Usual USD

What is Usual USD?

Usual USD (USD0) is an ERC‑20 fiat-referenced stablecoin issued by the Usual protocol and designed to maintain a 1:1 backing against U.S. dollar value by holding short-duration, liquid real‑world assets (primarily tokenized U.S. Treasury exposure) rather than relying on commercial bank deposits.

The core problem it targets is stablecoin credit and banking-system fragility, and its intended moat is a “bankruptcy-remote” reserve architecture coupled with on-chain mint/redeem controls, public collateral reporting, and a protocol design that routes a portion of monetization back to on-chain stakeholders rather than concentrating economics at an issuer.

The project’s own materials frame USD0 as an RWA-aggregating stablecoin, with minting constrained by a 1:1 backing ratio and redemption implemented as an on-chain burn against the collateral module, while also acknowledging explicit compliance tooling (notably blacklisting) inside the token stack as part of operational reality for a fiat-referenced asset.

In market-structure terms, USD0 is best understood less as a “payments stablecoin” competing directly for merchant rails and more as a DeFi collateral and cash-management primitive competing for balance sheet share inside on-chain money markets, liquidity pools, and structured vaults.

As of early 2026, third-party market data sources place USD0 among larger cryptoassets by market capitalization ranking (with CoinGecko reporting an approximate top‑100 position at the time of capture), while protocol TVL metrics tracked by DeFi analytics sites show Usual’s secured value in the low-to-mid hundreds of millions of dollars, concentrated on Ethereum, with meaningful protocol fee and revenue lines relative to its size—signals that the product has found some distribution in DeFi beyond pure exchange float.

Who Founded Usual USD and When?

USD0 emerged from Usual as part of a broader “RWA-backed stablecoin plus value-redistribution” thesis that accelerated in the post‑2022 stablecoin credibility reset and alongside the 2023–2025 growth of tokenized Treasury collateral as a DeFi building block. Public disclosures emphasize the protocol/DAO framing and product suite (USD0 as the stable core; bonded/locked variants for yield distribution; USUAL as governance/revenue exposure), and the project has disclosed institutional venture participation around a December 23, 2024 Series A raise led by major industry investors, which is relevant context because RWA stablecoin execution typically requires a hybrid of on-chain engineering and off-chain reserve operations.

However, the identity of “founders” in the traditional sense is not consistently presented in the project’s primary documentation in a way that is as crisp as older L1 projects; for institutional diligence, that usually implies extra work: validating corporate entities, control over admin keys, and governance/role separation, rather than relying on brand-level messaging.

Narratively, Usual’s positioning has evolved from “a new stablecoin” into a multi-token system explicitly separating stability (USD0), duration/yield commitment (formerly USD0++, later reworked), and governance/revenue rights (USUAL and its staking/locking wrappers). A concrete example of this evolution is the protocol’s migration away from a monolithic “locked stablecoin” concept (USD0++) toward a bond-style construct (bUSD0) plus a separable redemption-right token (rt‑bUSD0), which is a meaningful design pivot: it turns liquidity preference into a market for redemption optionality rather than forcing a single price-floor mechanism to do all the work.

How Does the Usual USD Network Work?

USD0 does not run its own consensus network; it inherits security from the underlying blockchains it is deployed on (Ethereum and multiple EVM chains), and the relevant “network” for risk analysis is therefore the combination of base-layer finality, bridge and adapter infrastructure (where applicable), and the Upgradable Proxy + admin role architecture of the token and collateral contracts.

On Ethereum, the USD0 contract is deployed behind a transparent upgradeable proxy pattern (as visible on chain explorers), which is standard for actively developed DeFi systems but introduces a governance/key-management trust surface that differs from immutable ERC‑20 deployments.

Mechanically, the protocol describes USD0 minting as being constrained by collateralization enforcement—minting is only permitted if the DAO treasury’s RWA holdings satisfy or exceed the 1:1 backing ratio—and redemption as an on-chain burn against the collateral module, with an explicit redemption fee (documented at 0.10%) intended to mitigate certain classes of attack and to fund protocol operations.

From a security standpoint, the design’s most distinctive (and institutionally consequential) technical feature is not sharding or ZK verification but rather explicit compliance and control hooks: the token stack includes a blacklist function and states that it enforces sanction screening, which means USD0 is closer in practice to USDC/USDT than to censorship-resistant crypto-collateralized dollars, even if the reserve composition is positioned as “banking-independent”.

The project also maintains a substantial audit trail across multiple vendors and time windows, which is relevant because proxy-based systems can change materially across upgrades and because vault/router logic tends to be the most failure-prone surface area.

What Are the Tokenomics of usd0?

USD0’s “tokenomics” are structurally different from typical cryptoassets: as a fiat-referenced stablecoin, supply is primarily demand-driven and should be expected to expand/contract with net minting and redemption rather than follow a pre-committed emission schedule. In that sense, USD0 is economically inflationary in quantity when adoption grows, but not designed to be inflationary in purchasing power; any credible analysis therefore focuses less on max supply and more on the enforceability and transparency of the backing, the liquidity of the collateral, and the friction (fees, gating, settlement latency) around primary issuance/redemption.

