The next stage for stablecoins: from assets to services.

In the current era of rapid evolution in digital assets and blockchain finance, stablecoins have gradually evolved from being merely a "medium of exchange" to becoming the "foundation currency" of the DeFi and Web3 ecosystems. Numerous projects and users rely on this stable unit of value in decentralized trading, lending, on-chain payments, and cross-chain bridging. However, traditional stablecoins largely depend on fiat currency reserves, the banking system, and centralized custody, which brings geographical limitations, regulatory bottlenecks, and centralized risks. Thus, the new model of "stablecoin as a service" has emerged—providing services such as the issuance, management, synthesis, and combined use of stablecoins through open platforms, protocols, or ecosystems, empowering developers and projects to quickly access stable value assets.

The underlying macroeconomic drivers are clear: the global demand for digital finance is expanding, with cross-border payments, decentralized finance, on-chain asset utilization, and the creation of "non-bank" user groups becoming trends. A stable asset native to the blockchain, requiring no bank account, and freely circulating across multiple chains and protocols is becoming crucial. The bottlenecks of traditional stablecoin models are increasingly apparent, with fiat currency reserves, custody trust, regulatory compliance, and bank integration all becoming obstacles, especially since banks in some jurisdictions may simply be unwilling to support stablecoin operations. Meanwhile, the DeFi ecosystem's desire for composable and scalable assets is also driving change. Stablecoins are no longer simply "1:1 against the US dollar"; they must also function efficiently in lending, trading, derivatives, and yield aggregation, making the logic of issuance service-oriented, protocol-based, and autonomous issuance clear. Against this backdrop, service platforms that can provide "stablecoin issuance + management + ecosystem access" are becoming a significant opportunity in the blockchain finance sector.

Three major challenges facing the serviceification of stablecoins

First, there's the interplay of the "trust-custody-compliance" triangle. Traditional stablecoins largely rely on fiat currency reserves, bank accounts, and centralized custodians. For service-based stablecoins to break free from these dependencies, they must challenge the existing trust chain and rebuild a compliance model. However, in reality, banks are often reluctant to support non-traditional issuers, and regulatory frameworks like MiCAR are constantly evolving. This puts service-based stablecoins in a dilemma: either partner with regulated financial institutions or build a fully autonomous, highly trustworthy on-chain mechanism. The former implies compromise, while the latter faces dual challenges of technology and trust.

Secondly, there is the "capital efficiency-stability-decentralization" dilemma. While stablecoins aim for a 1:1 peg to the US dollar, there is a fundamental tension between capital investment, collateralization ratio, leverage, return mechanisms, and risk hedging. Over-collateralization reduces capital efficiency, while insufficient collateralization may lead to de-pegging risks, and reliance on centralized assets or institutions weakens the decentralized nature. It is difficult to simultaneously achieve high decentralization, high capital efficiency, and strong stability; often, only two of these three can be achieved.

Finally, there's a lack of mature examples of "ecosystem combination + yield model." Service-oriented architecture means stablecoins can't just be passively issued; they must be widely used in scenarios like lending, trading, yield generation, synthetic assets, and cross-chain applications. This requires the issuance protocol to have sufficient liquidity, broad accessibility, continuous yield, and a robust mechanism. However, in the history of DeFi, many "algorithmic stablecoins" have lost trust due to design flaws or collapses in extreme market conditions; UST's failure is a typical example. The market remains cautious and wait-and-see about stablecoin service-oriented architecture; no one wants to be the next victim.

Practical Examples of Stablecoin Services

In the exploration of stablecoin servitization, the issuer of USDe is providing a noteworthy answer. Its white-label stablecoin-as-a-Service model essentially modularizes and protocolizes the capabilities of stablecoin issuance, management, and profit distribution, allowing any chain, application, or wallet to quickly deploy its own stablecoin.

