Obex, a new crypto incubator, has raised $37 million to support building the next generation of dividend-generating stablecoins led by Framework Ventures, LayerZero and the Sky ecosystem, the team has told CoinDesk in an interview.
The initiative aimed to invest and raise capital for projects that bring real-world asset-backed strategies onchain, bringing institutional-grade risk controls and underwriting practices to the fast-moving sector.
Obex will be the latest capital allocator of Sky, the entity formerly known as MakerDAO behind DAI and USDS stablecoins with a combined market cap of $9 billion, providing funding for projects that scale from the protocol’s vast reserves and earn returns from their strategies.
“While we see stablecoins go to a trillion [dollar market]I think yield-bearing stablecoins are moving even faster,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Stablecoins, a group of cryptocurrencies that aim to keep a stable price pegged to an external asset such as the US dollar, are a rapidly growing asset class. While mostly backed by fiat money, government bonds and increasingly used for cross-border payments, a growing group of tokens seek to offer competitive returns to holders through backend investment strategies. Often dubbed synthetic stablecoins, the most notable example among them is Athena’s $8 billion token USDE, which generates dividends by holding spot cryptos while simultaneously shorting an equal amount of derivatives into a neutral trading position.
However, some support strategies can turn out to be risky, causing the tokens to lose their supposed price anchor. A number of synthetic stablecoins, including Stream Finance’s USDX and Elixir’s deUSD, recently lost their peg following a DeFi contagion triggered by decentralized protocol Balancer’s exploit.
Obex was designed to avoid these stablecoin failures, highlighting the need for stricter oversight and better technical foundations, Spencer said. “We can’t have people create $500 million stablecoins and blow them up,” he said. “Sky has the infrastructure to scale these securely.”
The initiative will focus on stablecoins backed by high-quality real-world security, focusing on three key areas: computing credits, such as tokenized GPU infrastructure; energy assets such as municipal solar and battery installations; and loans to large fintechs, which often lack access to credit lines despite their size.
The incubator will run a 12-week program for early-stage teams, offering capital, technical resources and access to Sky’s infrastructure.
Teams that pass risk and governance reviews can qualify for additional capital from Sky, which recently authorized a government vote to use up to $2.5 billion USDS in Obex projects.
Spencer described Obex as a “Y Combinator for stablecoins,” a reference to the influential Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “You look around San Francisco and you see stablecoin ads everywhere. We receive five to ten pitches every day,” he said. “The energy is there.”
“What’s missing is infrastructure: to properly sign off on these ideas, to make sure they’re secure and actually bring them to scale,” he added.
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