Stablecoins have gotten a lot of attention over the past few weeks, sparking conversations in the crypto world, traditional finance and regulators both on Capitol Hill and around the world. With new legislation passed and adoption happening across the global financial system, one big question remains: Has “Stablecoin Summer” already peaked?

Jeremy Ng doesn’t think so. Ng spent two decades in investment banking before breaking into crypto at Gemini, where he led the exchange to become the number one fiat on-ramp in Singapore, securing more than one-third of the market share. Two years after his work at Gemini, Ng went on to become a founder of the real world asset (RWA) tokenization platform OpenEden.

OpenEden is pushing Stablecoin Summer into Fall, Winter and Spring with its flagship product OpenDollar (USDO), issued by OpenEden Digital, a Bermuda-regulated and licensed entity. USDO is a regulated yield‑bearing stablecoin backed 1‑for‑1 by tokenized U.S. Treasury bills, held in a bankruptcy‑remote structure, that enables the yield of underlying Treasury bills to automatically flow to holders.

As stablecoins enter a new phase of scrutiny and innovation, Ng sees the path forward not in hype but in building a trusted infrastructure that connects traditional finance and crypto. This means stablecoin projects have to unlock productive capital, push for regulated and transparent stablecoins and promote real-world use cases to keep stablecoins top of mind for the seasons to come.

Passive to productive capital

When looking at the future of stablecoin advancements, Ng makes it clear that the most obvious driver is capital efficiency. “In traditional finance, when counterparties trade, they post collateral, usually dollars, and earn overnight repo rates,” he explains. “In crypto, your collateral sits on an exchange, exposed to risk, and earns nothing… That’s just a structural issue in crypto,” he continued.

The yield-bearing stablecoin model mirrors broader momentum toward “productive capital.” Tokenized money‑market funds, on-chain reverse‑repo vaults and wrapped, non‑rebasing versions of yield coins (such as cUSDO) give traders familiar cash‑equivalent instruments while keeping their working capital on the blockchain.

Yet it’s not just institution players like market makers or HFT firms, but also for those “living on-chain”. The opportunity to earn yield on dollars held on-chain mirrors the returns typically seen from real-world deposit accounts, creating a more familiar path for new entrants and a “superior product” for crypto natives.

Regulation and transparency: a catalyst, not a roadblock

When it comes to regulation, Ng didn’t shy away from being direct when discussing early-to-market, gray area stablecoins: “If they’re not backed by cash, cash equivalents or Treasuries, I consider them synthetic dollars… If the backing is lending‑based, it’s not truly stable.”

To Ng, many of those “synthetic dollars” have reached an adoption ceiling, only being accepted in the crypto world, but not in the broader world of traditional finance. Instead, those who have operated in pursuit of regulatory compliance and transparency are not limited by the adoption ceiling, and recent efforts by global regulators have rewarded the stablecoins who put these efforts first.

In Ng’s opinion, this has made regulation a catalyst for innovation, not a roadblock, and OpenEden’s efforts to go “above and beyond” in compliance and transparency has positioned the project to be a leader in stablecoin innovation.

OpenDollar is issued via a bankruptcy‑remote structure, and all reserve assets are on‑chain, allowing for transparent, real‑time proof of reserves via Chainlink. Importantly, that level of transparency is voluntary. “It's not a regulatory requirement, and other stablecoins can’t do it because their collateral is managed off-chain,” Ng told CoinDesk. By enabling greater transparency, OpenEden is furthering credibility for the entire stablecoin market by continuing to innovate ahead of regulation.

Real-world use cases, the real growth engine

The initial rise of stablecoins can be attributed, in part, to liquidity incentives and yield farming activities. But the next growth phase is being driven by the purposeful application of stablecoins, where they will be integrated into institutional trading systems, payment rails and mainstream financial infrastructure.

One of the clearest examples of this comes from OpenEden’s recent partnership with Binance and institutional custodian Ceffu. cUSDO is “the first yield‑bearing digital asset to be accepted as collateral in an off‑exchange settlement setup,” Ng says. “Institutions can remove exchange risk and earn yield on their trading collateral at the same time.”

The implication of this partnership for market makers and HFT desks is significant, removing exchange risks in a way that's both familiar to traditional markets while eliminating the potential threat of contagion events that plagued the markets back in 2022.

“This development is significant, not just because we were selected as the yield-bearing first collateral, but because it's a solution institutions have been seeking.” Ng continued, “It allows them to eliminate exchange risk – as we all saw with FTX, when it collapsed, so did the collateral held there.”

Forecasting for the future

With stablecoins making and breaking headlines over the past few months, it may be difficult to see how the recent hype and adoption cycle can be sustained beyond Stablecoin Summer. Despite the weather changing, the thermometer shows that stablecoins are only continuing to heat up according to OpenEden CEO Jeremy Ng.

Indeed, things are only getting started for OpenEden. “The crypto market is tiny, only around $3 trillion, compared to public equities at $100 trillion and fixed income markets worth multiple hundreds of trillions,” Ng stated. “That convergence is coming, and OpenEden will be the bridge between both worlds.”

Things aren’t just heating up for OpenEden: We’re seeing broader adoption and new innovations in stablecoins everywhere. The accelerated adoption we’ve seen during Stablecoin Summer is not the result of a sudden event, but the coordinated effort of stablecoin research and development over the past several years. In Ng’s words, “Adding new products isn’t hard; building something credit‑worthy and trusted takes time.”

Stablecoins have just begun to show what they can do, suggesting we’re not at the peak but only getting started in a much larger cycle. As stablecoins evolve from their static form into productive capital that operates in a transparent and regulated environment, treasury-backed, yield-bearing stablecoins like USDO will continue to be a hot topic on Wall Street and in digital markets for many seasons to come.