Season 3 turned $USDST into something exciting.

It's STRATO's native stablecoin, of course, backed mostly by gold. But now it has officially become an earning asset, with easily accessible yield through a savings vault, available to anyone with a few quick clicks.

"So yes, it's — but yeah, it's like it's USDST. It's not, you know, a huge-supply stable just yet — we've got maybe five million of it in circulation. It'll trade natively on STRATO soon, maybe some other venues too. But it's reasonably close to a dollar in formulation — at least that's the intent.

Yeah, well, it's pretty cool, because whereas USDST has existed for a while, it's really just been something you use on STRATO, and not necessarily very exciting — really more of a mechanism than anything. But now, with the vault, it's actually like an earning asset. It's really turned into something much more productive."

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8% on $USDST is high, but not too high.

＠kjameslubin explains why the APY number isn't the only thing that traders base their decisions on. A lot of it comes down to safety and sustainability.

Get started with the $USDST Savings Vault at https://t.co/CaZsoWmJEi

"Also, I would say that people get a different personality when the yields are too high.

Some of the bigger, more institutional players look at a really high yield, and they're like: something's wrong there; it can't be sustained. Whereas your more DeFi yield farmer might be excited by high yield — get in, and then get out in like three days or something.

So it's a little bit of an emphasis on sustainability. But also, again, the incentives have changed, so that you as a token holder don't actually want there to be a giant increase in the circulating supply of STRATO. So the staking flavor will help lock some of it up and so on. And as communicated before the auction, it's a hundred million, fixed. A bunch of it has been allocated in different buckets, but you don't want it all hitting at one time.

So the point of the points program is really now to make the system work as best as possible, and less about making sure lots of people hold the token and so on and so forth. So think of it more like a marketing budget. You know how we feel about marketing people — you want that budget as small as possible. We love all of our marketing people."

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Hard Money Weekly Digest | July 24th
This week's HardFi news in just 2 minutes

🏅 Gold: up +1.95%
🥈 Silver: up +5.52%

1. China ended retail paper gold trading: Today, ICBC, the world's largest bank by assets, along with Postal Savings Bank, Ping An Bank, and China Guangfa Bank, halted retail leveraged paper gold and silver products linked to the Shanghai Gold Exchange, a wind-down the banks announced in late June.

Physical gold, accumulation plans, gold ETFs, and institutional exchange trading all stay open. The change strips leverage and synthetic claims from retail hands and leaves the metal itself available to everyone.

1. Tokenized Gold Gets Its First Legal Home: Legal recognition is what turned tokenized treasuries into a financial instrument, and gold just got its first ruling of that kind.

On July 20, the Abu Dhabi Global Market recognized Tether Gold as an Accepted Spot Commodity, the first time a major financial center has defined tokenized gold in law. Regulated firms there can now custody, trade, and settle the token under local rules.

1. China's gold-buying streak reached 20 months: The People's Bank of China added about 15 tonnes in June, its largest monthly purchase since 2023, taking reserves to 2,346 tonnes. It bought straight through the drawdown, part of a reserve-diversification push running since November 2024.

2. Tokenized stocks got a licensed US route: On July 23, Ondo Finance's subsidiary Oasis Pro Markets secured FINRA authorization to offer tokenized equities, ETFs, mutual funds, and IPO-linked products to US institutional and retail investors under SEC and FINRA oversight. It is the first licensed path to put American shares on-chain for American buyers.

Until now, every tokenized-stock product had to route around the US retail market.

1. The London Stock Exchange Moves to Copy On-Chain Markets: A 300-year-old exchange rebuilding itself for round-the-clock trading, copying tokenized markets.

Plans surfaced July 20 for a separate overnight venue running 5:00pm to 7:50am London time, targeted for the first half of 2027 and starting with more than 2,600 exchange-traded products. Gold and silver already trade that way on STRATO.

1. Tokenized RWAs pulled back to $34.7 billion: Tracked on-chain value of tokenized real-world assets slipped to $34.67 billion on July 22 from a peak of $35.2 billion, even as Wall Street firms kept expanding their on-chain offerings. Treasuries remain the largest slice at $15.9 billion, with commodities at $8.3 billion, led by tokenized gold. The pullback landed the same week the products kept multiplying, which reads like consolidation rather than retreat.

