Stable Summit

The stablecoin liquidity playbook has changed. At Stable Summit IV in Cannes, Phil Fogel (Cork Protocol), Ben Haslam (Superset), Lorenzo Romagnoli (USDT0), Jackie Z. (Bridge), and Ivangbi (Ethereum Foundation) laid out why the old path of Curve pools, vote incentives, and AMM bootstrapping no longer applies. As Jackie Zhang put it, the market has shifted "from more liquidity first to more demand first" - issuers now need distribution, reserve design, and utility before chasing onchain depth. Phil Fogel made the case that DeFi still lacks real-time credit pricing: stablecoin ratings exist, but they are static snapshots, not live risk signals. The next infrastructure layer needs to bring tradfi-style credit spreads onchain so lending protocols can underwrite with confidence rather than guesswork.} Listen to this discussion on YT: https://lnkd.in/ebpDN26a

At Stable Summit IV, Romeo Ravagnan from 3F made a sharp case for why the current approach to RWA leverage on chain is fundamentally inefficient. Looping, the process of repeatedly collateralizing, borrowing, and repurchasing to build a leveraged carry trade, can take up to 30 days for a 5x position on a T+1 asset. 3F Labs has designed an auction mechanism where bridge facilitators front capital so the entire position is built in a single settlement cycle. As Romeo put it, "we want to kill looping." With Standard Chartered projecting $2 trillion in stablecoins by 2028 and crypto markets too small to absorb that supply alone, RWA collateral may be the structural answer to where stablecoin yield comes from next. Listen to the talk on YT: https://lnkd.in/dyQkxcsQ

The yield-bearing stablecoin category expanded over 200% in the past year, but the infrastructure to monitor it hasn't kept pace. At Stable Summit IV, Piotr Saczuk of stablewatch walked through how a single week in November produced three major depegs and $2.5 billion in outflows, the worst event since Luna/UST. His core argument: smart contract exploits are no longer the primary failure mode. Collateral composition drift, opaque offchain allocations, and unchecked counterparty exposure are what's breaking products now. As Piotr put it, the industry still has "no S&P or Moody's" for yield-bearing stablecoins, and market incentives aren't aligned to build one. Until that changes, operators and allocators need to treat continuous monitoring as a requirement, not an option. Listen to his full talk: https://lnkd.in/dhuTP5m9

The systemic risks panel at Stable Summit IV surfaced a sharp thesis: the stablecoin landscape is converging toward two poles. Fully decentralized, on-chain-only stablecoins with no counterparty risk on one end, and well-regulated, traditional-asset-backed stablecoins on the other. As Liquity CEO, Michael Svoboda put it, "the trust me bro zone" in the middle offers users the worst of both worlds, DeFi risk without DeFi's transparency guarantees, and no regulatory safety net either. The panel called for independent rating standards and protocol-level risk disclosure next to every deposit button, not buried in blog posts. If the industry doesn't self-regulate on transparency now, it will keep repeating the same failures. Speakers: egin33r, Solutions Architect, Yearn Cyrille Brière, Contributor, f(x) Protocol Wojtek Pawlowski, CEO & Co-Founder, Accountable Michael Svoboda, CEO, Liquity Moderator: Artem Sinyakin, CEO, OAK Research Watch the panel on YT: https://lnkd.in/dEpaJC9D

The Clarity Act won't kill stablecoin yield. It will reshape how it moves. At Stable Summit IV in Cannes, Guillaume Nervo (Co-Founder, Merkl) argued that economics, regulation, and competition all point to the same conclusion: issuers need per-product revenue distribution, not a single flat rate for every holder. In his words, the key differentiator for issuers going forward is "revenue distribution" itself. Merkl's infrastructure is already in production, having distributed over $1.5B in rewards across thousands of protocols and 5 million-plus addresses. Watch the talk on YT: https://lnkd.in/dW5RPARR

Luzius Meisser of Frankencoin Association made the macro case for decentralized stablecoins as a new credit layer. By replacing price oracles with challenge-based auctions, Frankencoin accepts collateral types traditional lenders won't: tokenized equities, gold tokens, ETFs. The result, as Meisser framed it, is "democratization of money creation" where any liquid asset can back new stablecoins and unlock financing for underserved categories. The implication is pointed: capital requirements in traditional banking don't just manage risk, they distort which parts of the economy get financed. DeFi credit protocols may be the corrective. Watch the full talk: https://lnkd.in/dMMjJXiv

At Stable Summit IV, Stani Kulechov (Aave Labs) argued that DeFi's surplus liquidity problem isn't a supply issue, it's a credit demand gap. Aave V4 introduces a hub-and-spoke architecture where liquidity is stored centrally and credit lines are issued to specialized modules that can lend against tokenized assets, payment receivables, and even raw data. As Kulechov put it, the model is "fintech in the front and Aave in the back." With integrations like Warp already bringing 21 million e-commerce users on-chain through Moonpay, Privy, USDT0, and Plasma, mainstream DeFi credit rails may be closer than most assume. Moderator: Dave Liebowitz, cap Listen to this fireside on YT: https://lnkd.in/dg5RsTBv