RWAs You Can Use For Payments: USDY on Sphere
The onchain economy continues to evolve, bridging the gap between blockchain and everyday financial activities. Payments—a cornerstone of economic interaction—are one of the arenas being revolutionized on Solana with platforms like Sphere Pay, enabling seamless onchain transactions for commerce users across the globe, providing simple solutions for customers and businesses looking to tap into fast, efficient onchain payment solutions. But there is another important side to the payments field, where users and merchants look for opportunities to optimize their idle balances and cashflows. This is where DeFi and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) enter the fold.
Ondo Finance’s US Dollar Yield token (USDY), which is integrated into Sphere for payments, offers a unique way to enhance payment ecosystems by offering a yield solution that stablecoins don’t provide. By integrating Ondo’s composable RWAs, onchain payment platforms are reshaping how users can do business on Solana.
The Payments Challenge in Onchain Ecosystems
Crypto payments are growing in adoption, having provided users with clean, simple access to onramps, offramps, and payment transfers. Yet hurdles remain for users and businesses alike:
- Businesses: Businesses wanting to interact with, and accept crypto as a form of payment, typically do so via stablecoins. While stablecoins offer stability, they do not generate yield, leaving funds idle and unproductive. Businesses can utilize a cash management solution that goes beyond simple stability to deliver financial efficiency and returns on reserves, while not opening themselves up to the risk of volatile assets or smart contract risk.
- Users: End users wanting to utilize crypto often overlook opportunities to earn on idle funds, or they have them deployed in highly volatile tokens. They are unaware of the middle ground of liquid, idle assets that aren’t far along the risk curve.
Both groups need a payments infrastructure that combines the benefits of crypto—speed, composability, and accessibility—with tools that enable capital efficiency and flexible cash management.
Sphere Pay: Bridging Traditional and Onchain Payments
Sphere Pay is providing an operating system for the digital economy, transforming cross-border payments into secure, reliable experiences. The Sphere platform is focused on empowering businesses and individuals in underserved and emerging markets with payment solutions for doing business, creating opportunities for economic growth. Sphere offers a simple gateway for users to transact onchain. Its ability to support multiple Solana-native tokens and streamline onboarding makes it a widespread solution in the payments ecosystem, creating an opportunity for users looking to tap into RWAs as payment vehicles.
- For Businesses: Sphere’s integration with Ondo’s USDY offers businesses an opportunity to improve cash management by accepting and holding tokenized US Treasuries. These assets provide a secure, yield-generating alternative for managing reserves and payment flows, particularly for businesses in emerging markets that may lack such solutions.
- For Users: Users can access Sphere’s seamless payment experience while leveraging Ondo’s RWAs to passively grow their payment balances, unlocking the full potential of their onchain funds.
Sphere’s accessible payment rails paired with yield-bearing RWAs provides the type of simple opportunity that makes DeFi alluring—financial efficiency in the digital economy.
A Payment Ecosystem That Makes Sense
With platforms like Sphere paving the way for seamless, scalable onchain payments, the inclusion of tokenized RWAs like USDY offer yet another incremental, yet major improvement on the system that is. This combination of efficient payments via flexible RWAs demonstrates the untapped potential of blockchain technology to power not just transactions but sustainable cash management.
Ondo Finance’s mission to bring institutional-grade RWAs onchain is redefining what’s possible in payments—empowering users and businesses alike to thrive in an interconnected, digital-first economy.
With RWAs you can use for payments, Solana is proving that the future of payments isn’t just fast—it’s smart, flexible, and yield-generating.