Spend the Dollar, Keep the Yield: USST Arrives on Stellar

Stellar has a new stablecoin. STBL, the "Stablecoin 2.0" protocol co-founded by Tether co-founder Reeve Collins, has brought native USST minting to the network, and its pitch is unusual: spend the dollar, keep the yield. The dedicated app is live at stellar.stbl.com, where it states that reserves are verified on-chain through Soroban smart contracts. USST is one of the newer real-world-asset dollars to settle on Soroban, and its short history is worth knowing before you use it.

What separates USST from a plain cash-and-Treasuries wrapper like USDC is that it splits the dollar from the interest it earns. STBL runs a three-token model:

• USST is the spendable, USD-pegged stablecoin, for payments, trading, and DeFi.
• YLD is a yield-claim token, issued as an NFT, representing the right to the interest thrown off by the assets backing USST.
• STBL is the protocol's governance and value-accrual token, fed by staking and fee-funded buybacks.

The backing is tokenized short-term US Treasuries, with Ondo Finance's regulated USDY as the primary collateral. A user locks approved RWA collateral, the protocol mints USST plus a YLD claim, and the underlying assets keep earning while the USST circulates as an ordinary dollar. You can hold or spend the stablecoin and still collect the yield later, either claiming the accrued interest or letting it compound. STBL, created by Collins and Dr. Avtar Sehra, frames the wider goal as "Ecosystem Specific Stablecoins": partners issue their own branded, compliant dollars on shared infrastructure.

USST did not start on Stellar. It launched as an EVM asset on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, moving cross-chain via Wormhole NTT, and STBL's Q1 2026 roadmap slated the Stellar deployment for March 2026 alongside Solana. Two details about the Stellar build stand out. First, the app says reserves are "verified on-chain via Stellar Soroban contracts." For an RWA stablecoin whose credibility rests on the collateral actually being there, on-chain reserve verification is a meaningful design choice. Second, the chain suits the product: Stellar's low fees, fast settlement, and established anchor and on/off-ramp network are what a spendable stablecoin needs. A dollar meant to be spent fits a chain built for moving money.

The launch page skips the most important context, which is USST's own record. "Backed by Treasuries" and "deeply liquid" are separate promises, and the token has already tripped on the second. When USST first launched on Curve in October 2025, it fell to about $0.96 within hours. The reported cause was thin liquidity, only about $965,000 in Curve pools at launch. The Ondo collateral behind it was not the issue. The STBL governance token has its own baggage. In September 2025, the analytics firm Bubblemaps flagged the top five STBL traders as suspiciously interconnected, with collective profits above $10 million, though it found no evidence linking them to the core team. STBL then fell more than 80% from its highs. USST the stablecoin and STBL the volatile governance token are separate assets, and conflating them would be a mistake, but both episodes are on the record. The team's fixes — automated peg management through a Hypernative integration and a fee-funded STBL buyback — read as an acknowledgment that the first version needed work.

None of this is disqualifying. RWA-backed dollars with credible Treasury collateral and on-chain reserve proofs are the kind of infrastructure the ecosystem should want, and Soroban gives USST a place to demonstrate its reserve claim in a way its EVM debut could not. The open questions are practical ones. Liquidity depth comes first: the original depeg was a liquidity failure, so the test on Stellar is how deep and resilient USST's markets become. Institutional demand comes second: STBL has announced large minting commitments, including a reported $100M partnership with Franklin Templeton in 2025, and whether that interest follows USST onto Stellar is still unproven. The biggest question is whether the Ecosystem Specific Stablecoin ambition lands on Soroban at all. If partners begin issuing branded dollars on these rails, this quiet launch is the start of something much larger.

For now, USST is another yield-bearing, RWA-backed dollar in Stellar's growing stablecoin lineup, paired with something Stellar is well suited to prove: that a stablecoin's reserves can be checked on-chain, in real time, on Soroban. The collateral looks solid. The liquidity is the open question.

Sources: STBL Stellar app (stellar.stbl.com); STBL Q1 2026 roadmap (Bitget News); "What Is STBL? Guide to STBL Token and USST Stablecoin" (OSL); USST depeg coverage (The Defiant); STBL token / Bubblemaps coverage (Yellow.com, PANews); Franklin Templeton partnership (Cryptopolitan); Soroban background (Stellar).