There are roughly $350 billion worth of stablecoins circulating in crypto right now, and nearly all of them earn nothing for the people holding them.
The interest goes to the issuers. Jeremy Ng, co-founder of OpenEden, thinks that’s a problem with a clear fix.
“Tether and Circle keep all the interest,” Ng told TheStreet Roundtable in a recent interview. “By allowing (stablecoin holders) to move into a free-flowing, risk-free yield in a very composable and high utility manner, I think that makes a lot of sense.”
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OpenEden’s answer is a tokenized money market fund, one of the most straightforward products in traditional finance brought on-chain.
Ng’s case for why money market funds specifically are the right starting point comes down to fundamentals.
“It is the most liquid instrument in the whole world, and by default it is risk-free,” he said. “And you don’t have that on-chain.”
The yield isn’t some DeFi-native rate propped up by token incentives, either. OpenEden is tokenizing the actual underlying product, managed by Bank of New York as both fund manager and custodian.
“They’re managing the portfolio just like how they’re managing their own money market funds,” Ng said. “The yield is actually the same. It’s just that we tokenize it and allow it to be used on the crypto ecosystem, either as collateral or as simply a store of value.”
But money market funds are just the starting point. OpenEden has built a tokenization platform called OpenEden Atlas, designed to let asset managers, stablecoin issuers, and asset owners bring their products on-chain.
The protocol has already expanded into high-yield credit and multi-strategy yield products.
The next frontier, according to Ng, is public credit: investment grade bonds and emerging market debt.
“If you look at the traditional world, a portfolio construction of an average institution or high net worth investor is about 40, 50% fixed income,” he said. “The biggest component is investment grade bonds. You don’t see that being tokenized yet.“
OpenEden is working with several large asset managers to change that.
If traditional portfolio construction eventually migrates on-chain, the fixed income layer will need to come with it.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on Apr 9, 2026, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
