Onchain yield markets close the week of March 13th with a clearer picture of where institutional capital is settling. USDC transaction volume has overtaken USDT year-to-date for the first time since 2019. Aave crossed $1 trillion in cumulative loan originations. Lido expanded its product surface with its first stablecoin vault. And Sky tightened its token economics while continuing to grow USDS credit infrastructure.
This week's headlines reinforce a pattern that has been building for months: compliant, curated infrastructure is pulling capital away from legacy venues. The protocols capturing that capital are spread across dozens of chains and integrations — and that's exactly the problem Yield.xyz is built to solve.
Stablecoin Developments
Circle (USDC): USDC hit a new all-time high circulation of $78.25 billion this week after Circle minted $600 million across Ethereum and Solana. Year-to-date USDC transaction volume has reached $2.2 trillion, compared to $1.3 trillion for USDT, flipping Tether on adjusted volumes for the first time since 2019.
Tether (USDT): USDT supply holds above $184 billion, maintaining its position as the largest stablecoin in crypto by market cap. Lending yields on USDT range from roughly 2% on Aave's Ethereum markets to 6–7% on newer venues. MiCA non-compliance has continued to drive delistings on European exchanges, with institutional demand in regulated markets migrating toward USDC and compliant alternatives like syrupUSDT.
Sky Ecosystem (USDS): Sky executed a governance proposal this week that tightened staking emissions and expanded USDS lending infrastructure. Two new Launch Agents were onboarded to expand USDS lending markets. The Sky Savings Rate holds at 4% APY, with Sky-curated Morpho vaults offering additional yield for sUSDS and related deposits.
Ethena (USDe): sUSDe yield continues to offer approximately 3.5% APY as perpetual futures funding rates have softened alongside broader risk-off conditions. USDe supply holds near $5.9 billion across 23 chains. Pendle LP strategies continue to offer structured exposure to sUSDe, and the token remains widely used as collateral on Morpho and Aave.
Maple Finance (syrupUSDC / syrupUSDT): Maple's institutional momentum continued through the week. syrupUSDC asset transfer volume doubled over the past month to approximately $5 billion, active loans grew 8.4% to $2.4 billion, and total TVL reached $3.2 billion — a 21% gain over the period. syrupUSDC generates approximately 4.5% APY via institutional lending to crypto-native borrowers.
Protocol Developments
Morpho: Morpho TVL grew 6% this week to approximately $6.8 billion, ranking it in the top 10 protocols by TVL and second among lending protocols. Growth is being driven by continued inflows into curated stablecoin vaults on Ethereum, Base, and HyperEVM. Sky's newly launched Morpho vaults are accumulating quickly, with active incentives pushing headline yields around 5% APY.
Aave: Aave crossed $1 trillion in cumulative loan originations this week, becoming the first DeFi protocol to reach that scale. TVL sits at approximately $26.5 billion across 16+ networks. Aave V4, which introduces a hub-and-spoke architecture for cross-chain liquidity unification, remains in final audit phases.
Lido: Lido launched two new Earn vaults this week: EarnUSD, its first stablecoin vault accepting USDC and USDT deployed across DeFi strategies on Aave, Uniswap, and Morpho; and EarnETH, which accepts ETH, WETH, or stETH and deploys across similar venues. Both return yield-bearing tokens to depositors. Lido DAO is seeding the vaults with $5 million from its treasury and has committed to covering losses if anything goes wrong. Soon after launch, the Earn product now holds over $150 million in deposits.
Drift: Drift remains one of the most active yield venues on Solana, with earn rates on SOL in the 5–6% APY range and liquid staking tokens like jitoSOL and mSOL offering 8%+ APY through mSOL and jitoSOL. This week, Drift launched PAXG-PERP, bringing gold perpetuals to Solana's derivatives suite, an extension into commodity exposure that reflects the broadening of Solana DeFi beyond core crypto assets.
Build With Yield.xyz Today
The yield stack is growing faster than any single team can maintain integrations for. Morpho has live deployments on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, HyperEVM, and multiple other networks. Aave spans 16+ chains. Maple is live on Ethereum, Solana, and expanding to BNB Chain. USDC is natively issued across 32 networks. Any application looking to offer users access to this landscape — without building and maintaining direct per-protocol, per-chain integrations — faces a compounding engineering problem that grows with every new launch.
Yield.xyz provides a single API covering 2,800+ yield opportunities across 80+ networks. The platform standardizes staking and lending transactions, automates reward compounding, handles cross-chain yield delivery, and gives wallets, custodians, and applications access to the full onchain yield stack without managing individual integrations.
One integration, unlimited scale. Get started at Yield.xyz