Personal DD / notes. Figures as of June 3, 2026, and they move daily. Not financial advice.

TL;DR: A stablecoin is a money-market fund that keeps the yield instead of paying it to you. The issuer (Circle) is the obvious, expensive, high-beta way to play it. The boring plumbing underneath (BlackRock, BNY Mellon) is the durable, lower-beta way. The macro tell is ~$0.8–1T of new T-bill demand by 2028 (Standard Chartered). And the catch almost nobody prices: the macro thesis and the issuer thesis fight each other.

The structure

A dollar held in USDC/USDT buys short T-bills. The issuer earns ~4% on the reserves and pays the holder 0%. Same mechanism as a bank deposit or a money-market fund, different fee architecture: banks and stablecoins keep the spread, money-market funds pass it through. The spread-keepers (USDT + USDC) hold ~$260B in reserves; the pass-through tokenized Treasury funds hold ~$13B. That's roughly 20:1 sitting on the same underlying bills. The gap is the whole trade.

The names (real numbers)

Issuer layer — high beta, expensive, pure

• CRCL (Circle) — ~$25B cap, ~$100/sh, ~6x sales. Roughly breakeven on a trailing basis; Q1'26 swung positive (EPS $0.21, adj. EBITDA $151M, +24% YoY). Down ~66% from its $299 post-IPO high. The only public pure-play issuer. Bull: the CLARITY Act compromise (May 4) banned passive deposit-style yield, so it legally keeps the spread. Bear: distributor revenue-share deals (the Hyperliquid arrangement) are starting to eat margin, and 6x sales is priced for flawless execution.
• COIN (Coinbase) — ~$48B cap. Gets a cut of USDC reserve income plus trading revenue. Q1'26 was a GAAP loss (-$1.49/sh) on $1.41B revenue. More diversified, more bitcoin-beta, less pure.

Infrastructure layer — lower beta, durable, diluted

• BLK (BlackRock) — ~$165B cap, ~27x P/E, ~27% net margin, ~$12T AUM. Manages Circle's reserve fund, and issues BUIDL, and just filed two more tokenized funds (May 8). It sits on both sides of the spread/passthrough line. Caveat: stablecoins are a rounding error on BLK, so it's "own the trend, heavily diluted."
• BK (BNY Mellon) — ~$92B cap, ~18x P/E, $7.40 EPS. Custodian and one of the two Treasury clearing banks. Earns fees on assets held, indifferent to which issuer wins. Same dilution caveat.

Passthrough / tokenization side

• BEN (Franklin Templeton) — runs BENJI, lowest fee in the category (0.15%), '40-Act registered, most accessible. The "they did it the honest way" comparison.
• ONDO — ~$1.3B token, crypto-native pure-play on tokenized Treasuries, 21Shares spot ETF filed. High vol, not equity.

Bitcoin-as-harder-asset leg

• IBIT / FBTC — clean spot BTC. MSTR (Strategy) — ~$150/sh leveraged BTC proxy; just made its first bitcoin sale since 2022. XXI (Twenty One) — Tether/Bitfinex-controlled, Brandon Lutnick chaired; the closest public name to the Cantor/Tether orbit, but it's a bitcoin-accumulation vehicle, not stablecoin economics. Controlled float, extreme volatility.

The contradiction almost nobody prices

The macro view (stablecoin demand compresses front-end T-bill yields) is bearish for the issuer view. CRCL's reserve income is the front-end yield. If short rates compress, issuer net interest margin compresses with them. Coinbase already guided Q1 services revenue lower on "lower effective interest rates." So being long CRCL and long the compression thesis is half a bet against yourself. Worth resolving which one you actually believe before sizing either.

How I'd frame the sizing (illustrative, not a recommendation)

The logic runs lower-beta-heavy, because the durable edge is in the plumbing, not the issuer:

• ~50% infrastructure (BLK / BK) — survives any regulatory outcome, earns on flow
• ~20% issuer (CRCL / COIN) — the high-beta upside, kept small because it's expensive and rate-conflicted
• ~20% front-end / cash (SGOV, USFR, or an actual money-market fund) — gets paid while waiting, and is literally the passthrough product the whole thesis says holders should prefer over a zero-yield coin
• ~10% bitcoin (IBIT) — the harder-asset leg, capped for volatility

The cleanest structural-purity expression is long BLK/BK, hedge CRCL with puts: the infrastructure keeps its fee no matter how regulation lands, while the issuer's economics are the thing that gets rewritten. That single pair is the entire framework turned into a position.

Risks

• CRCL and COIN are priced on sales, not earnings; multiple compression is the base-case risk, not a tail.
• Distributor yield-share deals (Hyperliquid) and new entrants (SoFi's bank-issued coin) erode issuer margin structurally, not cyclically.
• Crypto is in a sober phase: BTC ~-30% in a month, CRCL ~-66% from its high. Beaten up is not the same as cheap.
• Regulation cuts both ways and moves on legislative, not market, timelines.

Positions: framework-level, not single-name. Not financial advice, not a recommendation, do your own work. Valuations as of June 3, 2026 and stale the moment markets open.