Ondo US Dollar Yield

What it is

USDY, the US Dollar Yield token, is a tokenised note from Ondo Finance, a New York firm that specialises in putting traditional financial assets on blockchains. Ondo describes it as the first freely transferable yield-bearing token secured by US Treasuries, and that framing captures the design goal: something that spends like a stablecoin but earns like a savings product. It launched in 2023. The memorable restriction is who can hold it: USDY is offered to individuals and organisations outside the United States, giving non-US savers token-based access to US government yield that domestic rules make awkward to offer at home.

How it works

Each USDY is a debt instrument secured by short-term US Treasuries and bank demand deposits, with the assets held through a bankruptcy-remote entity, a legal structure designed so that holders’ collateral stays protected even if the parent company fails. As of 23 July 2026 Ondo reports the portfolio at roughly 98.7 percent Treasuries. Yield accrues daily through the token’s price, which started at $1 and stood near $1.14 in late July 2026, with the advertised yield about 3.55 percent annually. Ondo also offers rUSDY, a variant that stays at $1 and pays yield as extra tokens instead. Subscriptions and redemptions run daily, including weekends and bank holidays, and after an initial holding period tokens transfer freely between wallets across several blockchains.

The story so far

USDY arrived as part of the first serious wave of tokenised Treasury products, alongside BlackRock’s BUIDL and the Hashnote fund that became Circle’s USYC. Ondo’s bet was distribution: where BUIDL restricts transfers to vetted institutional wallets, USDY was built to circulate, listing on exchanges and plugging into DeFi applications across multiple chains. That openness, within its non-US limits, helped it become one of the most widely held tokenised yield products. Ondo Finance itself, led by former Goldman Sachs banker Nathan Allman, has grown into one of the most prominent firms in real-world asset tokenisation, with a separate ONDO governance token that ranks just outside this page’s subject.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026, USDY ranks about 40th among crypto assets tracked by CoinGecko, at roughly $2.2 billion, close behind USYC at about $3.0 billion and BUIDL at about $2.6 billion. The tokenised Treasury category has become a genuine three-way contest, and USDY’s differentiator remains free transferability rather than institutional gating. Worth watching from here: how its yield tracks US interest rates, whether DeFi integrations keep widening, and how regulators in the US and elsewhere treat yield-bearing tokens sold offshore. Our crypto explainers hub sets the tokenisation trend in the context of the wider crypto market.