RWAs keep accelerating. Tokenization is inevitable...and accelerating.

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Most of the world saves in gold, but most gold holders also just keep it "under their mattress," so to speak.

This is the STRATO unlock:

→ physical gold or silver
→ tokenized
→ instantly tradable
→ borrow $USDST against it
→ use the USDST to earn more on STRATO
→ OR use it in the real world

STRATO turns gold from being something hidden away to gather dust into an asset that can work for you in the market. Be your own gold-backed bank.

That's the magic of $GOLDST + $USDST on https://t.co/sxsrZTh4lW:

"What's special about USDST?"

"To our knowledge — I think I've seen some announcements like this — it is very notable that you can create it against gold and silver.

So if you think about the amount of above-ground gold in the world, it's about thirty trillion. It's less the case in the West, but it's the default savings asset for much of the planet — most of the planet, maybe half. And so people have a lot of it. But the problem with it is it's often like a mattress asset: it's not providing you any real financial inclusion unless you're capable of navigating pretty big institutions who will give you decent to good terms on it — maybe if you want to borrow or trade it and so on.

But your average mattress gold holder — it's just sitting there. It's not doing anything for you from a productivity perspective. So we think it's like a really big unlock.

And we've actually seen that even with folks who have pretty good access to US financial services — they've been excited to tokenize, get instant tradability of those tokens. The tokens can be much more liquid than the gold itself, in the sense that you can move them anywhere. It's still reflective of the underlying gold, but you can move the tokens over the internet and the gold sits somewhere.

And you can get the liquidity out of it from borrowing the stablecoin, too. And by the way, the rates can be extremely, extremely high — we heard recently that if you work with short-term gold lenders in, say, India, the interest rates are as high as twenty-five percent.

So this allows both an easy loan path and much better rates than you can get in a lot of different markets."

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There's a magic trick hiding inside DeFi right now: put physical gold in a vault, and what comes back out is a liquid, tradable token you can swap or borrow against in seconds, without ever selling the gold itself.

That single mechanic is quietly turning gold into a "crypto-native" asset.

STRATO accelerated this by creating a custom-built network for HardFi with low fees so gold and silver can become usable money to anyone in just a couple of clicks.

"The magic of going from putting gold in the vault to getting liquid, tradable tokens back. You don't have to physically move the gold, and you can swap them for cash or borrow cash. That's the big driver, and it's happening."

"...gold does fairly well — XAUT and PAXG, the big ones, maybe we're fifth or something, I'm not quite sure as far as gold tokens go. There's a good handful of them.

Interestingly, PAXG at first had transfer fees — if you moved it, you'd slowly erode value. Then they got rid of those, and it started to work better in DeFi for that reason. Try to do a swap on something with a transfer fee, on Uniswap or wherever you're swapping will usually tell you, 'hey, you're about to lose some of your principal.' They don't trade as much, and then it's hard to build lending markets around them.

So gold is actually starting to do a decent job as a DeFi asset, kind of beyond tokenized treasuries. Treasuries are typically very liquid and transferable — there was a time hedge funds would take some treasuries, borrow against them, and loop to like twenty-X leverage to try to crank the yields to infinity. They maybe still do that. You'd think you'd be able to do something like that in crypto, because crypto people love looping, and you kind of can't right now.

Stocks are closer; the feeling is more crypto-native, where there's starting to be some DeFi infrastructure where you can borrow against them, definitely swap for them, where the secondary-market side kind of works.

So I'd expect more market cap out of gold, but it's coming. I'd expect treasuries to feel more like crypto, and they largely don't just yet, and where they do, they're indirectly expressed — maybe supporting the yield for some crypto-native token, but they themselves aren't all that tradable on-chain. Stocks have weirdness too — sometimes they're super illiquid out of market hours, huge spreads, no quotes back from aggregators — but they're kind of starting to feel like crypto too. It's a nuanced story, and in this sense I don't actually feel that gold is behind, per se.

Silver is smaller than I thought it would be — although silver perps are actually pretty popular. I think there's like four times the silver-perp volume on Hyperliquid that there is for gold. Spot silver is smaller than I thought it would be; I think that will grow quite a bit.

