Should all money be yield-bearing?

Stablecoins and tokenized money market funds are both backed by the same underlying assets, primarily U.S. Treasury bills, yet they sit under entirely different regulatory regimes: one can be transferred freely but cannot pay yield, while the other pays yield but cannot be transferred freely.

This asymmetry is the product of legacy classification systems that predate blockchain technology, and history suggests it may not last. Ride-sharing and home-sharing platforms once operated in direct conflict with existing taxi and hotel regulations before policymakers adapted the rules to reflect how people actually used the products.

1) Market cap

• Stablecoin issuers hold reserves primarily in U.S. Treasury bills and reverse repos, assets that earn the risk-free rate. Under the GENIUS Act, issuers are prohibited from passing that yield to holders. The difference between what reserves earn and what holders receive functions identically to the deposit spread that underpins traditional bank profitability.

2) Investor count

• Stablecoin issuer revenue is a direct function of two variables: the total supply of stablecoins in circulation and the prevailing short-term interest rate. As supply grows, so does the aggregate yield captured by issuers on their reserve assets. The ongoing policy debate over whether any of this yield can flow back to holders has significant implications for the competitive dynamics between stablecoins and bank deposits.

3) Transfer volume

• Tokenized money market funds and stablecoins are both backed by short-term government securities, yet they operate under entirely different regulatory regimes. TMMFs are classified as securities, which subjects them to transfer restrictions and redemption controls but permits them to distribute yield. Stablecoins are classified as payment instruments, which permits free transferability but prohibits yield payments. Both products now increasingly settle on the same blockchain-based rails, making this regulatory distinction harder to defend and maintain.

4) Transfer count

• As stablecoins and tokenized funds continue to proliferate, more consumers will start to question why the freely transferable stablecoin pays no yield while the restricted tokenized fund does. Since both are technically tokens on a blockchain, the boundary between a payment instrument and an investment product becomes a regulatory designation rather than a functional distinction. This convergence puts pressure on policymakers to revisit the classifications that currently determine who earns the risk-free rate and who does not.

Explore the full dataset here.

Since Token Terminal’s standardized metrics went live on Binance several months ago, the scope of our work has expanded from a data integration to in-depth quarterly (and monthly) reporting.

Token Terminal has published 17 Q4 2025 reports covering sectors including lending, liquid staking, derivatives, exchanges, infrastructure, and more. Each report covers key financial and operational metrics alongside qualitative commentary from the respective core team.

We’re proud to work with teams that prioritize transparency and clear stakeholder communication.

Featured report: Sky Q4 2025

More from Q4 2025:

Reports for Q1 2026 are currently in production. If you're evaluating how to formalize your project's investor relations strategy, get in touch.

Platform updates:

• Integrated Sui with a complete set of standardized metrics, covering fees, revenue, earnings, active users, and more.

• Added 63 new asset deployments to the Ondo Finance project page. Ondo Finance now has 273 tracked products across 9 chains, spanning stablecoins, tokenized funds, stocks, and commodities.

• Expanded non-USD stablecoin coverage, including chain additions and preminted address exclusions for EURCV (Societe Generale) and EURS (Stasis). Preminted address exclusions ensure circulating market cap calculations only reflect tokens in active circulation.

• Listed Aktionariat with basic metrics. Aktionariat is a Swiss equity tokenization platform that enables private companies to issue, manage, and trade shares onchain under Swiss DLT Law.

Interested in getting listed? Read more here.

How we maintain data correctness at institutional scale

Onchain data changes constantly. Protocols upgrade contracts, rename events, and introduce new fee mechanisms. Every change is a potential discrepancy between what the data shows and what is happening onchain. We call the work of finding and fixing these discrepancies data investigations.

A team of under 20 manages petabytes of onchain data and runs over 30,000 data models daily. At this scale, data investigations come in constantly, and each one can take hours.

We built an autonomous agent that runs these investigations 24/7. It works in two phases:

• Classify and trace: the agent classifies each ticket as a data discrepancy, methodology question, or new integration request, then traces the pipeline back through every transformation layer to its raw blockchain source.

• Investigate and fix: the agent reads the protocol registry, queries the data warehouse, verifies the state onchain, and writes the fix. Every reviewed investigation encodes a new pattern.

What this enables: data coverage, depth, and quality scale independently of team size, across 100+ blockchains, 1,200+ protocols, and 3,000+ tokenized assets.

Questions about our data pipeline or methodology? Get in touch here.