On August 28, there were $681.8 million of YLDS tokens in existence. On September 1, there were $447.0 million. The price never moved off a dollar, no incident report went out, and no outlet wrote it up.

YLDS is the first yield-bearing stablecoin the SEC registered as a security. It is issued by Figure Certificate Company and sold through Figure Markets, and its latest quarterly report explains a $235 million move better than any market commentary could. Of the $556.0 million of certificates outstanding on June 30, $477.5 million belonged to the parent company and its affiliates.

What a YLDS token actually is

A YLDS token is a face-amount certificate, an old Investment Company Act structure that Figure dusted off and put on a public blockchain. It is a debt instrument, priced at a dollar. Each token is an unsecured obligation of the issuer, redeemable for one dollar plus interest accrued since you got it. The rate is the overnight SOFR rate less 35 basis points, floored at zero. SOFR printed 3.66% on September 3, so holders are earning roughly 3.31% right now, accrued daily and paid on the first business day of each month.

The backing is conservative and itemized in the filing. At June 30 the company held $561.9 million of qualified assets against $557.5 million of certificate reserves: $273.1 million of Treasury securities, $282.4 million of repurchase agreements collateralized by Treasuries, and $6.2 million of cash at depository banks. Reserves are managed by a registered investment adviser inside the same corporate family.

The structure exists for a legal reason. The GENIUS Act bars payment stablecoin issuers from paying interest to holders. Figure's answer was to skip the payment stablecoin category entirely and register the thing as a security, which sits outside that ban. The yield is legal. The cost is that every holder has to clear KYC with Figure Markets, and the token cannot be dropped into a lending pool the way USDC can.

Mike Cagney, who co-founded Figure, framed the pitch to Fortune at the February 2025 launch: "If I can hold this, if I can self-custody this, if it pays me interest, and I can actually use it to transact, what do I need a bank for?" Nineteen months later, the filings show who took him up on it.

The four days

YLDS lives mostly on Provenance Blockchain, the network Figure helped build, with a smaller slice on Stellar. The Provenance marker uylds.fcc reports 497,000,807 tokens as of today, matching DefiLlama's supply figure to the dollar. Stellar carries another $25.2 million, and it has barely moved since June.

YLDS tokens outstanding, August 18 to September 5, 2026

Provenance plus Stellar balances, in millions of dollars. The gap covers August 29 to 31, for which no daily snapshot was recorded. Supply then rebounded $75.9 million on September 4.

Supply had spent the second half of August in a narrow band between $666 million and $688 million. Then a third of it vanished across a long weekend, sat flat for three days near $447 million, and jumped back to $522.9 million on September 4. Redemption at face value is the mechanism: hand the certificate back, take a dollar and your accrued interest, and the tokens are burned.

Who holds the float

The 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 splits the balance in two lines. Fully paid certificates held by related parties: $477,536 thousand. Held by third parties: $78,497 thousand. The related party number is 86% of the total.

Six months earlier the same split was $252.3 million of $328.8 million, or 77%. The product grew by $228.7 million over the half year and got more concentrated doing it.

The flow statement is where it gets stark. Certificates issued in the six months: $983.2 million. Surrendered: $762.8 million. Broken out, related parties issued $539.4 million and surrendered $319.8 million, a net addition of $219.6 million. Third parties issued $443.7 million and surrendered $442.9 million. Net outside money for the half year: $0.8 million.

3,450 accounts, $78.5 million

Account count is climbing. Figure reported 3,450 accounts holding transferable certificates at June 30, up from 1,768 at the end of 2025. Outside balances did not climb with them. Spread $78.5 million of third-party certificates across every account on the platform and the average lands near $22,750 — and the real distribution is almost certainly a handful of treasuries and funds on top of a long tail of small holders. The company paid $8.3 million of interest over the half year and booked a net loss of $0.8 million. Most of that interest went to its own affiliates.

What this means if you are shopping for on-chain yield

  • Supply growth is a bad demand signal here. A chart of YLDS outstanding is mostly a chart of one shareholder's treasury operations. The $235 million drop and the $75.9 million rebound are both consistent with an affiliate moving cash, not with a run.
  • The yield floats with the Fed. SOFR minus 35 basis points is roughly 3.31% today. Every cut takes the same bite out of it, and the floor is zero.
  • Redemption goes through one door. Minting and redeeming run through Figure Markets after KYC. Secondary liquidity for a security token is thin by design, so the issuer's redemption desk is your exit.
  • You are an unsecured creditor. The reserves are high-quality and the coverage is above 100%, but the certificate is an obligation of Figure Certificate Company rather than a claim on ring-fenced assets.

None of this makes YLDS a bad product. It does what it says: a dollar token, registered, backed by Treasuries and repo, paying a rate you can look up on the New York Fed's website. The registration was real work, and the reserve reporting is better than most of what the stablecoin market discloses.

My problem is with how the growth gets cited. YLDS keeps appearing in tokenized-asset roundups as proof that regulated yield tokens are pulling in real money, and the filing says otherwise. Two numbers from the same document tell the whole story, and the interesting one is not the $235 million that left over the weekend. It is the $0.8 million of net third-party money that arrived across an entire half year, against a product that closed the period with $557.5 million outstanding. When the next YLDS supply chart shows up in your feed, the question worth asking is whose dollars moved.