiding the risk of capital rates turning negative, ensuring stable income during both bull and bear markets, and enhancing the overall product line, making Ethena a focal point in the market.
In light of Ethena's success, more and more interest-bearing stablecoin-related protocols have emerged 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? From where does their yield come? Let's have WOO X Research take a look.
Source: Ethena Labs
USUAL: strong team background, token design has Ponzi-like attributes
RWA interest-bearing stablecoin, backed by short-term government bonds, stablecoin at USD0, after staking USD0 gets USD0++, rewards in $USUAL for staking. They believe that current stablecoin issuers are too centralized, like traditional banks, which rarely distribute value to users. USUAL makes users co-owners of the project, returning 90% of the generated value to users.
Regarding the project's background, CEO Pierre Person was a member of the French National Assembly and served as a political advisor to French President Macron. The Asia-Pacific executive Yoko was a former fundraiser for the French presidential election. The project's strong political and business relations in France, along with RWA's crucial role in transferring physical assets onto the blockchain, along with regulatory and governmental support, are key to the project's success. It is evident that USUAL has strong political and business relationships, serving as a solid moat for the project.
Returning to the project mechanism itself, USUAL's token economics have a Ponzi-like characteristic, not just as a mining coin, with no fixed issuance volume. The issuance and staking of US0 (USD0++) is linked to the TVL, contributing to an inflation model, but the issuance will vary based on the protocol's 'revenue growth', strictly ensuring the inflation rate matches the protocol's growth rate.
Whenever the USD0++ bond token is newly minted, a corresponding proportion of $USUAL will be generated and distributed to all parties, and the conversion ratio (Minting Rate) will be highest at the beginning after TGE, following a gradually declining exponential curve, aiming to reward early participants and create token scarcity in the later stages, 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.
USUAL Coin price higher -> 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 stablecoin USD0's supporting assets to USDtb. In the coming months, Usual will become one of the largest issuers and holders of USDtb.
As part of this collaboration, Usual will set up a sUSDe treasury for holders of the bond product USD0++, allowing Usual users to earn sUSDe rewards while maintaining 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 exchange between USDtb-USD0 and USDtb-sUSDe, increasing liquidity between core assets.
Recently, they have also opened up USUAL staking, with rewards shared among stakers constituting 10% of the total supply of USUAL; the current APY is as high as 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, with underlying assets being a private credit asset portfolio. USDz can be staked to obtain sUSDz, which allows for RWA returns.
The underlying assets are in partnership with the US-licensed brokerage Percent, with the portfolio's risk exposure primarily in the US market, and the maximum proportion of a single asset does not exceed 15%. The portfolio is diversified with 6-7 types of assets, and the current APY is about 10%.
Partners are also well-known in traditional finance, including BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Moody's Ratings, UBS
Source: Anzen
In financing, Anzen raised $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 public fundraising using Fjord.
In terms of ANZ token design, the ve model is used, allowing ANZ to lock up and stake to obtain veANZ and share in 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, USR and RLP,
USR: backed by ETH as collateral, a stablecoin generated through over-collateralization, while RPL ensures price pegs, 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, and the amount of collateral needed 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 held directly on-chain and staked. A portion of the collateral is held by institutions as futures margin.
100% of the on-chain collateral is deposited in Lido, with the shorting collateral margin between 20%-30%, using leverage of 3.3 to 5 times, with 47% on Binance, 21% on Deribit, and 31.3% on Hyperliquid (using Ceffu and Fireblocks as CEX custodians).
Sources of income: on-chain staking and capital rates
Basic rewards (70%): stUSR + RLP holders
Risk premium (30%): RLP
Assuming the collateral pool generates a profit of $20,000:
The basic reward calculation formula is $20,000*70%=$14,000, and it will be distributed proportionally based on the TVL of stUSR and RLP
The risk premium calculation formula is $20,000*30%=$6,000, distributed to RLP.
It can be seen that RLP receives more share, but if the capital rate is negative, funds will be deducted from the RLP pool, and the RLP risk is also higher.
Recently, Resolv has 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.
Related Data:
stUSR: 12.53%
RLP: 21.7%
TVL: 183M
Collateralization Ratio: 126%
