Every few months someone announces a new stablecoin and the coverage fixates on the technology — the chain, the throughput, the partners. It is almost always the wrong thing to watch. The interesting question is never how the coin moves. It is who keeps the interest on the money that backs it.
A fiat-backed stablecoin is, mechanically, a money-market fund wearing a token. You wire a dollar to the issuer; it buys short-term Treasuries and cash; it mints you a coin that says "one dollar." You hold the coin. The issuer holds the T-bills — and the yield they throw off. At today's rates, on the roughly $190 billion of USDT outstanding, that is billions of dollars a year in revenue against a few hundred employees. Tether is, per head, one of the most profitable companies on Earth, and it sells a product it gives away.
This is not a crypto trick. It is the oldest trick in banking, and it has a name from the card world: the float. Money that sits in your system, briefly or indefinitely, earning for the operator while it waits. Prepaid cards run on float. Wallets run on float. Correspondent banks run on trapped float. Stablecoins simply industrialized it and put it on-chain.
Why everyone suddenly wants in
Once you see the float as the business, the 2025–26 land grab makes sense. The US GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying interest directly to holders — so the fight moved to structure. Exchanges pay "rewards" on balances. Tokenized money-market funds compete for the same wallet with actual yield. And at the end of June 2026, a consortium of more than 140 companies — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock among them — launched Open USD, a stablecoin explicitly designed to distribute the reserve income to the partners who bring volume, rather than let one issuer keep it all. Circle's stock fell double digits on the news.
If that pattern feels familiar, it should. It is exactly how the card networks won: they did not pay consumers, they paid the distribution side — issuers get interchange to push cards, so cards got pushed. Open USD is interchange, rebuilt for stablecoins. The rebels built a rail; the incumbents are laying track on it and arguing over the tolls.
The one question to ask
So here is the lens I use for every stablecoin announcement, and I would encourage you to steal it: ignore the chain, ignore the TPS, ignore the logos. Ask whose parked money is earning, and who is fighting to capture that yield. Follow the float and you will understand the deal every time — including the ones dressed up as technology news.