Most of the stablecoin market is a dollar liability that pays the issuer, not the holder. A smaller and faster-growing part of it is something else: a share in a fund that holds short-dated government paper, issued on a blockchain, where the yield accrues to whoever holds the token. For an allocator that distinction is the whole subject.
What the data shows
- The three largest tokenized Treasury products carried $3.7bn on 29 December 2025, +3,726.4% over ninety days.
- That is 1.20% of all stablecoin supply, against a market dominated by non-yielding tokens.
- The wrapper is a regulated fund share in each case, so the credit risk is the fund’s holdings rather than an issuer’s balance sheet.
- Redemption terms, not the blockchain, are what decide whether these behave like cash in a stress.
| Product | On chain | 90-day change | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|
| BUIDL | $1.5bn | −36.2% | BlackRock, through Securitize |
| USYC | $1.5bn | +110.7% | Circle, formerly Hashnote |
| USDY | $693.3m | +4.4% | Ondo Finance |
Tokenized Treasury funds on chain, combined
BUIDL, USYC and USDY circulating supply added together, daily, in dollars.
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
The balance sheet question
Every token in these figures is a liability. The useful distinction is not between stablecoins and other digital assets but between issuers: a fiat-backed token is a claim on cash and short-dated Treasuries held by a named company, and a crypto-backed token is a claim on collateral held in a smart contract and marked to a volatile market. Those are different instruments with the same ticker convention, and an allocator that treats them as one line item has mispriced the risk.
How this was measured
- Supply figures are DeFiLlama’s daily circulating series for each issuer and chain, which count tokens in circulation rather than reserves held. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before, and every figure names the date it belongs to. Circulating supply is not the same as the assets backing it: what an issuer holds against its liability is disclosed on the issuer’s own schedule, and nothing here substitutes for an attestation. Chain figures count tokens native to or bridged onto that chain, so a token bridged between chains appears once on each side of the bridge in the chain view and once in the total.
