Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz ignited a fresh round of debate inside the Solana ecosystem on September 10 after floating the idea of a Solana-aligned stablecoin whose reserve yield would be redirected to SOL via buybacks or burns—either as an “enshrined” protocol feature or, more likely, through competing digital-asset treasury companies (DATs). “Warming up to the idea that Solana should enshrine a stablecoin,” he wrote, adding that “50% burn of the yield goes back to burning SOL.” Hours later, he reframed the thrust: “it shouldn’t be enshrined, a DAT should do it… fix it and trillions.”
In short: Mumtaz’s “commodity” phrasing is rhetorical, not legal. Still, the law’s most consequential economic detail—stablecoins cannot pass interest to holders—means issuers (or affiliated structures) capture the reserve income and can decide how to use it. That’s precisely the lever Mumtaz wants pointed back at Solana.
Within hours, one builder publicly accepted the challenge. “We (@KASTcard) will put 101–103% of all interest income from USDK on Solana, to buyback SOL,” wrote CEO and co-founder of KAST, adding that the buybacks would sit with a foundation that issues a token after a planned TGE and that USDK would be issued with the m^0 foundation as a U.S. “Genius compliant” stable. The 1–3% kicker above 100% would be treated as marketing spend. KAST and m^0 have previously disclosed plans to launch programmable, application-specific dollars on the networl; KAST’s consumer app and card already target global stablecoin payments.
The proposal’s mechanics are straightforward in concept. A native USD stablecoin accrues reserve yield (e.g., from T-bills) at the issuer level; a DAT structure then commits that income stream to buy SOL on the open market and either retire it or recycle it into ecosystem programs.
Mumtaz even sketched a toy model—“Assume a Solana DAT runs a Solana stable, call it USDmanlet… [it] earns yield. The DAT takes all the yield and buys SOL with it… embed it in the ecosystem and take the yield and pump it back… or into burning SOL.”
None of that is nefarious—USDC’s terms are clear—but for Solana purists it is strategically suboptimal to let billions in Solana-settled stablecoin activity originate issuer profits that are then reinvested in a rival’s stack. That is the “simple problem” Mumtaz says he wants to fix, whether by enshrining or (more plausibly) by market-driven competition among issuers and DATs.
For now, this is only a proposal—there is no SIP or governance vote to “enshrine” anything at the protocol layer, and Mumtaz himself emphasized the market-driven DAT route. Whether the proposal takes the form of competing issuers pledging buybacks, a canonical “ecosystem stable,” or a more modular treasury program, the endgame Mumtaz sketched is unambiguous: stop leaking yield, and point it at SOL.
At press time, SOL traded at $228.