But as this infrastructure gets into place, you'll just see more in-kind deposits — the magic of going from putting gold in the vault to getting liquid, tradable tokens back. You don't have to physically move the gold, and you can swap them for cash or borrow cash. That's the big driver, and it's happening."

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Big day for tokenization, precious metals, and HardFi:

Silver leads a sharp metals rally: Silver jumped about 4% to near $59 and gold reclaimed $4,060 after defending the $4,000 line, driven by reports of a proposed US-Iran ceasefire, short covering, and a softer dollar. The move follows gold's worst quarterly drop in 13 years. Two green sessions off a nine-month low says the sellers keep running into a bid.

China's gold-buying streak reached 20 months. The People's Bank of China added about 15 tonnes in June, its largest monthly purchase since 2023, taking reserves to 2,346 tonnes. It bought straight through the drawdown, part of a reserve-diversification push running since November 2024.

US margin debt hit a record $1.53 trillion. June's FINRA data shows a 7.9% monthly jump and a 51% rise over a year, with leverage as a share of S&P 500 market cap near the highest on record. Equities are levered. Vaulted metal is not. Worth knowing which side of that you hold.

The London Stock Exchange plans to trade through the night in 2027. LSEG plans a separate overnight venue for the first half of 2027, running 5:00pm to 7:50am London time and starting with more than 2,600 exchange-traded products, per the FT. Nasdaq, NYSE, and Cboe are extending hours too. The exchanges have concluded that a market that closes is a competitive weakness against crypto markets that don't.

DTCC's tokenization service went live in production. The clearinghouse processed its first US trades using DTC-tokenized assets on July 15, in a pilot spanning Russell 1000 names, major ETFs, and Treasuries, with full service launch set for October 2026. DTC custodies over $114 trillion in securities. Tokenization has reached the core of the system, not the edge.

Banks and institutions continue to bet on gold and silver, whether the price is up or down in the short term. Tokenization continues to accelerate. HardFi is inevitable.
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$USDST is entering its usability arc.

The USDST Savings Vault is live and part of Season 3 STRATO rewards. This means you can park USDST in the saveUSDST vault and earn base yield + points as a bonus.

Buy $GOLDST and $SILVST, borrow USDST against them, and earn extra yield on that USDST through the savings vault. Now live on https://t.co/CaZsoWmJEi

"In particular, folks who have minted USDST — that was incented last time around to increase supply.

And in a certain way, we ended up with plenty of supply. You could even say too much. And what we really need is USDST to be as usable in many contexts as possible. And so that means, for the time being, people being willing to trade other assets for it — ETH or USDC or what have you. And not only doing that: not immediately turning around and getting rid of it.

So we have a savings flavor of USDST, for instance, which allows people to kind of lock the USDST up. And there are some incentives associated with that, so that we can create not just exit pressure on USDST.

Folks want to borrow it and then go use that in the real world — someone has to take the other side of that. And then what you don't want is a kind of down spiral where everyone's trying to get rid of their USDST. So the activity we have there is intended at solving that problem — a bootstrapping problem that's kind of common amongst new stablecoins, if you want to call them that."

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STRATO Rewards Season 3 launches this week!

The first vault to open: The USDST Savings Vault. Earn a high base yield plus points on top as a bonus. You'll soon be able to do it all in just a single click.

Stay tuned as more vaults open throughout Season 3...

"Yeah, just like Kieran said, the USDST Savings Vault does offer STRATO points. And those points will be convertible at some future date to STRATO. But they're separate than native STRATO for now. Staking is the only activity where you can get native STRATO. We may add some other points activities, probably, as we go over these coming weeks. But staking is special in this way."

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Bitcoin and gold just hit all-time-high milestones on ＠aave.

Gold and BTC are two assets people don't want to sell, both getting used as collateral instead of being sold for cash.

STRATO makes it easy to borrow against gold, silver, BTC, ETH, and more. Except you can tokenize gold, buy it, and borrow against it all on STRATO alone, instead of multiple platforms.

Check it out at https://t.co/CaZsoWnhtQ
https://t.co/ACpHKLXihm

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Does the gold price drive STRATO?

There's no direct line because STRATO isn't just about tokenizing gold and silver. HardFi is more than that.

