Strategy's Preferred Stock Is Now a Stablecoin. And DeFi Has a Security Problem.

**Austin Campbell** (0:01)
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We're here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro, and today, one or two interesting new developments and products. But before we begin, first, a word from our sponsors.

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**Austin Campbell** (0:49)
All right. Today is Monday, April 20th, and I am your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. Here with my co-hosts, Ram Ahluwalia, Maester of Wealth, the leader of Lumida, Chris Perkins, CEO of 250 Digital Asset Management. Today, we're going to be joined by multiple guests, but starting with Parker White, founding contributor to Apyx. So let's start with that one, which is Apyx.
We've seen a significant set of products launch over the past few years, attempting to capitalize on blockchain rails, developments around crypto, and call it alternative means of creating, I guess in this case, stable coins. So Apyx, Parker, I'm going to let you give us the download on this first to describe as our light foundation here. What is it? How does this work?

**Parker White** (1:49)
Sure. So the general idea is to create a stable coin or a stable like asset backed by digital credit. And digital credit is what Michael Saylor is calling their preferred equity instrument issued by strategy, STRC. So if anyone's been paying attention, I believe it was last week, they bought about two and a half billion dollars with a Bitcoin.
They are raising capital at a pretty astonishing pace. Micro strategies, STRC or stretch instrument as they call it is the most traded, most liquid and largest preferred stock ever in history. Preferred stocks are kind of a somewhat niche area of the market. But interestingly, and many people don't know this, stretch's IPO was actually the largest IPO of 2025, full stop. Larger than circle, larger than any other asset IPO.
It has really been catching on now.
But it's NASDAQ listed, it's not really accessible into the DeFi world. Essentially what we did was we created stable coin backed by this instrument, put some cash in there as well, a little bit of SATA. But we think a whole bunch of other DATs are going to be issuing very similar variable rate non-convertible preferreds as well. And so this basically ports that yield from the NASDAQ into the on-chain world. So right now, APYUSD, the staked version, is paying about 12%. We target about 13%.
And so it's good double-digit yield on chain, and it's super transparent backing. There's no trading strategies or borrowing and lending across Aave and centralized exchanges. It's just people give us cash, we send it to the brokerage account, we buy the stretch. That's that. Now we of course are listed on Pendle and we have the points farm and all of that, which helps to boost the yield a little bit. But the underlying collateral base is itself yielding about 12% because we've got a stretch in there of just 11 and a half. And we've also got SATA. So pretty straightforward, pretty simple product. But over the last seven and a half weeks, we've been growing pretty significantly. We've hit about 180 million in supply. We announced, I guess it was a week or so ago, crossing the million share. So $100 million worth of stretch on the balance sheet. So we're one of the largest holders of stretch at this point. And today, actually, the stable coin was just listed on Kraken, which is pretty wild for a stable coin pre-TGE to be listed on Kraken. Obviously, the entire team is ex-Kraken. So that certainly helped. But there's a lot of steam being built here around this narrative of kind of digital credit Unchained.

**Austin Campbell** (4:55)
Excellent. So, looking at this, as we look at, call it press commentary out in the world, one bull case. So if we look at Joseph Onorati, the CEO at DeFi Development Court, it's Apyx creates a feedback mechanism that bridges between publicly listed balance sheets and on-chain markets.
Benchmark Research was noting that stretch is becoming the backbone of yield-backed stablecoin ecosystem. And Parker, you just gave us a good description of how to get this yield on chain. So, bear case to go the other way.