Ondo USDY Passes BlackRock's BUIDL: What the Small Print Says

We can't really have uh banks come in and try to kill their competition at the expense of the American consumer, right? People in America should be able to earn more money on their money.

People in America should be able to earn money on their money. Well, that's the boss of Coinbase, and it's the fight of the year. Who gets to pay you for holding dollars on a blockchain? And while the banks and the crypto firms argue about it, a crypto company called Ondo has quietly done something big. Now, its yield token, USDY, now holds more money than BlackRock's own tokenized fund called Build, about 2.3 billion dollars against 2.2.

And there's one fund still start above them, which I'm going to come to, but now a lot of people saw that and they thought Ondo beat BlackRock, so the Ondo coin must be the play.

There are three lines in the small print that change the whole picture about that, and one of them is about who actually allowed to buy it. So, there's also who's really sitting at the top of the table of single products, because it isn't Ondo's. 30-second question I'll give you to ask before you put any coin to work, and there's a link in the description. It's the first one, guys, and it has changed how a lot of people handle the big calls on coins like this. I'll tell you why, again, about halfway through this video.

So, if you're holding a proper bag of crypto, this is really about one question. The big money has worked out how to earn on its spare dollar on a blockchain.

Is your crypto doing anything, or is it just sat there? By the end of this video, my hope is that you'll have those three lines question to ask before you chase any yield, and you'll have a little bit of a better understanding and can make decisions based off what is good for you, not what you think is about to happen. Okay, I'm going to leave you with that until I get to that link. Now, this is a leaderboard most people in this corner of crypto watch. It's a tracker called rwa.xyz.

It's listed tokenized treasuries, which is the US government debt turned into tokens on a blockchain. A treasury is just a loan to the US government, and you lend it money for a few months, and it pays you interest. It's about as boring as money gets, right? Which is why the big money likes it, but even boring money moves when interest rates do. Anyone can check.

The whole market's about 14 and a half billion dollars now, and in the middle of October Ondo's yield token, it actually went past BlackRock's fund. Like I said, that's a crypto company beating the biggest money manager on the planet at BlackRock's own game. On those tokenized treasury products together came to roughly $3 billion and the yield token now runs on a whole list of networks including Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and the XRP Ledger. So, what is it? Well, here's how Solana, one of the networks it runs on, explained it back in October.

Through tokenization, US Treasuries are being brought on chain and transformed into [music] yield coins. Take Ondo Finance's USDY as an example. It's backed by US government debt and earns yield automatically reflected in the token itself. [music] This means investors can now hold real-world income-producing assets directly in their wallets.

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No banks, no middlemen.

No banks, no middlemen. So, remember that line because the small print has something to say about it. Now, the idea itself is simple. A normal stablecoin sits at $1 and pays you nothing. A yield coin like this one creeps up in value as the interest comes in.

Ondo also does a version that stays at $1 and drops extra tokens into your wallet instead. So, you get a gist of what this video's going to be about. It's going to be a bit of a long one, guys, but we are going to go real deep into this. So, I'm not a financial advisor. This is for education purposes only.

This is only my opinion. So, tell me yours in the comments. Let's get deep into this. Now, picture this. You got a decent bag of crypto, you held it through the ups and downs, and every single month it just sits there.

Wow, the shopping costs more, the bill costs more, and also the big money moves its spare cash into things that pay it while it waits. Now, the big money doesn't have cash idle overnight, right? Let alone for years. So, you know you should probably be doing something with it. I think we can agree on that.

But, every single time you look, let's say if you give me anything like I used to be, it's either some app promising a big number or something so complicated that you close the page or worse, you did hand it to one of those apps once and it didn't end the way the advert said. Now, doing this on your own is is hard and I won't even stress that it isn't. Nobody explains what's actually behind the number and the big money has whole teams whose only job is to read the small print. And that's exactly why the first link is there, right? Instead of guessing which yield is real at midnight, you've got a team reading the stuff every single week, and it starts with a short free video and a free chat about your own coins.

Now, I'll tell you properly at the end, but if this is already hitting home, then have a look. So, why is this growing so fast? Well, here's BlackRock's own boss, Larry Fink, the day after America's first Bitcoin funds opened in January 2024.

ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial market. Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset.

Step two is the tokenization of the assets. That's what was said, and two months later, BlackRock launched BUILD on Ethereum. But, who was it actually for? Well, here's the boss of Securitize, right? The firm that runs it for BlackRock a couple of weeks later.

This particular product with BlackRock is geared towards the the crypto institutions that want to have you know, a cash management product native on-chain tokenized for either treasury management or for building derivative products or collateral management, etc.

BlackRock's fund was built for the big players with a minimum of $5 million to get in, and within a couple of weeks, it had already pulled in about $218 million. Here's why those players want it from BlackRock's head of cash, Becky Milchem, on the firm's own podcast just recently.

And so, in the world of tokenization, it means that you can move very seamlessly from something such as a stablecoin, which isn't going to earn you any yield, into something like a tokenized money market fund, which has all the benefits of the traditional money market funds that they have today, but just in that tokenized form, and that can all happen instantaneously.

A stablecoin which isn't going to earn you any yield. Well, notice who she's talking about, institutions, right? Moving millions in instant, not someone with a bag on an app like me and you, and that's the gap. America brought in a new stablecoin law in July 2025. It was called, and we've all spoke about it a lot, the genius app.

And under it, the companies behind stablecoins won't be allowed to pay you interest. So, the big money parks its dollars in these yield tokens instead, and earns while it waits. And that's why the market's grown so fast, and here's the bit most people don't realize. When you hold a normal stablecoin, the dollars behind it are usually sitting in treasuries earning an interest. You just don't get it, right?

The company behind the coin keeps it. That's the fact Armstrong was talking about at the start. Banking groups have been pressing Congress to stop crypto firms paying rewards on stable coins at all, and the crypto firms say the banks just don't want the competition. And to be fair, especially to Ondo, this is a real business with while a lot of crypto runs on hype, Ondo has actually built products that hold actual government debt, and people outside America have put over $2 billion into this one. Now, that's not a meme coin, but there is a real bear case on yield in crypto, and it stings, right?

We've heard earn while you wait before in July 2022, and an app called Voyager was paying people to leave their crypto with it. And Voyager wasn't some backstreet outfit. It was listed on the stock exchange in Toronto, and it sponsored the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Now, here's CNBC on the night it shut the door.

The crypto market is falling apart right now, Frank, and the latest casualty is Voyager Digital. Voyager's big announcement today comes just a few days after the once very prominent crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital defaulted on a loan to Voyager worth more than $670 million. Now, at the time, Voyager said, "Hey, no problem. Alameda Ventures has already committed to $500 million in financing. We're all good." But clearly, that wasn't enough to keep things running as usual.

defaulted on a loan to them, and that's where Voyager's yield came from. It lent its customers coins, the hedge fund went bust, and the customers' money was stuck. Now, Voyager filed for bankruptcy days later, and a lot of customers only got part of their money back at first. People who'd been told they could earn while they waited found that they couldn't even withdraw, and many waited until the following year for a first payout. So, if anyone says yield, the first thing to ask is where it comes from, not how big the number is.

And that's the pattern. In 2022, Celsius, BlockFi, and Voyager all paid people for leaving crypto with them, and all three froze withdrawals within months of each other. So, when a crypto company says it's beaten BlackRock at its own game, well, that's the first thing to check. Where's the money coming from? Who's allowed in?

And what do you actually own? With Ondo's yield token, at least the part is written down. So, let's read it. This is on those own page for its yield token. First line is for qualifying non-US individuals and institutional investors.

So, if you're in America, you cannot buy it. Now, remember, no banks, no middleman. There's still sign-up process and there's still a door and it's shut to American buyers. Second line, what's actually behind it? Short-term US Treasuries, shares of the iShares Short Treasury Bond Fund or bank deposits.

Well, iShares is BlackRock. Ondo's other big funders held part of its money in BlackRock's build. So, the company that just overtook BlackRock is partly built on BlackRock. So, some of the money behind those token ends up with BlackRock anyway. And the third line is the one most people buying the Ondo coin never read.

