NEAR Protocol is planning to launch its own native stablecoin branded as USN, a person familiar with the matter told AlexaBlockchain.
The news about USN stablecoin first surfaced when Zoran Kole, founder of Zorax Capital, claimed in a Substack post that Near Protocol will announce the launch of their own native algorithmic stablecoin $USN on April 20.
In the blog post titled “The Future is NEAR,” Zoran revealed that Near Protocol’s stablecoin will offer an extremely attractive yield of around 20%. AlexaBlockchain was not able to verify the 20% APR.
“With scalable, high transaction throughput, rapid YoY developer increase, and several major upcoming catalysts: NEAR protocol is headed for all time highs.”
Zoran
Kole believes that the solid modeling and design of the stablecoin will siphon the Near ecosystem’s total value locked from other alternative layer-one protocols.
Moreover, Kole also revealed that Near will be listed on Coinbase’s exchange, which will help it drive its retail visibility. Kole believes that it will pave the way for Near NFTs to be integrated into Coinbase’s upcoming NFT marketplace.
NEAR Protocol recently raised $350 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global to accelerate the decentralization of the NEAR ecosystem. In January, the protocol raised $150 million in a seed funding round led by Three-Arrows Capital. Last month, Trisolaris, a decentralized exchange on the Near protocol, announced a strategic investment worth $4.5 million from Electric Capital with participation from Jump Crypto, Dragonfly Capital, Leminscap and Ethereal Ventures.
According to Messari, Near is the 3rd most commonly held asset by crypto funds as of Q3 2021.
Stablecoins currently account for over 9% of the total crypto market capitalization with a combined market cap of $186 billion. That figure has surged more than 400% since the same time last year. According to CoinMarketCap, there are currently 75 stablecoin available in the market.
The stablecoin market is currently dominatted by USDT which accounts for 45% of the entire stablecoin pie. Tether’s closest rival is Circle’s USD Coin or USDC with a market share of 26%.
The third-largest stablecoin by market capitalization is Binance USD (BUSD) which has a circulation of 17.6 billion tokens according to CoinMarketCap. TerraUSD (UST) has taken the fourth spot from the decentralized DAI stablecoin with 16.7 billion tokens. DAI has a little less at 9.5 billion.
Near Protocol did not respond to an email related to this development, we will update this article if we receive an official statement.
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