Traditional finance has long had a way of splitting capital from coupons, allowing investors to separate interest-payment flows from the principal. Now, a team of stablecoin and blockchain-based real-world asset (RWA) pioneers is doing the same for tokenized assets.
A new startup, STBL, emulates TradFi’s zero-coupon strip structures by converting digital assets into a dollar-pegged stablecoin and yield-bearing non-fungible token (NFT). Just as with the traditional equivalent, the components can be held separately, allowing investors to keep the part that appeals to them and sell the other bit to counterparties with different attitudes to risk.
The product, currently in beta testing, goes beyond just packaging risk into different tranches. It also widens the stablecoin issuance model. With regular stablecoins, like USDT, the issuing company, in this case Tether, keeps the returns on the Treasuries they hold to maintain the token’s peg to the dollar. It’s profitable business, Tether reported $4.9 billion net profit in the second quarter. With STBL, whoever deposits a tokenized asset into the system becomes the minter and keeps the returns.
“Our mission at STBL is to evolve stablecoins from corporate products into public infrastructure,” said STBL co-founder Reeve Collins, who was also a cofounder of Tether. “For the first time, minters, not issuers, retain the value of reserves. This is the defining shift of Stablecoin 2.0: money that is stable, compliant, and built to serve the community.”
When a yield-bearing on-chain asset — this could be any yield-bearing RWA, such as Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, BlackRock’s BUIDL or Ondo’s USDY — is deposited and locked into the STBL protocol, it splits into a stablecoin (USST) that can circulate and serve as collateral or reserves in decentralized finance (DeFi) and a separate, yield-accruing non-fungible token (NFT) called YLD.
The design is intended to remain a non-security in spirit and align with the U.S. GENIUS Act and other regulatory frameworks by separating principal from yield, said CEO Avtar Sehra, who is also a co-founder of the project and was CEO and founder of Kaio (formerly Libre Capital).
“When a user who’s already whitelisted with a Franklin Templeton or BlackRock fund locks that asset into STBL, they receive an NFT that controls the vault,” Sehra said in an interview. “You hold the NFT and accrue interest, while the stable asset can be used as collateral, as reserves, or to mint an ecosystem-specific stablecoin aligned with GENIUS Act requirements.”
In the year or so before STBL started up, Sehra and Collins were looking at how RWAs or tokenized securities could be used in DeFi; asking how they worked as collateral; how money market funds became the reserves for minting stablecoins, and so on.
There had been a view that wrapping an asset, that is taking a tokenized security and placing it into a vault, meant the asset no longer counted as a security as far as U.S. regulations were concerned. But it’s not clear that wrapping something “deviates from or extracts the security-like essence” of the asset, Sehra said.
To ensure the USST stablecoin component isn’t viewed as a security required a mechanism to maintain the dollar peg. This is achieved by ensuring it is slightly over collateralized coupled with an incentive system related to mint fees and burn credits should deviation happen in a volatile market. Sehra referred to STBL’s peg-maintenance system as “synthetic” rather than “algorithmic.”
“The reason I call it a synthetic is because, even though it has this interest-rate algorithmic component to it, it is 103% over collateralized with pure money market assets,” he said. “As a result of this novel structure, eligible participants that hold permitted RWAs can mint and burn compliant stablecoins. So while minters can hold the yield, the stable asset can be openly used without breaking the non-yield bearing requirements of the GENIUS Act. That’s exactly how STBL operates.”
The protocol’s decentralized governance token, also called STBL, has been added to Binance Alpha, Binance Futures and Kraken Spot, and will list on other spot exchanges soon, Sehra said.
The Sept. 16 debut of the STBL governance token has been lauded as one of the most successful token generating events of 2025, Sehra added. It launched at $100 million fully diluted value, and demand pushed it over $1 billion. It is currently at $1.3 billion, having hit an all time high of about $2.3 billion within 24 hours.
The next steps involve a $100 million minting using Franklin Templeton’s BENJI token, Sehra said, and also the announcement of several other partnerships, including with a U.S. based payments firm. The protocol is due to open to the public in the fourth quarter.