Usual’s technical documentation asserts a hard 1:1 collateral constraint for minting and describes redemption via burning, with a stated redemption fee, implying that peg behavior is partly a function of arbitrage incentives versus fee drag and any operational constraints on collateral conversion.

Value accrual for USD0 itself is intentionally minimal—holders are not meant to receive protocol cash flows simply for holding the stablecoin—so the more relevant “tokenomic” question is how Usual splits economic surplus among its adjacent assets and modules. Usual’s design routes yield/ownership incentives into non-stable instruments such as bUSD0 (bonded USD0 with maturity) and USUAL (governance/revenue exposure), with bUSD0 distributing USUAL rewards and, after protocol changes, separating early-exit optionality into rt‑bUSD0; this is best interpreted as an attempt to (a) keep USD0 peg mechanics clean and (b) move “who gets the carry” into explicitly opt-in duration risk.

The protocol has also documented mechanisms around early exit and associated contributions that are partially burned and partially redistributed, which functionally resembles a fee-funded stability and long-term alignment scheme rather than a reflexive seigniorage model.

Who Is Using Usual USD?

On-chain usage for USD0 should be separated into three buckets: passive exchange float (speculative or convenience holdings), DeFi collateral utility (borrowing/lending, LPing, margin), and protocol-internal transformations (staking/locking into bUSD0 and vault strategies). As of early 2026, Usual’s tracked TVL and fee metrics indicate that the protocol is not purely a thinly traded wrapper; it generates measurable fee and revenue streams, suggesting meaningful utilization of the reserve-bearing structure, redemption pathways, and associated earn products rather than only secondary-market trading.

Meanwhile, the Usual app surface explicitly positions USD0 as the stability leg feeding into “earn modes” and liquidity opportunities, reinforcing that the expected user base is DeFi-native allocators rather than retail remittance users.

For institutional or enterprise adoption, the public record supports a cautious interpretation: there is clear evidence of venture participation and ecosystem connectivity, but fewer hard, independently verifiable disclosures of bank-grade distribution partnerships than would be typical for mainstream payment stablecoins.

The most defensible “institutional” signals are (a) the RWA substrate itself, which depends on regulated tokenized Treasury products and professional counterparties, and (b) the project’s explicit compliance posture (blacklisting and sanctions-list enforcement), which is often a prerequisite for centralized exchange support and for integrations that touch regulated entities, even if it conflicts with maximalist DeFi neutrality.

What Are the Risks and Challenges for Usual USD?

Regulatory exposure for USD0 is best framed as stablecoin-and-RWA exposure rather than “crypto commodity” exposure: reserve composition, redemption promises, sanctions compliance, and the legal structure around custody and bankruptcy remoteness matter more than chain-level decentralization narratives.

Usual’s own documentation makes clear that the contracts include a blacklist feature and that the system is operated with sanctions screening in mind, which mitigates some compliance risks but simultaneously increases censorship and key-compromise risks; for institutions, that creates a familiar tradeoff: better regulatory posture at the cost of issuer/operator discretion and operational centralization.

Technically, the presence of upgradeable proxies and privileged roles is a standard but non-trivial risk vector; it concentrates risk in governance processes and key management, and it elevates the importance of audits, timelocks, and multisig/role separation.

On the economic and competitive axis, USD0 competes in a crowded stablecoin stack (USDT, USDC) while simultaneously competing with a fast-growing set of tokenized Treasury and RWA-collateral “cash” products that are increasingly composable in DeFi. DefiLlama’s own competitor framing for Usual is explicitly RWA/Treasury-focused rather than generic stablecoins, which is directionally correct: the threat is not only a better “$1 token,” but also a better collateral primitive with deeper liquidity, lower fees, cleaner legal structuring, or superior distribution into money markets.

A further challenge is smart-contract and vault/router risk: despite audits, the protocol has had at least one publicly tracked exploit incident in 2025 tied to vault mechanics and conversion/arbitrage pathways; even if the reported impact was small, it underlines that the “wrapper + vault strategy” surface area can dominate risk more than the underlying T‑bill collateral itself.

What Is the Future Outlook for Usual USD?

The most credible “future” for USD0 depends on whether Usual can maintain tight, resilient peg mechanics while scaling distribution into DeFi collateral venues without accumulating hidden balance-sheet risks in the collateral stack (e.g., concentration in a single tokenized Treasury issuer, liquidity mismatches under stress, or governance complexity around multiple wrappers and vaults).

Verified roadmap signals over the last 12 months emphasize iterative product engineering rather than base-layer upgrades: the shift from USD0++ to bUSD0 plus rt‑bUSD0 is a material structural change to liquidity/duration design, and the continued development of earn modes and vault integrations indicates a strategy of embedding USD0 into yield and structured-product rails rather than selling it as a simple settlement coin.

These changes also increase system complexity, which raises the premium on transparent accounting, robust oracle and router design, and conservative parameter governance, especially in volatile rate environments where the attractiveness of Treasury carry can change quickly and where stablecoin liquidity can become reflexive under stress.