As of the end of January 2026, the total stablecoin market cap is at $305B. While stablecoins have won the "utility war” - surpassing Visa’s annual volume and increasingly becoming the internet’s primary payment rail - they are losing the "capital efficiency" war.
The industry is currently defined by "Lazy Money". Most stablecoins operate under a narrow bank model: issuers take user fiat, purchase yield-bearing assets like T-bills (currently yielding 3.62%), and retain 100% of the interest. The user holds the risk and gets the utility, while the issuer captures the productivity.
This misalignment creates a massive hidden tax on users. Approximately $270B of the total stablecoin market cap is accounted for by centralized issuers among the top 30 players. The estimated interest gifted back to these centralized issuers is approximately $9.7B per year, or roughly $814M per month.
Despite the rise of yield-bearing alternatives, they remain a marginal force, accounting for just $20B of the total supply. Consequently, the vast majority of on-chain USD remains fundamentally unproductive.
The current yield bearing stablecoin solutions face structural constraints:
Solving these constraints requires shifting from a staking model to a native infrastructure model - enabling yield to flow into existing stablecoin tranches without changing the token ticker or liquidity profile.
While the $300B stablecoin sector represents a massive total addressable market (TAM), the immediate opportunity for pluggable productivity lies in specific zones where capital is trapped by legacy technical constraints.
Current data shows an aggregate crypto treasury composition of $11B, of which roughly $1.1B (10%) is held in stablecoins. For the vast majority of DAOs, these stables are dead weight on the balance sheet.
MetaDAO provides a case study of this treasury drag. The DAO holds approximately $26M in idle USDC - part of it is used as monthly spend by projects launched on Metadao. At a target yield of say 5%, the DAO is effectively forfeiting $105k per month in potential revenue (which can then be redistributed to the protocols themselves or kept within MetaDAO itself).
Beyond treasuries, a massive tranche of idle capital is locked within Decentralized Exchange (DEX) liquidity pools.
Looking at some select DEXs on Solana and Ethereum, the total unproductive stablecoins (i.e. the stable side of a LP pool) is over $1.2B. In the Solana ecosystem alone, looking at Raydium and Orca, there is at least $583M in potential productive stable TAM within AMM LP positions.
Current LP models treat the stablecoin leg as a passive counterparty asset. These stable legs typically earn negligible base APYs (often 0.02% to 0.04%) from swap fees alone. Transitioning these pools to "Boosted LPs" via a productive stablecoin would allow providers to capture a base yield on top of existing trading fees, fundamentally altering the unit economics of providing liquidity.
A third, rapidly expanding sector for productive stables is the crypto-neobank market. Based on a 30% retention rule - where users maintain an average daily balance to facilitate spending - current idle capital across crypto neobank platforms is estimated at $180m.
With monthly crypto card volumes over $100M in January 2026, the idle float in user spend-balances represents a multi-million dollar yield opportunity currently lost to the lazy tax.
While legacy models allow issuers to capture this interest or leave it on the table for regulatory compliance, a pluggable infrastructure model routes this network-generated yield back to the user. This transforms a static prepaid balance into a self-growing income asset.
Unlocking this value requires a shift from 'money as a token' to 'money as infrastructure’.
Early decentralized attempts to make stables productive, such as Usual Money, relied on a governance incentive model. This approach proves there is massive demand for productive assets - Usual reached $1.8B in TVL at its peak and broke into the top 15 stablecoins within months - but it ultimately failed.
The core failure was a decoupling of value: while the collateral remained stable, the yield was paid in the protocol’s native governance token ($USUAL). This tied the dollar’s "productivity" to a volatile, inflationary asset rather than organic revenue. When the token price fluctuated, the yield became unpredictable, triggering a bank-run that culminated in the USD0++ bond depegging to $0.87 in early 2025. It proved that for a stablecoin to function as true money, productivity must be an inherent property of the asset, not a bribe paid in risky equity.
A more direct approach emerged with HyENA, a collaboration between Ethena and Hyperliquid that serves as a prime example of the "Productivity Meta" within the perps ecosystem. By integrating USDe as the native margin asset, HyENA converts what has historically been dead capital into a reward-bearing engine.
In a typical perpetual DEX, the billions of dollars backing trades sit idle; HyENA vertically integrates the yield, allowing traders to earn native sUSDe returns on their collateral while simultaneously maintaining their market positions.
With Hyperliquid on average processing $250B-$300B in monthly volume, the TAM for "productive margin" is theoretically significant - if only 20% of the platform’s $5B in open interest migrated to yield-bearing margin, it would unlock $1B in newly productive stables.
However, the model is fundamentally a walled garden. Because it is restricted to USDe, users are forced to accept the specific synthetic risk of Ethena and trade exclusively within the HyENA venue. This makes it a localized high-performance tool rather than a universal standard i.e. still doesn’t solve the existing lazy money problem - especially for the aforementioned high-value target zones.
Solomon represents a fundamental shift in the productivity meta from localized vertical solutions to a horizontal infrastructure layer. By acting as a Yield-as-a-Service (YaaS) engine, Solomon addresses the stablecoin market not as a series of fragmented "yield islands" (like specific perp DEXs or reward tokens), but as a unified $300B+ asset class.
The core unlock is the removal of the migration friction: instead of forcing users to wrap assets or bridge to new venues, Solomon’s pluggable rails allow existing treasuries, DEX LPs, and neobanks to accrue native background yield while maintaining their original tickers and liquidity profiles
The integration with Oro Finance serves as the definitive proof of concept: within just one week of launch, historically "dead" stablecoin LP legs were transformed into productive assets earning a 59% APY- all without altering the underlying user experience.
By moving the yield from the app to the infrastructure, Solomon targets the entirety of the idle stablecoin TAM, making productivity an inherent property of digital dollars rather than a reward for specific, high-friction actions.
While infrastructure-led models offer a path to unlocking idle capital, they face a steep integration tax. As of early 2026, USDT and USDC still command over 85% of total market share, as deep liquidity and established trust create a formidable barrier to entry for any new ticker.
For horizontal yield engines, scaling depends entirely on partnership velocity - getting whitelisted as collateral or integrated into core payment gateways that have historically treated stablecoins as non-productive settlement tools.
The ultimate trajectory of the market depends on whether legacy issuers can evolve their revenue models to share reserve yields before the efficiency gap becomes too large to ignore. While central bank rates are expected to continue their gradual decline toward 3.25% throughout 2026, the era of "free money" for issuers at the expense of holders is ending.
As capital efficiency becomes a core competitive metric, DAOs, Neobanks, and DEXs face a growing opportunity cost by remaining on non-productive rails. In this environment, the friction of migrating to yield-native infrastructure is rapidly becoming less expensive than the cumulative cost of maintaining static, non-earning balances.
