Summary
DeFi activity remained healthy this week, with steady onchain volumes and continued growth across lending, stablecoins, and staking markets. Builders and institutions alike continued shipping — driving meaningful expansion across Layer 2s and deepening integrations between onchain and offchain finance.
The pace of innovation remained strong, with new institutional partnerships, product launches, and rapid TVL growth highlighting the ongoing maturity of the yield landscape.
Let’s take a closer look at this week’s developments.
Stablecoin Developments
Circle USDC: USDC is coming soon to Starknet, marking another expansion of Circle’s regulated stablecoin across high-performance Layer 2s. The launch will make it easier for developers to power DeFi, payments, and gaming applications using a natively issued, compliant dollar.
Ethena USDe: USDe-native perpetual trading is now live on Ethereal, enabling users to earn USDe rewards on their full margin balance while trading. The feature strengthens USDe’s utility beyond passive holding, and highlights the growing ecosystem of projects building natively around synthetic dollars.
Sky USDS: Demand for staked USDS (sUSDS) continued to surge. With over $3.46B in deposits, sUSDS has become the yield-bearing stablecoin with the fastest 7-day TVL growth in DeFi — up 35.6% this week. The inflows reflect rising demand for stable yield and the continued adoption of the Sky Savings Rate.
Tether USDT: Tether reached 500 million users globally — an unmatched milestone for digital dollar adoption. As the most widely used stablecoin in emerging markets, USDT’s reach underscores its role as the de facto liquidity layer for crypto users in regions with limited access to traditional banking.
Protocol Updates
Morpho: Morpho’s deployment on Arbitrum has expanded rapidly, climbing from $25M to $480M in total market size in under eight weeks, marking a 20x increase. The surge makes it one of the fastest-growing lending deployments on any Ethereum Layer 2, signaling strong appetite for efficient borrowing markets and boosted yield strategies.
Maple Finance: Maple announced a strategic partnership with Aave to bring institutional assets to the largest onchain lending network. The collaboration bridges Maple’s real-world credit infrastructure with Aave’s liquidity base, opening the door for greater institutional participation in DeFi credit markets.
Lido: VanEck has filed an S-1 for the VanEck Lido Staked ETH ETF — a proposed fund that would hold stETH, the liquid staking token from Lido. If approved, this would mark the first ETF backed by a liquid staking derivative and a major milestone for Ethereum’s institutional adoption.
Euler: Yuzu Money, the native stablecoin of the Plasma network, launched its first lending market on Euler, with over $40M in deposits already. The market, curated by K3 Capital, provides a native source of onchain liquidity for Plasma assets and strengthens Euler’s footprint in emerging ecosystems.
Build With Yield.xyz Today
That wraps up this week’s review. From Lido’s ETF milestone and Maple’s institutional bridge to the explosive growth of Morpho on Arbitrum and Yuzu’s lending debut on Euler, DeFi’s yield layer continues to evolve quickly — becoming more scalable, composable, and institution-ready.
Yield.xyz powers this growth by providing developers, wallets, and fintechs with a unified API to deliver best-in-class onchain yield.
Start building with Yield.xyz today.