USDV wants to be native on more chains than any other stablecoin

The following is a guest post from Christina Comben.

With a current market cap of just over $20 million, you’d be forgiven for not having heard of Verified USD (USDV). The newcomer in the stablecoin market soft-launched on Ethereum in November 2023 and is steadily rolling out its native omnichain capabilities to further ecosystems.

USDV is now live on eight EVM-enabled chains including Arbitrum, BNB chain, Optimism, and Avalanche. Cryptoslate sat down with Mathew Commons, President of the Verified USD Foundation and former Algorand CFO, to find out why the industry needs another stablecoin and what’s different about USDV.

Aligning with the ‘decentralized ethos’ of web3

The concept of the Verified USD Foundation originated from two organizations: Canadian-based interoperability protocol LayerZero and Matrixport, a crypto financial services company based in Singapore. Commons explains,

“They were looking at what’s needed in the future for stablecoins and wanted to take a novel technical approach to align stablecoins with the decentralized ethos of our ecosystem while still having a fully reserved-backed stablecoin.”

USDV’s governance structure differs from the legacy stablecoins, which, although Commons acknowledges have “played a very important role in getting us where we are today,” are mainly private entities with centralization risk. USDV, on the other hand, is set up as a foundation.

“We aspire to be significantly more decentralized and have community involvement,” he says.

USDV uses an attribution mechanism called ColorTrace, which allows it to track which partners bring new capital into the USDV system so the yield can be shared.

“The yield isn’t shared with the end user,” he says, “as that would make it a security and be problematic as a permissionless token, but unlike the legacy stablecoins that keep the yield for themselves, we provide a strong incentive for our partners to bring new users and capital into the system.”

The Verified USD Foundation doesn’t mint new USDV itself but provides the legal, technical, and governance framework for its partners (DeFi protocols, centralized exchanges, OTC providers) to mint it. Once a partner creates USDV, they acquire the permissionless collateral token STBT (short-term treasury bill token) which is locked into the smart contract to create new USDV, and minted in the partner’s color, allowing them to earn yield.

“If they created it, they will continue to earn yield no…