A $306M Stablecoin Has Sat Below Peg Since June, and Its Collateral Explains Why

apxUSD trades at $0.9430. It is supposed to trade at a dollar. Around $306 million of it exists, and it has been below par since June — long enough that the story stopped being news and became a standing condition almost nobody talks about.

What backs it

apxUSD is a synthetic dollar issued by Apyx Finance. The collateral is the part worth understanding: rather than holding cash and Treasury bills the way USDC does, apxUSD is issued against preferred shares of digital asset treasury companies. Specifically the STRC series from Strategy, the company formerly called MicroStrategy, and the SATA series from Strive. Short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents sit alongside them in the reserve basket.

Preferred shares pay a dividend, which is the appeal. A reserve of cash earns whatever the money market pays; a reserve of dividend-bearing preferreds earns more, and that spread funds the protocol. The trade-off is that those shares are equity in companies whose main asset is bitcoin.

The chain of events

Bitcoin currently sits near $63,900, down roughly 2% on the day. Bitcoin-adjacent equities move with it, usually harder. When the shares backing apxUSD fall, the collateral behind each token falls with them, and holders who want out sell into whatever liquidity exists rather than waiting for redemption.

Apyx characterised an earlier June wobble as expected behaviour rather than a fault, on the argument that a collateral basket marked to market should be allowed to move. That is a defensible position for a synthetic dollar. It is a harder one to hold two months later with the token still six cents light.

Date	apxUSD price	Off peg
3 August	$0.9005	-10.0%
4 August	$0.9189	-8.1%
5 August	$0.9265	-7.4%
6 August	$0.9272	-7.3%
7 August	$0.9431	-5.7%
8 August	$0.9408	-5.9%
9 August	$0.9433	-5.7%
10 August	$0.9430	-5.7%

The direction is upward from the 3 August low, so the recovery is real. The pace is slow, and the token has not been within a cent of par at any point in that window.

The supply tells a second story

Circulating supply is the number to watch during a depeg, because it records whether anyone is actually getting out. apxUSD supply is $305.9 million today, down 10.7% from $342.7 million a month ago. Over the past week it moved 0.01%.

Roughly $37 million left during the first phase, and then redemptions stopped almost entirely. Two readings fit. Either the holders who wanted out have gone and the remainder are content to wait for the collateral to recover, or redemption at par is not practically available to the people still holding, and the secondary market price is the only exit. The published data does not distinguish between them, which is itself worth noting.

Why the collateral choice matters more than the depeg

Here is the part that deserves attention. The companies whose preferred shares back apxUSD are, right now, selling the bitcoin that gives those shares their value. Strategy has sold 6,916 BTC over the past six weeks, roughly $429 million worth, including 1,690 BTC in the most recent week. It is not alone among treasury companies in doing so; MARA disposed of 23,093 BTC during the first half of 2026 at an average price near $70,631.

A stablecoin holder in this structure is exposed to bitcoin, to the equity market's opinion of bitcoin-holding companies, to the capital structure decisions of those companies, and to the liquidity of a preferred share class. Each layer is defensible on its own. Stacked, they produce an instrument that is called a dollar and has behaved like a leveraged bitcoin position for two months.

What to take from it

Yield on a stablecoin reserve is never free, and apxUSD is a clean demonstration of where the payment comes from. The dividend that made the design attractive is compensation for holding equity risk, and the peg is what absorbs that risk when the collateral moves. Calling the result a stablecoin stretches the word past anything a saver would recognise. The honest label is a tokenised claim on a dividend portfolio, and the six-cent gap is the market pricing that claim correctly rather than a malfunction.

For anyone holding a yield-bearing dollar token, the question worth asking is not what the advertised rate is. It is what the reserve owns, and what has to stay true for the reserve to be worth par. If the answer involves an asset that can fall 30% in a quarter, the token inherits that.

Price and supply figures come from DefiLlama's stablecoin data, cross-checked against CoinGecko, and reflect balances at the time of writing. Nothing here is investment advice.