From Stablecoins to Yield: Tokenized Money Market Funds Could Win in a Post-GENIUS World
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The GENIUS Act’s yield ban has jolted the stablecoin landscape. Regulated, programmable tokenized MMFs on Concordium’s rails could be the compliant, yield-bearing alternative that bridges TradFi trust and blockchain speed.
Stablecoins have always promised a simple proposition: digital money that holds its value. But that promise has taken many forms. Some are backed by fiat reserves held in bank accounts, others are collateralized with crypto, a few are tied to commodities like gold, and the riskiest rely purely on algorithmic balancing acts. Each approach has attracted both adoption and controversy.
Perhaps, one of the most disruptive evolutions came with yield-bearing stablecoins, tokens that didn’t just sit in your wallet but actually earned interest. They proved especially attractive in the long era of near-zero bank rates. But this is now in danger of running into a regulatory wall with the passage of the GENIUS Act in the United States, a sweeping piece of legislation that has put stablecoins into a strictly defined regulatory box. From now on, in the U.S. at least, they must be fully reserved, regularly audited, and crucially, cannot pay yield directly to holders.
The Yield Ban Changes the Game
The new regulation is meant to reinforce trust in digital dollars, and it will. But it also strips away one of the most compelling features for investors and corporate treasurers alike. The market’s response has been telling. Even as the yield ban took effect, demand for yield-linked assets has surged. Protocols such as Ethena and Sky, which offer alternative ways to capture returns, have recorded rapid growth. In the weeks following the law’s passage, the circulating supply of Ethena’s yield-bearing USDe climbed 70%, while Sky’s USDS rose 23% —clear evidence that the appetite for stable, income-producing instruments hasn’t gone away, it’s simply looking for a compliant home.
That home may well be the tokenized money market fund. Unlike a stablecoin, a tokenized MMF is a fully regulated investment product. Its yield comes from traditional, short-term government securities and cash holdings—not protocol inflation or leverage. With the right architecture, it offers the stability and transactional utility of a stablecoin alongside the regulated yield of a money market instrument.
Concordium’s Role in Compliant Yield
This is exactly the space where Spiko, in partnership with Concordium, is operating. Funds are UCITS-compliant and approved by the French Financial Markets Authority. The underlying assets (cash and T-Bills) sit with a tier-1 bank, while shares are issued in registered form directly to cryptographic wallets, merging the safeguards of traditional finance with the flexibility of blockchain.
Where Concordium changes the game is in how those digital assets move and settle. As identity verification, compliance checks, and transaction execution are built directly into the Layer-1 protocol, there’s no need for external whitelisting systems or fragile oracles to manage conditional payments. For trade finance—a sector notorious for slow, costly escrows—this is transformative. With Concordium’s cryptographic locking and event-triggered smart contracts, funds can remain productively invested until predefined shipment milestones are met. GPS and IoT data can be verified on-chain, and the moment conditions are satisfied, settlement happens automatically, instantly and securely.
This approach doesn’t just preserve the benefits of yield; it enhances capital efficiency, compresses settlement from days to seconds, and delivers the kind of auditable transparency regulators around the world are now demanding. More specifically, it answers the GENIUS Act’s call for stability and oversight, while still meeting the market’s desire for return.
From Pegged Value to Programmable Finance
In the post-GENIUS landscape, the narrative shouldn’t be about the “end” of yield in digital assets. It should be about its migration away from opaque, loosely governed protocols and toward regulated, programmable instruments that can plug directly into the world’s payment finance (PayFi) and TradFi systems. Tokenized money market funds on Concordium’s rails are not a speculative bet; they’re a pragmatic evolution, built for a world where trust, compliance, and performance must coexist.
The stablecoin era has shown that money could go digital without losing stability. The next chapter will prove that digital money can also work harder, safer, and faster. And that’s a Smart Money upgrade the market and the regulators alike should welcome.
Learn more about TMMFs on Concordium.