🔍Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

valuable weekly insights

Jul 02, 2026

Theo, one of the most popular tokenless stablecoin protocols, has launched its largest points campaign to date. Check it out here.

GM friends.

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

🔎Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

📊 Crypto chart of the week

🗞️ The latest DeFi news

🔎Wall Street joins the stablecoin wars

USDT and USDC have dominated the stablecoin market over the past few years.

While hundreds of other stablecoins have been released, unfortunately, no one has managed to break this duopoly yet.

But that may change soon.

This week, an alliance of 140+ TradFi giants announced they are launching their own stablecoin called Open USD.

Source: https://joinopenstandard.com/blog/introducing-open-usd/

Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and BNY are among the biggest financial institutions that teamed up to launch Open USD.

These companies obviously have massive distribution power, which is why Open USD could be a noteworthy competitor in the stablecoin sector.

Stripe, for example, could introduce exclusive Open USD integrations across its products, driving adoption at a massive scale.

Initially, when I read the Open USD announcement, I have to say I was skeptical.

Many of these TradFi companies have a long history of overcharging users with outrageous fees to maximize their profits.

But after looking closely into Open USD, two things caught my attention:

Partners (protocols integrating Open USD) receive all of the earnings from Open USD’s reserves, less a small management fee to cover Open USD’s operational costs
Businesses can mint and redeem Open USD at no cost

The profit-sharing model is especially interesting to me.

Why does this matter?

Because for a long time, Tether and Circle have captured almost all of the profits generated by the collateral backing their stablecoins, while barely sharing any of it with their users or the platforms integrating their products.

If Open USD gains meaningful market share, it could pressure Tether and Circle to share some of their profits as well in order to stay competitive.

This would be a huge win for both DeFi protocols and users:

DeFi protocols - DeFi protocols with large amounts of stablecoin deposits (e.g. Aave) could get a new revenue stream from stablecoin reserves profits instead of watching all of it go to entities like Circle or Tether
Users - Some DeFi protocols could choose to share this additional yield with their users, which would lead to an increase in DeFi yields

Just to clarify, I'm not rooting for Open USD itself to become the world’s largest stablecoin. Many of the companies behind it have spent years openly attacking crypto.

However, if Open USD succeeds in creating real competition for Tether and Circle, forcing them to adopt profit sharing, all DeFi could benefit, as I mentioned above.

More serious competition in the stablecoin sector will inevitably lead to better stablecoin products and maybe also higher yields for DeFi users.

So it’s a win-win scenario.

Ultimately, though, I'd still like to see a crypto-native issuer, whether it's Sky, Ethena, Theo, Aave’s GHO, or another crypto native protocol, winning the stablecoin wars.

Together with Theo

Theo has launched a new points program

If you’re farming DeFi yields, you probably heard of Theo at least once.

It’s one of the largest tokenless stablecoin protocols, and just a few days ago, its team released a new points program aiming to reward early users.

Here are a few things you should know about it:

The points program is centered around thUSD, which is Theo’s stablecoin backed by a delta-neutral gold basis trade strategy
thUSD can be staked for sthUSD, a yield-bearing asset with a base APR of 5.40%
The strategy offering the highest points boost is depositing thUSD in Theo’s Core+ vault, which offers a 7.2% fixed APY and 4x Theo points in exchange for locking your capital there for 6 months

If you’re willing to take higher risks to maximize your yield, another solid option is Theo’s Boost Vault with 11% fixed APY + 2x Theo points for 6 months.

This vault also comes with a 6-month lock, and it deploys user funds into a leveraged sthUSD strategy on Morpho in order to generate a return. What’s interesting about it is that the APY you get is fixed at 11% regardless of Morpho’s rates.

Overall, there are plenty of options for everyone.

With thUSD, Theo is bringing gold basis trading, one of the most popular TradFi yield strategies, on-chain.

In other news, Theo dropped a big announcement this week:

They announced a $20 million investment in FILQ, Fidelity International’s tokenized USD digital liquidity fund. This is the first time when a crypto-native platform has accessed Fidelity International’s tokenized fund offering.

Check out Theo’s new points program here!