What are yield coins? Yield bearing assets explained originally appeared on TheStreet.

Tokenization isn’t just for stablecoins. Ian De Bode, chief strategy officer at Ondo Finance, coined the term “yield coins” to describe tokenized treasury funds that pay daily yield.

In an interview with TheStreet Roundtable, De Bode explained that while stablecoins tokenize cash for global 24‑7 access, they typically don’t pay out interest and have uneven investor protections.

Yield coins address that gap by combining safety with automatic yield distribution.

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“Yield coins is a term that we coined for any tokenized treasury fund,” De Bode said. Two of Ondo’s flagship yield coins are OUSG and USDY.

OUSG is a 3(c)(7) fund offered to qualifying purchasers and accredited investors worldwide. Investors onboard via a simple KYC process, deposit stablecoins and mint OUSG tokens 24‑7. Each token represents a share in U.S. Treasuries held in reserve and can transfer peer‑to‑peer among approved wallets.

USDY is a continuous‑registration fund for non‑US investors. It behaves more like a stablecoin — quasi‑permissionless on secondary markets — yet automatically reinvests its yield into more Treasury holdings.

Both products let users “park their cash on‑chain and still earn yield on it on a daily basis,” De Bode noted, while maintaining industry‑leading reserve disclosures and legal structures.

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Traditional Treasuries run on financial rails with cut-off times: if you miss the daily window, you forfeit that day’s interest. Yield coins operate on blockchain rails, so subscriptions settle instantly and begin accruing yield the moment tokens mint.

De Bode explained, “You can subscribe to our funds 24‑7 via stablecoins on chain the moment the subscription hits, which is instantly on crypto rails.”

Once minted, yield coins can engage with decentralized finance. Investors may use OUSG or USDY as collateral for repo transactions or margin loans over weekends — capabilities unavailable to on‑chain holders of traditional Treasuries.

Yield coins derive their yield by investing deposits into underlying Treasury instruments and tokenized Treasury funds — such as BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and Franklin Templeton’s Benji fund — and reinvesting the interest back into reserves.

Currently, OUSG yields about 4.1% and USDY about 4.29%.

De Bode likened the relationship between stablecoins and yield coins to checking versus savings accounts. Stablecoins remain the primary liquidity pairs in crypto trading, offering instant on‑ramps and off‑ramps without yield.

Yield coins, by contrast, serve as a savings vehicle — letting users earn the risk‑free rate on‑chain until they need liquidity again.

He advised that investors choose instruments based on need: “It sometimes is still helpful to just have cash lying around that you can very easily send to other individuals without necessarily having to earn interest on it.”

OUSG requires accredited or qualified‑purchaser status while USDY is open to non‑US investors. Onboarding involves a brief compliance check, after which users can mint or burn tokens via stablecoins or traditional wires.

By tokenizing Treasuries with built‑in yield and robust investor protections, yield coins offer a simple, flexible way to earn interest and access DeFi.

As De Bode puts it, “Until we tokenized our tokenized Treasury funds, it was very difficult to essentially earn the risk‑free rate on chain.” With yield coins, that is now a reality.

What are yield coins? Yield bearing assets explained first appeared on TheStreet on Jul 30, 2025

This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jul 30, 2025, where it first appeared.