USYC and BUIDL Anchor the Yield Floor as Pendle Widens Risk Premium

7,420 pools | Median APY 1.29% | Avg 3.6%

$26.6B

LOW-RISK TVL

3.5%

LOW-RISK AVG APY

3.5%

MED-RISK AVG APY

TVL BY RISK TIER

Low: $26.6B (126 pools, 3.5%)Med: $31.6B (1912 pools, 3.5%)High: $1.3B (1068 pools, 5.7%)

WEEK OVER WEEK

Total TVL

$178.1B-$178.9M

prev: $178.3B

Median APY

1.29%+0.01pp

prev: 1.28%

Pool Count

7,420+1

prev: 7,419

Low-Risk APY

2.69%+0.01pp

prev: 2.68%

4 THINGS TO KNOW

USYC, sUSDE, USDY, and BUIDL expand the RWA reference set

USYC is $2,907,631,357 at 3.16907% APY; Ethena sUSDE is $1,430,028,111 at 4.30991%; Ondo USDY is $1,110,828,471 at 3.55%; Ethereum BUIDL is $964,950,303 at 3.56711%.

Low and medium risk yields are only 3.22 bps apart

Low risk: 126 pools and $26,630,240,524 TVL; medium risk: 1,912 pools and $31,581,478,782 TVL; spread: 0.032205 percentage points.

Pendle remains the main source of structured-yield premium

Pendle: 234 screened pools, $1,263,996,138 TVL, 12.290922% average APY, and 44.555 weighted risk score.

Tracked TVL slips $178.9M day over day

Total TVL moved from $178,309,078,921 to $178,130,161,313, a decline of $178,917,608 or 0.1003%; pool count moved from 7,419 to 7,420.

CHAIN BREAKDOWN

This is the screened named-chain view: positive APY at or below 50% and at least $100K TVL. Ethereum remains the dominant liquidity base, while Arbitrum and Monad show higher weighted rates on smaller opportunity sets.

POOLS

AVG APY

TVL

Ethereum

1470

3.6%

$36.6B

Base

303

1.7%

$7.2B

Arbitrum

151

5.5%

$2.7B

Solana

406

3.3%

$2.3B

Aptos

3.2%

$1.1B

Avalanche

4.6%

$1.1B

STABLECOIN YIELDS (AVG APY)

USDC

2.9%

$18.6B

USDS

3.7%

$7.8B

USDT

2.5%

$5.7B

BUIDL

3.4%

$3.5B

SUSD

4.2%

$3.3B

PYUSD

2.8%

$3.3B

USYC

3.2%

$3.0B

USDY

3.5%

$2.2B

Avg APY can be skewed by outliers. TVL on right.

TOP RISK-ADJUSTED PICKS

126 pools | $26.6B TVL | 3.5% avg APY

Maple USDC

Ethereum | Large low-risk TVL and a rate above the screened market floor make this the main conservative reference.

4.8%

R:20

Sky Lending SUSDS

Ethereum | A deep conservative anchor whose scale makes it useful for benchmarking more volatile rates.

3.5%

R:20

Ethena Usde SUSDE

Ethereum | A large low-risk-scored row with a premium to the conservative floor, balanced against product and stablecoin mechanics.

4.3%

R:12

Usd Ai SUSDAI

Arbitrum | A $353.59M low-risk-scored Arbitrum position with a clear premium to the conservative floor. The higher rate should be read alongside strategy, oracle, and stablecoin exposure rather than as a generic DAI benchmark.

7.7%

R:24 | $353.6M

THIS WEEK IN STABLECOINS

The Block

Aave proposes portfolio-wide cleanup of $98M in supplied reserves

Aave proposed offboarding low-adoption reserves and winding down six deployments, affecting about $98.1M in supplied assets and $15.6M in debt. The framework covers low-adoption reserves and matured Pendle positions across several deployments rather than pointing to a single incident.

The proposal reinforces the need to monitor venue lifecycle and reserve support when a high APY comes from a specialized or aging deployment.

Aave Governance

Aave reviews PT-AUSD collateral support on Monad

An Aave governance proposal reviews onboarding PT-AUSD-8OCT2026 as collateral on the Aave V3 Monad instance. The proposal cited a Pendle pool with about $5.71M liquidity, an underlying AUSD administered rate of 3.50%, and a PT implied yield of 6.92% in its snapshot.

It is a live example of how fixed-principal and yield-token structures can move from a Pendle market into a lending venue, with expiry and oracle risk becoming central to the rate.

DeFiLlama

Stablecoin market cap holds near $300.7B with USYC and BUIDL growth

DeFiLlama's live stablecoin dashboard shows total market capitalization near $300.74B, up 0.05% over seven days. USYC was up 0.07% and BUIDL up 1.17% over seven days, while USDT remained the dominant supply at about 60.84% of the tracked market.

The supply data gives context to the newsletter's large USYC and BUIDL rows: their role is growing reference coverage, even when their yields sit near the conservative floor.

OUTLOOK

Stablecoin yield is likely to remain bifurcated over the next few weeks. The screened average is 3.5586%, with low-risk pools at 3.4924% and medium-risk pools at 3.5246%, so the broad floor offers little compensation for extra complexity. The sharper premiums sit in smaller, structured or incentive-linked rows: Pendle averages 12.2909% at a weighted risk score of 44.6, while high-risk screened pools average 5.6635% on $1.35B. RWA reference coverage is expanding through USYC, BUIDL, USDY, and sUSDE, and current stablecoin supply data shows USYC and BUIDL among the positive seven-day movers. The next signal is persistence: whether RWA wrappers attract durable TVL and whether Pendle yields hold after expiry, liquidity, or incentive conditions shift.

HIGHRWA stablecoin distribution

MEDIUMLow-versus-medium risk compression

MEDIUMPendle structured-yield persistence

MEDIUMCross-chain concentration