Tether Co-Founder Says Stablecoin 2.0 Will Put Reserves Onchain

Reeve Collins Says Stablecoin 2.0 Will Split Yield From Tokens

Stablecoins may be approaching their next major redesign.

Tether co-founder Reeve Collins says the industry is moving toward what he calls “Stablecoin 2.0,” where reserves become visible onchain, yield is separated from the stablecoin itself and programmable contracts determine how economic returns are distributed.

“The next generation of stablecoins is absolutely embracing the concept of stablecoin 2.0,” Collins said in an interview with Wu Blockchain. “All the collateral is transparent and on-chain. The yield is stripped, and it’s programmable.”

The shift could matter well beyond crypto trading. Stablecoins are increasingly being positioned as payment, settlement and savings infrastructure, bringing questions around reserve quality, yield and legal ownership into sharper focus.

Stablecoin Yield Could Become Its Own Product

Collins’ vision separates the stablecoin from the income generated by its underlying reserves.

Rather than automatically embedding yield into a digital dollar, returns could be routed programmatically to investors, liquidity providers or businesses responsible for distributing the asset.

“It can be distributed programmatically to those who have earned it. That’s the future of stablecoins,” Collins said.

That distinction attracted attention on X. Product Marketer at Coinmarketcap, Macro Bombastic, said, “yield separated from the stablecoin itself is the part that actually matters.” This highlights how modularizing returns could create new financial products without fundamentally changing the payment token.

Such a structure could also matter for crypto companies navigating regulation around stablecoin rewards and interest-bearing products.

Onchain Transparency Does Not Solve Every Risk

Putting reserves onchain could give stablecoin holders much faster insight into the assets supporting a token. But transparency is not the same thing as legal protection.

Head of Europe at OpenFX, Anjli Amin, pointed to that limitation, writing on X: “On-chain reserve transparency tells you what the issuer holds. It doesn’t tell you whether you, the holder, have any legal claim on it if the issuer fails.”

As she noted, insolvency rights ultimately depend on legal structures and bankruptcy law, not simply what a block explorer shows.

That distinction could become increasingly important as stablecoins attract more institutional capital. Real-time proof of assets may reduce information gaps, but investors will still need to understand custody, segregation and claims on reserves.

AI Could Push Crypto Infrastructure Into the Background

Collins believes artificial intelligence (AI) could drive an equally important change in how people interact with digital finance.

“AI is going to change the game for everybody,” he said, predicting that blockchain networks, stablecoins and protocols will increasingly disappear behind simpler interfaces.

Instead of navigating wallets, bridges and individual decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, users could eventually instruct AI systems to execute complex financial transactions through voice or other natural interfaces.

The endgame, in Collins’ view, is a global financial layer capable of moving value as easily as the internet moves information.

That is what makes the “Stablecoin 2.0” idea worth watching. The next stablecoin battle may not simply be about which token becomes largest. It could be about which architecture makes digital money transparent, programmable, and almost invisible to the person using it.