All investors love yield, and the 3-month US Treasury bill currently sits at 4.17%. For anyone holding stablecoins, that's the benchmark to beat, since it comes without smart-contract, credit or depeg risk. But is DeFi able to compete and offer enough extra points on top to be worth the risk?
To answer that question, we took every stablecoin pool on DefiLlama with at least $50M supplied and no token incentives. That gives us 98 pools, and we compared their 30-day base APY with the bill to measure the gap in percentage points (pp).
The short answer is that DeFi stablecoin yield can be interesting, but only selectively. Half of the pools beat the bill, yet lending, which holds most of the money, usually sits around the T-bill and never pays more than about 2.3pp over it. The pools that go further earn the yield of another asset: in RWA, tokenized credit, reinsurance or preferred shares, and elsewhere in unsecured loans, basis trades or small trading books. The higher the premium, the more of that asset's risk you're buying, on top of the smart-contract risk.
Across all 98 pools, the median 30-day base APY is 4.07%, which puts the typical large stablecoin pool 0.10pp under the bill. Keeping only the ones that beat it leaves us with 48 pools. Their median premium is 1.21pp, for a yield of 5.38%, and the highest, Axis sUSDx, pays 16.06%, or 11.89pp above the bill.
The distribution shows where activity lies and, as we'll see, shapes the premium.
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