DeFi Protocol Usual’s Surge Catapults Tokenized Hashnote Treasury on BlackRock’s BUIDL
There has been a changing of the guard in the ranks of the $3.4 billion tokenized Treasuries market.
Asset manager Hashnote’s USYC token has zoomed to over $1.2 billion in market capitalization, growing fivefold in size over the past three months, rwa.xyz data shows. It toppled the $450 million BUIDL, issued by asset management behemoth BlackRock and tokenization firm Securitize, which was the largest product by size since April.
USYC is the token representation of Hashnote International Short Duration Yield Fund, which, according to websiteinvests in reverse repo agreements in US government-backed securities and Treasury bills held at Bank of New York Mellon.
Hashnote’s rapid growth underscores the importance of connecting tokenized products to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and making their tokens available as building blocks for other products — or composability, in crypto lingo — to scale and reach wider adoption. It also shows the appetite of crypto investors for yielding stablecoins, which are increasingly supported by tokenized products.
USYC, for example, has benefited greatly from the rapid ascent of the emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Usual and its real-world asset-backed, yield-generating. stablecoinUSD0.
usually is chasing the market share of centralized stablecoins like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC by redistributing a portion of the profits from its stablecoin backing assets to holders. USD0 is mainly backed by USYC at present, but the protocol aims to add more RWAs to the reserves in the future. It was recently announced added Athena USDtb stablecoinbuilt on top of BUIDL.
“The bull market has triggered a massive influx into stablecoins, but the main issue with the biggest stablecoins remains: they lack rewards for end users and don’t provide access to the yield they generate,” said by David Shuttleworth, partner at Anagram. “Additionally, users do not gain access to the protocol’s equity by holding USDT or USDC.”
“The appeal of Usual is that it redistributes the yield along with the ownership in the protocol back to the users,” he added.
The protocol, and consequently its USD0 stablecoin, has raked in $1.3 billion over the past few months as crypto investors chase on-chain yield opportunities. Another significant growth catalyst was the protocol management token (USUAL) airdrop and exchange listing on Wednesday. USUAL began trading on Binance on Wednesday, and has largely outperformed the shaky broader crypto market, appreciating about 50% since then, per CoinGecko data.
BlackRock’s BUIDL also enjoyed rapid growth earlier this year, driven by DeFi platform Ondo Finance turning the token into a key reserve asset of its own yield-earning product, the Ondo Short-Term US Government Treasuries (OUSG) token.