HardFi is about taking those old assets, putting them on new rails, and making them accessible and useful for everyone.

＠jeffryrpowell: "With all of the talking that we do about precious metals and the price of gold and silver and GOLDST and SILVST — is that what drives STRATO? Is that what really influences STRATO, or is STRATO its own entity, and the prices of those assets are not of paramount importance?"

＠kjameslubin: "Well, I'm going to say it definitely helps if they're on a run. I believe the company holds some silver, on which I think we have an aggregate cost basis of like thirty, thirty-four bucks.

So that's been good, and all of that. And you definitely get more attention on the assets as they run. But no, there is no direct line between STRATO and gold and silver prices.

The bet sort of is that gold and silver move on-chain, and that generates economic activity, which — just like, in an ETH style — slowly burns STRATO, and so on."

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We are live with today's spaces to talk about capitalizing on season 3
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1aJbddzoVEvKX

STRATO | DeFi Powered by Precious Metals | HardFi

STRATO What to Expect for Season 3

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The tragedy of gold is that it's the most trusted asset and also one of the most inconvenient and least productive.

This is the problem STRATO is built around. Tokenized gold gives users direct access and ownership and allows them to:

Buy and sell gold in a click
Convert to USDST for easy spending
Borrow against gold to make it productive

Own gold that is easy to use on https://t.co/sxsrZTh4lW.

"So if you think about the amount of above-ground gold in the world, it's about thirty trillion [dollars]. It's less the case in the West, but it's the default savings asset for much of the planet — most of the planet, maybe half. And so people have a lot of it.

But the problem with it is it's often like a mattress asset: it's not providing you any real financial inclusion unless you're capable of navigating pretty big institutions who will give you decent to good terms on it — maybe if you want to borrow or trade it and so on. But your average mattress gold holder — it's just sitting there.

It's not doing anything for you from a productivity perspective. So we think it's [STRATO] like a really big unlock."

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If you participated in the Community ICO and earned $STRATO, you can earn more via staking. Right now, staking is the only activity that earns native STRATO.

This demo is the full path from "I bought in the auction" to "my tokens are working": bridge, delegate, earn.

Make your $STRATO earn its keep:
https://t.co/fBxEDedkSD

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Gold is the perfect RWA to tokenize, but hardly anyone is making it composable - the main benefit of tokenization - except STRATO.

As ＠a16z says:

"Precious metals have similarly low utilization rates [in DeFi protocols]. These assets are mostly held onchain rather than used as composable financial building blocks that can extend upon, remix, or interoperate with each other."

"Gold is a natural fit for tokenization: It’s globally standardized, easy to store, unperishable, and already commonly traded through paper claims."

The markets are waking up to the potential of tokenized gold. STRATO was the first:
https://t.co/f5XxcJKTiF
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In June, China's gold exchange paused paper gold trading.

Paper can get paused, but gold can't because paper gold is just a promise layered over metal you'll never see.

But what about tokenized gold? On a permissionless network like STRATO, it can't be shut off, transactions settle on the network, you have direct ownership, you can redeem $GOLDST for physical gold, and you can borrow against it.

Paper gold doesn't do that.

"The China gold exchange temporarily paused paper trading in June, because they saw internally it got too volatile. So that might be kind of depressing prices, or holding prices a bit, because people can't trade in and out as fast — at least within China.

So that might be one element that's, depending on your view, keeping prices stable or keeping prices down — like historically, stable and up; maybe for the last three months, slightly down.

So I think that's sort of the view I have on it. And banks still seem to be accumulating gold. I think a lot of things are happening where people are kind of just looking for alternatives to the US dollar in general."

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"I try to be zen about prices. Things go up, they go down. I try to let it wash over me like a great wave."

In light of days like today, it's good to remember calm is a strategy. And it's easy to be calm when your foundation is built on hard assets like gold and silver.

As ＠kjameslubin says:

"Yeah, I mean, you never know with these things. I try to be zen about prices. Things go up, they go down. I try to let it wash over me like a great wave. We've definitely, in the middle of our auction, we saw, I think, the recent bottom for ETH at like fifteen fifty or thereabouts, back up to eighteen hundred — a little bit of a rally. So why not? Things are good on that front."

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