The stablecoin market is undergoing a major period of reassessment regarding the capture of profits generated by their collateral reserves. Currently, giants like Tether and Circle are accumulating substantial revenue—reaching hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars each quarter—thanks to interest earned on underlying assets such as U.S. Treasury bills. However, this financial windfall remains the exclusive property of the issuers, leaving the end-token holders, who are ultimately responsible for creating this value, with no direct return on investment.
In response to this, Reeve Collins, co-founder of Tether, is proposing an innovative architecture dubbed « Stablecoin 2.0 ». The core idea is to decouple the stablecoin’s payment function from the yield generated by its reserves. In this model, the primary token maintains its fixed parity with the dollar to ensure transactional utility, while the interest is redistributed to users via a second, dedicated asset. The STBL protocol already exemplifies this approach by splitting the deposit into two distinct tokens: a payment token and a yield token.
One of the major challenges in this shift lies in international regulatory compliance. Indeed, frameworks such as the MiCA regulation in Europe or the GENIUS Act in the United States strictly prohibit issuers from paying interest directly on electronic money tokens. By adopting a structural separation of financial flows, the Collins model circumvents these legal constraints while offering exchanges and their clients the opportunity to capture a portion of the value traditionally monopolized by central issuers.
This evolution is taking place within a broader context where decentralized finance (DeFi) is redefining investor expectations. Investors are increasingly seeking to optimize their idle capital through lending or liquidity provision strategies, without exposing themselves to crypto market volatility. By making on-chain revenue streams transparent, this new generation of stablecoins could durably transform digital savings management, placing the issues of financial sovereignty and value sharing at the heart of the debate on the future of the digital monetary system.