The Ondo token has no role in creating and redeeming the yield token. It actually gives you no claim on its reserves, its fees, or the company. It's a voting token. DeFi Llama listed with no fee share, no buybacks, and no dividends. So, the yield token overtaking BlackRock is great news for the Ondo, the company.

Now, it doesn't automatically put a penny in the pocket of someone holding Ondo the coin. Now, that does sting a bit for holders, but it isn't the end of the story. It's a voting token, and if holders ever vote to switch on or share the fees, that changes the picture. Now, that's the vote to what? And there's a fourth thing the headline skipped.

Look at the top of that table. Circles Fund, USYC, is bigger than both of them. Ondo's yield token didn't take first place, it actually took second. And here's the catch, from that same Solana video, check this out.

Yield coins aren't a one-size-fits-all [music] solution. Even though they live on chain, they're still tied to traditional financial forces like interest rate changes and macroeconomic shifts. So, their price, unlike stablecoins, will not stay at $1. Instead, [music] the value of a yield coin will change to reflect the accrued yields over time.

So, when interest rates come down, then what do these tokens pay? It's a useful tool, but it isn't magic. Here's one for free and it takes 30 seconds. Before you put any coin to work anywhere, ask one question. Who is paying me and where does that money come from?

Well, with Ondo's yield token, the answer is written down. It's most of the US government paying interest on its debt. Now, with Voyager, the honest answer was hedge funds and trading firms borrowing your coins. If you can't answer that question in one sentence, then do not hand your coins over. That's one question.

The rest like how much to put to work, where it sits while it earns, and what you do for each drop, that all depends on your own bag. And that's the bit the team goes through with its members. So, what happened next? Well, the gap at the top of the table is tiny. One big deposit could reshuffle the order any week, so the headline could flip back.

Around half of all the Ondo coins are still waiting to be unlocked. That's about 5 billion of them, which is actually worth knowing if you hold it. An American stablecoin law is due to come fully into force in January 2027, which decides how much of this big banks and the crypto firms get to offer. Now, that's the sort of thing the research team keeps an eye on for members, by the way. Now, some of you are going, "Fair enough.

I'll just buy the Ondo coin and ride the story." You can, but the token doesn't own the money it's riding on. So, then to be fair, plenty of people hold coins for the story, and that's fine. Now, I'd just rather you knew what the token actually gives you before the next headline hits. My honest take, tokenized treasuries are one of the more grown-up ideas in crypto. Though they still carry risk, and Ondo deserves credit for what it's built.

Now, what if changes is how carefully we read the small print? Well, most people have been burned by a big number at some point, and knowing where it comes from is how you stop that happening again. If that question's going on your list, stick yield in the comments. So, quick recap, right? Ondo's USDY pass-through rocks fund, but Circle is still bigger.

USDY is for non-US buyers only. Part of what backs Ondo's products in BlackRock's own funds. And the Ondo coin gives you no claim on any of it. And that leaves you with three decisions. Number one, is your crypto doing anything while you wait?

And do you know who's paying for it? And last but not least, where does it sit while it earns? Could someone freeze it? And when would you move it in or out? Because if you haven't decided these questions, then the biggest number on your phone will decide it for you.

So, here's what all of this really shows. The big money worked out years ago how to make its spare cash earn while it waits, and it reads every line of the small print before it does. Most people holding crypto either leave it doing nothing or hand it to whoever shouts the biggest number. Not because they're daft, right? Nobody ever sat them down and showed them how to tell a real yield from a risky one.

But none of this is clever, okay? None of this is really smart stuff that someone needs to take you to university for. They just need to walk you through it once. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your bag in a video because that depends on what you're holding and what your situation is, but you don't have to work it out on your own. There's a link down below like I mentioned, and it's not that hard to start.

It's our private intelligence network, and it's for all of us. Most of what I bring you on this channel comes from inside it, and there it goes a lot deeper than I can in a video. Basically, the research team digs into where this is heading. Members hear it first. They'll show you how to get what you're already holding starting to earn it instead of just stop there, and how to check what's actually paying you before you do.

So, there's no obligation, guys. Check it out. You get to go on a call for free, and just get a little bit of information on your situation. If you want to go further than that, it's completely up to you. But, as always, stay bullish.

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