Right now, there are approximately $350 billion worth of stablecoins circulating in cryptocurrencies, and almost all of them earn nothing for the people who own them.
The interest goes to the issuers. Jeremy Ng, co-founder of OpenEden, believes this is a problem with a clear solution.
“Tether and Circle take all the interest“Ng told TheStreet Roundtable in a recent interview.”By allowing (stablecoin holders) to move toward seamless, risk-free performance in a very composable, high-utility way, I think it makes a lot of sense.“.
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OpenEden’s answer is a tokenized money market fund, one of the simplest on-chain traditional finance products.
Ng’s argument for why money market funds specifically are the right starting point comes down to fundamentals.
“It is the most liquid instrument in the world and, by default, is risk-free.“, said.”And you don’t have that in the chain“.
Yield is also not a native DeFi rate backed by token incentives. OpenEden is tokenizing the actual underlying product, managed by Bank of New York as fund manager and custodian.
“They are managing the portfolio the same way they manage their own money market funds.“Ng said.”In reality, the performance is the same. It’s just that we tokenize it and allow it to be used in the crypto ecosystem, whether as collateral or simply as a store of value.“.
But money market funds are just the starting point. OpenEden has created a tokenization platform called OpenEden Atlas, designed to allow asset managers, stablecoin issuers, and asset owners to bring their products on-chain.
The protocol has already expanded to high-yield credits 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, the portfolio construction of an average institution or high net worth investor is about 40, 50% fixed income.“, said.”The most important component is investment grade bonds. You still don’t see that being tokenized.“
OpenEden is working with several large asset managers to change that.
If traditional portfolio construction eventually migrates on-chain, the fixed income layer will have to come with it.
This story was originally published by TheStreet on April 9, 2026, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.