They're All Called Stablecoins. They All Hold a Dollar. We Classified What's Actually Behind It: Five Different Backing Models, From Circle's Cash to Ethena's Futures Hedge to a Dollar Backed by Tokenized Treasuries.
Every stablecoin makes the same promise — one token, one dollar. Classify what actually sits behind the dollar and the single category splits into five: cash and Treasuries, over-collateralized crypto, a futures hedge with no reserves at all, backing by another tokenized asset, and disclosure only in aggregate. The peg is the same across all of them. What guarantees it — and whether anyone can check it — is not.
- Scored against one trust rubric, a stablecoin's backing model barely predicts how it lands. The 'safe' cash-and-Treasuries cohort spans the full range — USDC and USDP at 85.8, Frax at 27.8 — a 58-point spread inside the group the market treats as the trustworthy one. see data →
- The line that actually separates them is verification, not backing. Of the 29 stablecoins scored here, only 6 have their reserves attested by an independent third party and 2 more are fully readable onchain; the other 21 are self-published on the issuer's word. The real divide is verified versus taken on faith.
- This is becoming load-bearing as stablecoins are held inside other products — as the reserve behind a newer stablecoin, as lending collateral, as a payment's settlement leg. When one coin's reserve is another coin, an unverified backing propagates, and regulators drawing the GENIUS Act's lines are wrestling with the same question the data poses: not what backs a dollar, but who can check it.
One of the largest stablecoins in the market today holds no cash, no Treasury bills, no reserve pile of any kind. Ethena's USDe has climbed into the top ranks of dollar tokens on a design that keeps its price near a dollar with a futures hedge instead of reserves — and its rise has arrived at the same moment US regulators are still working out whether something built that way should even be called a stablecoin at all.
That question is not academic anymore. Stablecoins are moving past their origins as a trading tool and into payments, lending, and the reserves that back other stablecoins — the market treating them as one interchangeable form of digital cash. Classify what actually sits behind each dollar, though, and the single category splits into five.
Twenty of the twenty-nine stablecoins measured here are backed the way most people assume — cash and short-term Treasury bills held by a custodian, the model behind Circle's USDC. Five are backed by other crypto instead, over-collateralized so a fall in the collateral still leaves more than a dollar behind each token, the way MakerDAO's DAI works. One, Ethena's USDe, holds no reserve pile at all: it stays near a dollar by pairing crypto collateral with an equal and opposite futures short — a hedge, not a vault. One, Usual's USD0, is backed by tokenized US Treasuries — a stablecoin standing on another tokenized real-world asset. And two, led by Tether's USDT, disclose their backing in aggregate categories rather than line by line.
One word, five structures
The shared label is doing a lot of work. “Stablecoin” began as a description of a behavior — a token that holds a dollar — and became a category the market trades as fungible. But a dollar held as cash and Treasury bills, a dollar held as over-collateralized crypto, and a dollar held as a futures hedge are three different financial instruments that happen to share a price. The table below groups every stablecoin measured here by what actually stands behind the token.
| Backing model | How the dollar is held | Count | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash & Treasuries | Fiat and short-term T-bills held by a custodian | 20 | USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, EURC |
| Crypto, over-collateralized | Other crypto assets, held above 1:1 to absorb a fall | 5 | DAI, GHO, Sky USDS, USDD |
| Backed by a tokenized RWA | Another tokenized real-world asset (tokenized Treasuries) | 1 | Usual USD0 |
| Synthetic (delta-neutral) | Crypto collateral paired with an offsetting futures short — no reserve pile | 1 | Ethena USDe |
| Aggregate disclosure | Backing reported in categories, not itemized | 2 | Tether USDT, United Stables |
The label barely predicts the trust
If the backing model were what mattered, scoring these tokens on a common trust rubric — reserve quality, redemption, transparency, structure — would sort them into tidy bands: cash at the top, then crypto, then the rest. It does not. The chart below scores each stablecoin and colors it by backing model, and the cash group (grey) is scattered from top to bottom rather than clustered anywhere.
Fig 2 — Trust score, colored by backing model · 29 scored · Aug 10, 2026
Backing doesn't sort trust
Each bar is one stablecoin's trust score; the color is its backing model. The cash-and-Treasuries group (grey) runs the full height of the chart — from the top (USDC and USDP at 85.8) to the bottom (Frax at 27.8) — so 'cash-backed' says little about where a token lands.
Circle's USDC and Paxos's USDP top the set at 85.8. Frax, backed the same cash-and-Treasuries way, sits at the very bottom at 27.8 — a fifty-eight-point gap inside the one model everyone treats as the safe one. Being “cash-backed” is not what carries a token to the top of that chart.
