Obex, a new incubator for stablecoins designed to support and finance teams building yield-generating stablecoins on the Sky Protocol, has launched out of San Francisco with one of the largest investment commitments the crypto sector has seen in years.
Obex will access up to $2.5 billion of Sky authorized USDS stablecoins for deployment into select projects that graduate from the Obex incubator. Obex has raised $37 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, LayerZero, and Sky – which rebranded from MakerDAO last year is now considered the third largest stablecoin issuer.
Fully deployed, this amount of capital would put the nascent incubator in rare company, even by traditional finance standards.
TradFi Joins The Stablecoin Stampede
Obex is launching at a time when the stablecoin industry is experiencing its strongest surge of momentum since the first dollar-pegged tokens emerged more than a decade ago.
Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, recently reported $10 billion profit in the first nine months of 2025, simultaneously becoming the 17th-largest holder of U.S. Treasury securities, with about $135 billion in government debt, placing the company ahead of sovereign holders such as South Korea and Germany.
The U.S. market is surging just as quickly, with bank analysts reporting that Circle’s USDC is now outpacing Tether’s USDT in on-chain expansion, supported by clearer regulatory frameworks and rising institutional participation. Circle reported that by the end of Q3 2025, USDC in circulation reached approximately $73.7 billion, a 108% year-over-year increase.
For many institutions, what once looked like a peripheral Web3 experiment has now become a mainstream market they can no longer afford to dismiss. JPMorgan estimates that stablecoins could generate up to $1.4 trillion in additional demand for U.S. dollars by 2027, while bull case forecasts from BNY and Citigroup go even further, projecting a potential market size of between $3.6-$4 trillion by the end of the decade.
This momentum is now reshaping the strategies of global banks. A coalition of ten major institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Citigroup, UBS, and more recently announced they are exploring the issuance of a jointly developed stablecoin pegged to G7 currencies, a signal of how aggressively traditional finance is moving to keep pace with the stablecoin developments.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan, previously one of the most conservative of the banks around stablecoin growth, has gone live with its own deposit token called JPM Coin, a blockchain-based representation of customer deposits at the nation’s largest bank.
JPM Coin is usable on Base, the Coinbase-affiliated public L2, enabling clients to move dollars with near-instant settlement and operate on a 24/7 schedule, an upgrade from the business-hours limitations of traditional systems.
A New Model For Stablecoin Incubation
Amid the surge of activity from incumbent issuers and the rapid positioning by major banks, an entirely new class of stablecoins is pushing its way into the mainstream. As a recent report points out, yield-bearing stablecoins, or tokens backed by real-world cash flows, have grown more than 300% year over year, with new issuers entering the market almost every month.
Unlike traditional payments stablecoins which compete on liquidity, brand, and network effects, this emerging category is increasingly defined by business models, yield generation, and distribution strategy.
There appears to be a growing recognition that stablecoins can function as specialized capital formation vehicles capable of bringing “real-world” yield on-chain, a shift from incumbents that have been traditionally used for payments, trading, and remittances.
“Banks and credit funds have spent decades generating returns off-chain across asset-backed lending, trade finance, and private credit” said Parker Edwards, principal at Framework Ventures, “Obex is designed to help founders bring those institutional yield primitives into composable, decentralized markets.”
As an incubator, Obex is aiming to position itself squarely at the center of this shift. Administered by Framework Ventures, a VC firm best known for their early moves in the DeFi space including The Graph, Chainlink, Immutable X, and Aave, Obex appears to be offering stablecoin founders what amounts to a hybrid between traditional early-stage venture funding and direct access to institutional scale liquidity.
“If you’re trying to do something capital-intensive within crypto that needs to be financed through stablecoins or tokenized assets, this is the program,” said Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, “The ambition is to supercharge Sky so it can compete with the “Apollos and Blackstones” of the world.”
Spencer’s comparison underscores a growing ambition in DeFi: to evolve beyond crypto-native lending and into a full-stack, stablecoin-powered credit platform that can finance real-world industries.
Recent launches illustrate this shift, including USD.ai, which finances GPU operators and AI data centers and channels the resulting cashflow to holders as on-chain yield, and Daylight, which uses stablecoins to fund solar installations and returns yield generated by electricity production.
For this next wave of stablecoin founders, the appeal of Obex as an incubator will likely seem straightforward: newcomers enter an intensive 12-week program in which they are granted initial capital to launch their stablecoin project to chase interesting sources of yield. At the end of the program, teams in the incubator will take part in a demo day, where participants showcase their results and pitch for additional capital from outside investors.
