Sky joins bidding war to launch Hyperliquid’s USDH stablecoin

Crypto protocol Sky has become the fifth crypto project to launch a bid to help the decentralized perps exchange Hyperliquid launch and issue a stablecoin.

Sky co-founder Rune Christensen on Monday posted his project’s proposal to back Hyperliquid’s USDH stablecoin, offering up Sky’s resources and promising a customizable token with a yield rivaling US treasury bills.

“By using Sky to power USDH, the Hyperliquid community will gain unbeatable advantages that no other stablecoin project can offer,” Christensen said in his pitch.

Sky, formerly known as Maker, created and backs USDS (USDS) and Dai (DAI), respectively the fourth and fifth-largest stablecoins that are together worth around $12.5 billion, and its proposal joins at least four other crypto projects all bidding to win the USDH job, which Hyperliquid posted on Friday.

Sky promises USDH yield, option for GENIUS Act compliance

Christensen’s wide-ranging proposal says Hyperliquid would receive a 4.85% return on all USDH on its platform, which he said is “significantly above the T-Bill rate.”

He added that USDH will also be able to convert to and from a version of its USDS stablecoin that gives its holders a yield of 4.75% and would be “natively multichain” using the cross-blockchain protocol LayerZero.

Source: Rune Christensen

The Hyperliquid community will also be able to customize the stablecoin under Sky’s proposal, with Christensen giving the example that it could be made to comply with US stablecoin laws under the GENIUS Act, which bans stablecoin issuers from paying yield.

Christensen said Sky would also give $25 million to create a project to “autonomously grow DeFi on Hyperliquid,” which will have exclusive tokens that could be “potentially bringing in billions” to the protocol.

Sky’s bid the fifth for Hyperliquid

Sky’s proposal is the fifth similar bid for the stablecoin from a major crypto project after Hyperliquid posted to its Discord on Friday that it wanted pitches from “teams interested in deploying a Hyperliquid-first, native stablecoin with the ticker USDH.”

It comes after the first proposal from Native Markets, a new venture set up by Hyperliquid advocate Max Fiege that would see Stripe’s stablecoin payment processor Bridge issue USDH.

Also in the mix are the stablecoin protocol Frax, stablecoin issuer Paxos and crypto infrastructure firm Agora, with backing from the crypto fintech MoonPay.

VanEck CEO makes an appeal to Hyperliquid

Meanwhile, Jan van Eck, the CEO of investment giant VanEck and father of Agora co-founder Nick van Eck, wrote to X on Monday to appeal to the Hyperliquid community to seemingly back his son’s stablecoin bid.

“We’d be thrilled to be a part of your community’s ecosystem,” he wrote. “We have spoken to many of the leading HyperEVM builders and continue to look for new ways to contribute to Hyperliquid, whether that’s through this Agora proposal or something else in the future.”

“But we don’t like being gang-tackled,” van Eck said. “You wouldn’t want us as a partner if we were pushed around easily.”

Hyperliquid validators will vote on their favored proposal after the network’s next upgrade, which it has yet to announce.

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