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Pharos

Hold short-duration Treasuries, accrue NAV daily

Regulated money-market and government-securities funds; the token is a fund share that accretes NAV instead of trading exactly at $1.

T-Bill / RWA fund tokens are the on-chain wrapper around a regulated short-duration government-securities fund. Subscriptions come in as USD or a permitted stablecoin; the fund deploys into U.S. T-Bills, overnight repos, and cash; the token represents a fund share whose net asset value (NAV) rises every day by roughly the prevailing risk-free rate. Most of these tokens are explicitly not pegged to $1.00 — they are NAV-accruing fund shares with a daily price published by the fund administrator.

Closer to a tokenized Treasury bond ETF than to a checking account. Yield is real, but redemptions run through a transfer agent (the fund's registrar of record), holdership is whitelisted, and secondary-market liquidity is thinner than in fiat-cash stablecoins.

Investors subscribe cash into a regulated fund; the fund deploys into short-duration T-Bills and repurchase agreements; STBL units represent fund shares whose NAV accrues daily from the underlying yield.01Investor cashsubscribed via fund02T-Bills + Reposshort-duration RWA03STBL unitsNAV accrues daily

How it works

The flow, step by step

  1. Investor cash

    A KYC-verified investor — typically a Qualified Purchaser (a U.S. accreditation tier above accredited investor that requires roughly $5M+ in investments) or an accredited investor — subscribes USD through a transfer agent such as Securitize or NAV Consulting. Some funds also accept tokenized USDC and convert inside the fund.

  2. T-Bills + Repos

    The fund deploys cash into short-duration U.S. T-Bills, overnight reverse-repos, and a small cash buffer. The administrator publishes a daily NAV; the on-chain token records the holder list and accretes yield.

  3. Token units

    How the yield reaches the holder depends on the wrapper, and this archetype carries two families. NAV-accreting share classes let per-unit price drift up: USDY and OUSG appreciate at the published NAV. Par-stable tokens hold the unit at $1 and move the yield elsewhere — BENJI rebases share count daily, BUIDL mints new units, and the reserve-backed $1 tokens built on the same T-Bill collateral (USDtb, USD0, frxUSD) pass yield through a separate staked wrapper or retain it at the issuer. Roughly half the coins Pharos tracks under this archetype are par-stable rather than NAV-accreting; the detail page reads the coin’s NAV flag. Redemption is bank-wire or stablecoin-out, settled at NAV for fund shares and at par for the rest.

Tracked examples

Live coins using this design

Decommissioned

Designs that broke and stayed broken

  • Mountain Protocol USDM2025-08

    Regulated, yield-bearing T-bill stablecoin licensed in Bermuda, S&P-assessed, deployed across eight chains. Peaked at $157M before the yield-bearing market commoditized. When Anchorage Digital came shopping in May 2025, the team took the exit — minting off, yield zeroed, residual tokens dumped into a Uniswap pool for whoever was left.

  • Lift Dollar2025-12

    Paxos's ADGM-regulated yield-bearing dollar — daily rebase from T-bill reserves, peaked at $128.7M on Ethereum. Wound down to consolidate around USDG and the Global Dollar Network. Minting ceased October 2025; rebasing stopped December; balances auto-converted to USDG. A clean regulated exit, not a failure of the design.

  • Verified USD2024-12

    Omnichain stablecoin backed by tokenized T-bills via Matrixport's STBT. The Verified USD Foundation ceased support on December 31, 2024 and began removing tokens from circulation. The fund-wrapper layer never gained traction independent of larger T-bill issuers.

Full obituaries, peak market caps, and post-mortems in the stablecoin cemetery.

Where the design fails

Known failure modes

Duration mismatch in a yield-curve shock
Short-duration Treasury funds still carry mark-to-market risk. A sharp jump in short rates pushes T-Bill prices below par; the fund recovers at maturity, but redemption pricing during the shock is at the depressed NAV.
Redemption gating and transfer restrictions
Fund shares are securities, not cash: transfers are restricted to whitelisted addresses, and primary-market redemption can be paused, queued, rate-limited, or settled T+N. The par-stable tokens built on the same reserve usually transfer freely, but their mint and redeem rails stay permissioned, so the same gating applies at the exit. Terms are per-issuer and have to be read per-issuer — OUSG, for one, advertises instant redemption while its own docs set 24-hour global and per-investor caps, allow instant redemption to be limited by available USDC liquidity, and expose paused-redemption states for integrators. A daily-NAV ticker does not turn a permissioned claim into cash.
Custodian and fund-administrator failure
The token is only as good as the off-chain legal claim. BNY Mellon custodies BUIDL; Anchorage Digital Bank — an OCC-chartered national bank — issues and holds USDtb's reserves. If the custodian is impaired, or the transfer agent fails, the on-chain token becomes a claim on a frozen legal structure.
Bridge layer mismatch
Several products keep the fund-share registry on a single chain and bridge token representations via LayerZero OFT or another third-party bridge. A bridge failure can suspend cross-chain transfers without affecting the underlying fund.

Variations

Sub-flavors within the archetype

Tokenized money-market funds with stable $1 NAV
BENJI and similar share tokens operate as $1-stable funds where yield is paid out by rebasing share count. UX looks fiat-cash; the legal wrapper is a fund.
NAV-accreting fund shares
USDY, OUSG, and USYC let per-unit price drift up over time. Pharos flags these as NAV tokens and shows "NAV" instead of bps on peg-deviation tables — price drift is signal, not depeg.
Hybrid yield-bearing stablecoins
USDtb (Ethena) and the M0-built family use T-Bill reserves to back a token that does target $1. The exit rail differs from a pure NAV token; the reserve mechanics are the same.

What to watch on Pharos

Signals that matter most

  1. 01

    NAV-tag treatment on the peg table — coins flagged as NAV tokens show "NAV" rather than bps in the peg-deviation column, because per-token price is supposed to drift.

  2. 02

    Reserve composition on the detail page — these should be majority very-low-risk (Treasuries, repos, cash). Anything else is unusual.

  3. 03

    Redemption Backstop route family — most NAV tokens show off-chain issuer routing with bank-wire settlement; watch the settlement delay, daily redemption cap, minimum redeem size, and holder eligibility tier.

  4. 04

    Yield Score (PYS) on /yield — PYS rewards consistent Treasury-derived yield over reward-heavy or single-source-dependent venues.

  5. 05

    DEWS exclusion for NAV tokens — DEWS skips fund-share tokens; the closest equivalent stress signal is the Redemption Backstop snapshot and issuer reserve cadence.

  6. 06

    Proof-of-Reserves attestor tier and cadence on the detail page — Big 4 with daily NAV is the gold standard for tokenized funds; niche attestors are acceptable but slower to respond.

Tracked universe

42 tracked stablecoins in this archetype

See all in the screener

Case studies

When this mechanism met a stress test

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