If you hold stUSDT or its wrapped version, the yield has already stopped and a redemption clock is running. Where your tokens sit today decides how much work you have ahead.

stUSDT, the yield-bearing token that sold itself as a way to earn from short-term government bonds, stopped accruing interest on Saturday, November 14, and opened a six-month window for holders to cash out. Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing both reported the wind-down, and both put the remaining value locked at roughly $8.6 million, according to DefiLlama data.

That is a long way down. DefiLlama recorded an all-time high of $2.301 billion on November 22, 2023, which makes the drop more than 99%. A year ago the protocol still held about $60 million, and DefiLlama showed $56.3 million as recently as late October, so most of the remaining money left in the last few weeks.

Per the announcement as relayed by Cointelegraph, holders of stUSDT and wstUSDT can redeem through the official portal until May 14, 2027. Requests that miss that date will be handled through customer support in monthly batches through August 2027. Crypto Briefing reports that redemptions pay out in USDT with no fee beyond network transaction costs.

There's a catch for anyone who never held the token directly. Tokens parked on exchanges, in JustLend or in Curve pools have to be moved to a personal wallet first, and wstUSDT has to be unwrapped before the portal will touch it. JustLend DAO is already phasing out its wstUSDT market functions, per Cointelegraph. If your position sits in a lending market, don't wait for the last month to find out how long that unwinding takes.

USD1, a stablecoin with roughly $4.7 billion in circulating supply, lost one of its largest listings after HTX converted every user's holdings to USDT and cited a UK sanctions designation tied to Russia as the root of the dispute. - Justin Sun HTX delists Trump stablecoin USD1 - cryptocurrency exchange freezes World Liberty Financial assets

The team says every token is still fully backed. It gave no reason for shutting down, and Cointelegraph reported that it received no reply to its requests for comment. Check the portal itself before you move anything.

What was stUSDT, and who held it?

The token launched in July 2023 on Tron, taking USDT deposits and paying yield through a rebase, meaning your balance grew as interest accrued. It later expanded to Ethereum. Despite the name it has no connection to Tether. It was widely linked to Justin Sun, and Protos reported that about 99% of the supply sat with wallets tied to him and entities such as Huobi, with contracts it described as largely unverified and unaudited. Protos also reported that Poloniex pulled out of the Ethereum version, which left utilisation close to nothing.

That concentration matters more than the headline figure. A product can show $2.3 billion locked and still be a handful of large holders, and when those holders leave, the chart looks like a cliff. The RWA pitch to everyone else was that Treasury-style yield would make onchain dollars safer. Nobody outside the team could check that from the chain alone.

Frankly, this is the cleanest argument yet for reading who actually holds an RWA token before you read its yield. DefiLlama's RWA category still tracks about $4.1 billion across 176 protocols, and stUSDT now ranks only 18th by value in it.

It also isn't the only yield product to wind down this year. Altura shut its stablecoin vaults after about $8.5 million in USDT redemptions, a rush that followed a depeg scare at MainStreet, which later said its assets stayed fully backed and blamed a proof-of-reserves dashboard going offline. Different protocols, same pattern: when a yield product can't show you its reserves in real time, a rumour is enough to empty it.

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