The big question is how does Obex differ from a traditional incubator?
The short answer is, through massive capital deployments. Select Obex-graduate projects will gain access to up to “nine figures” in additional capital from Sky, allowing them to pursue their strategies at scale.
“If you are a stablecoin founder, I am not aware of another incubator that offers this much room and support to execute,” Spencer argues, “A typical incubator can give you funding and some go-to-market help, but it cannot provide the hundreds of millions in liquidity a stablecoin needs to prove its model at scale.
“Instead of trying to convince fintech investment funds and firms that crypto is legitimate and your strategy is worth their attention, you can build within Obex, and if you demonstrate real yield, you may receive a significant capital injection to grow your project. The goal is not to create a long tail of small, undercapitalized tokens.
“We want teams launching audited, well-capitalized stablecoins with real backing and a safety net if something goes wrong, and Sky is the only partner in the market that we think can support that vision.”
Sky’s Expanding Yield Strategy
Sky opening up its balance sheet because of how Obex is structured – Stablecoin projects that emerge from the incubator are expected to launch as independent decentralized projects within the Sky ecosystem, each tasked with delivering some form of yield back to Sky.
Sky moved to a more modular model focused on its native stablecoin USDS and a suite of yield strategies. Support for Obex aligns with Sky’s wider growth strategy over the last year to broaden its exposure to real-world credit markets.
The protocol’s flagship stablecoin, USDS, has seen significant expansion, supported mainly by the protocol’s approach of deploying capital into a range of diversified, yield-generating initiatives across its ecosystem.
These efforts span Keel, which is sourcing yield throughout Solana’s DeFi markets, Spark, a lending market that supports borrowing across Ethereum, and Grove, which has deployed more than a billion dollars into Janus Henderson AAA-rated CLO ETF as part of Sky’s expanding real-world credit strategy.
Seen through this lens, Obex appears to be an effort to accelerate Sky’s approach by seeding a broader range of stablecoin projects that could funnel new categories of yield back to USDS holders.
“We believe smart money looks to USDS as the saving standard,” said Rune Christensen, Sky’s co-founder in a release, “Obex will play an important role in creating the rails of an upgraded, more efficient and transparent financial system and scaling Sky.
LayerZero’s participation in the raise suggests that some Obex-backed stablecoins may also be designed to operate across multiple blockchains from day one, reflecting a trend among newer stablecoin issuers toward multichain distribution.
The Bigger Picture: A Growing Stablecoin Arms Race
Though Obex appears to have found a market to target with substantial room for growth, some uncertainties will need to be addressed and hurdles overcome.
Beyond the question of (global) regulatory treatment of yield-bearing stablecoins which remains unsettled and fragmented across jurisdictions, stablecoins as a whole continue to face the smart-contract, liquidity, and operational risks typical of young crypto markets, a reality underscored in recent weeks by multiple depegging events.
Some yield-bearing projects like USDX, and more recently, Stream Finance’s xUSD, have shown how quickly stress can expose weaknesses in design. In these cases, yield seems to have been built on leverage-dependent architectures that relied heavily on external derivatives markets, leaving the systems vulnerable when liquidity thinned or hedges failed.
Obex appears to be targeting yield from external, real economy assets as opposed to recursive DeFi leverage.
Add Spencer, “Part of what makes the incubator model so important is the ability to launch these stablecoins in a controlled way. Instead of a small stablecoin going vertical and then collapsing, we can bootstrap liquidity gradually, apply credit standards from day one, and actually test the durability of the underlying yield streams. Newer stablecoins sometimes fail because they have no backstop, no structured peg-stability mechanism like Sky’s, and no way to manage liquidity during periods of stress.”
Even so, questions also remain around how Obex intends to deploy this capital. Sourcing and locking in stable yield streams is far from guaranteed, particularly as more issuers pursue similar strategies and compress returns.
Both Tether and Circle now operate sizable venture arms, with Tether alone deploying roughly $4 billion into U.S.-based investments through its investment wing, and it is not difficult to imagine these incumbents moving to incubate stablecoin projects themselves if the model proves effective.
In other words, the competitive landscape is only likely to intensify, and Obex will need to build defensibility should it start showing traction.
Nonetheless, Obex appears to be a bold bet within a broader competition to push stablecoins beyond their traditional role in payments and trading and into more sophisticated financial infrastructure.
Its success will depend on whether their incubated teams can turn large-scale support into sustainable yield, and whether the market ultimately values stablecoins for their income potential as much as their utility.