What separates the top from the bottom is whether anyone independent checks the reserves. Of the twenty-nine stablecoins scored here, only six carry a voluntary third-party attestation of what backs them. Two more can be read directly onchain, because their collateral lives in public contracts. The remaining twenty-one are self-published: the reserves are described by the issuer, on the issuer's word, with nothing external to check them against. The dividing line in the market is not cash versus crypto. It is verified versus taken on faith.
| Backing model | What it's exposed to | How the reserves are evidenced |
|---|---|---|
| Cash & Treasuries (20) | Custodian and banking failure; T-bill liquidity | Attested by an outside party for only a handful; most self-published |
| Crypto, over-collateralized (5) | A crypto drawdown outrunning the buffer | Collateral is public onchain, but figures are self-published |
| Backed by a tokenized RWA (1) | Whatever sits in the underlying tokenized asset | Named onchain, self-published |
| Synthetic — delta-neutral (1) | Futures liquidity; a persistently adverse funding rate | Collateral and hedge readable directly onchain |
| Aggregate disclosure (2) | Depends on the backing; hard to assess from outside | Attested, but reported in categories rather than line by line |
None of this ranks one backing model above another. Cash reserves, over-collateralization, and synthetic hedging are all established designs, and each has held its peg through real stress — a cash-backed token, USDC, is the one that actually broke briefly in 2023, when some of its reserves were trapped in the failed Silicon Valley Bank, and it recovered when the deposits were made whole. The point is that the structure a reader worries about and the thing that actually determines whether the backing is real are two different axes — and the market has been sorting on the first while the second is where the difference lives.
Why it matters more as they scale
A year ago the distinction was mostly academic — most stablecoin value sat in two or three cash-and-Treasuries tokens, and the edges were small. That is changing. Synthetic and RWA-backed models are among the faster-growing corners of the market, and stablecoins are increasingly held not by end users but inside other products: as the reserve behind a newer stablecoin, as collateral in lending markets, as the settlement leg in payments. When one stablecoin's reserve is itself another stablecoin, the backing question stops being about a single token and becomes a chain of them.
Regulators are beginning to draw the same line the structure already draws. The US GENIUS Act, the first federal stablecoin law, reserves the term for the cash-and-Treasuries model — and the fight over where exactly to put the boundary is why the final rules slipped past their own deadline. A synthetic dollar and a cash-backed dollar trade at the same price; whether they carry the same label is now a live question with real consequences for who can issue what. The direction of travel is toward distinguishing the five, not flattening them — and the place that distinction is likely to bite first is the reserves that stablecoins increasingly hold in each other, where the label a token carries decides whether it can sit behind the next one.
Each stablecoin's backing model is classified from its reserve structure into one of five mechanisms: cash-and-Treasuries (exogenous fiat), crypto over-collateralized, backed by a tokenized RWA, delta-neutral synthetic, or aggregate-only disclosure. 29 of 30 measured stablecoins are classified; one is not yet classified and is excluded from the counts.
Verified Aug 10, 2026 · onchainbenchmark.com/methodologyThis is a neutral structural map, not a safety ranking. Every model here has held its peg through real stress; each also has a distinct failure mode. 'Aggregate disclosure' describes how a token's backing is reported (in categories rather than itemized), not a claim that any reserve is missing.
Coverage notes · onchainbenchmark.com/ratingsThis report deliberately makes no market-size claim. It classifies the backing structure of the measured set by count and model; it does not rank the models by capital.
Coverage notes · onchainbenchmark.com/ratings- How many different ways are stablecoins backed?
- Across the set measured here, five. Twenty are backed by cash and short-term Treasuries held by a custodian; five by over-collateralized crypto (DAI, GHO, Sky USDS, USDD, Falcon USD); one by a delta-neutral futures hedge with no reserve pile (Ethena USDe); one by tokenized US Treasuries (Usual USD0); and two disclose their backing only in aggregate categories (Tether USDT, United Stables).
- What backs Ethena's USDe, and how is it different from USDC?
- USDC is backed by cash and short-term Treasury bills held by a custodian. USDe holds no equivalent reserve pile: it stays near a dollar by pairing crypto collateral with an equal and opposite futures short, so the value is preserved by the hedge rather than by assets in a vault. Both trade at one dollar; the mechanism keeping them there is different, and so is the risk.
- Does a different backing model mean a stablecoin is less safe?
- Not by itself. Cash reserves, over-collateralization, and synthetic hedging are all established designs, and each has held its peg through real market stress. Each also has a distinct failure mode — a custodian or bank failure, a crypto drawdown outrunning the buffer, or a futures market seizing up. The backing model tells you what the token is exposed to and how its backing can be checked, not whether it will hold.