Yield-Bearing Stablecoin
A stablecoin that passes its reserve yield back to holders, blurring the line between dollar token and money-market fund.
A yield-bearing stablecoin distributes the return earned on its backing — Treasury interest, or on-chain yield — directly to holders, rather than the issuer keeping all the seigniorage. As interest rates made reserves lucrative, these tokens proliferated, effectively packaging a money-market fund as a spendable stablecoin.
They sit in a regulatory gray zone: a token paying yield on reserves starts to resemble a security or a fund, which is exactly where 2026’s rulemaking is drawing lines. For users the appeal is obvious — a dollar that earns while idle — but the questions are the usual ones plus one more: what is the yield’s source, and does earning it change the token’s legal status where you live?