The core logic of this model is not complex: partners mint their own branded stablecoins through Ethena's infrastructure, obtaining most of the returns generated by the underlying collateral, while Ethena only charges a small protocol fee. Throughout the process, reserve management, audit contracts, on-chain pipelines, custody and liquidity infrastructure, and compliance framework are all provided by Ethena. Partners only need to choose the backing mix (the ratio of USDtb or USDe) to achieve issuance from scratch. Taking Jupiter's jupUSD as an example, it was initially 100% backed by USDtb (Government Bonds), and can be adjusted to USDe (delta-neutral mechanism) as needed to improve APY. MegaETH's USDm uses USDtb reserves to maintain the stability and predictability of sequencer fees. Sui Network launched suiUSDe and USDi, driving the growth of $SUI buybacks and non-EVM ecosystem DeFi.

Returning to the three major challenges mentioned earlier, USDe's issuer design offers some solutions. Regarding "trust-custody-compliance," it collaborates with regulated institutions such as Securitize and the BlackRock BUIDL Fund to incorporate USDtb, a fiat-backed stablecoin, into its system, providing compliant reserve backing options. Simultaneously, it utilizes institutional-grade custody services like Copper to manage on-chain assets, ensuring transparency and security. This hybrid approach of "partial compliance + on-chain transparency" alleviates, to some extent, the difficulties of bank integration and regulatory pressure. Regarding the "capital efficiency-stability-decentralization" dilemma, Ethena adopts a flexible strategy: USDtb follows the traditional fiat reserve route, offering strong stability but lower capital efficiency; USDe, on the other hand, uses a delta-neutral hedging mechanism (spot plus short futures) to synthesize a synthetic dollar, maintaining its peg while releasing capital efficiency and generating on-chain revenue. Partners can dynamically adjust the ratio of the two based on their own risk preferences, finding a balance among the three dilemmas rather than choosing extremes. In terms of "ecosystem combination + revenue model," Ethena's strategy is to build a shared liquidity network. Each new white-label stablecoin is not an isolated island, but rather connected to the same infrastructure and liquidity pools. USDe has been integrated into centralized exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, and Gate, and is also widely used in perpetual contract DEXs like Ethereal, yield protocols like Pendle, and lending platforms like Euler and Morpho. This "network effect" allows each new partner to add liquidity, users, and application scenarios to the entire ecosystem, thereby reducing the cold start cost of a single stablecoin.

Stablecoins are becoming a programmable financial layer.

From a broader perspective, the service-oriented approach to stablecoins represents a shift in infrastructure thinking. Traditional stablecoins are "products"—you either use USDC or USDT. Service-oriented stablecoins, on the other hand, are "protocols," providing a standardized interface and modular capabilities that allow anyone to build their own stable value units on top of it. This is somewhat similar to the evolution of cloud computing—early companies either built their own servers or rented machines from specific vendors, but the emergence of AWS and Azure made "computing" itself a callable service that anyone could use on demand. The service-oriented approach to stablecoins is doing something similar, transforming "stable value issuance" into a callable, composable, and customizable infrastructure capability. Ethena, through its integration with institutional custodians like Copper, is also bridging on-chain and off-chain connections. USDtb connects to BlackRock's BUIDL fund, and USDe connects to the derivatives market through a delta-neutral mechanism. This allows stablecoins to move beyond isolated ecosystems and become an intermediary layer connecting CeFi, DeFi, and RWA.

If the past decade was the "anchoring era" for stablecoins, then the next decade will be their "servitization era." From jupUSD to suiUSDe, from MegaETH to UR Global, what we are witnessing is not the birth of a new stablecoin, but the formation of an entire stablecoin infrastructure. Each ecosystem can have its own native USD, each application can customize its own yield strategy, and each user can obtain stable value and on-chain rewards within a transparent and auditable framework. As USDe demonstrates, stability does not mean stagnation, but a sustainable art of balance. And servitization makes this art of balance replicable, scalable, and shareable. Stablecoins will no longer be merely containers of value, but engines of financial innovation—this may be the true future of stablecoins: not the victory of a single coin, but the establishment of a new paradigm for financial infrastructure.