In partnership with
DEFI
The Fed Pays Your Bank 3.90%. Your Bank Pays You 0.01%. 🙃
A rate-by-rate look at where U.S. savers can park dollars this fall - banks, crypto exchanges and DeFi - and what each one wants in return.
The Federal Reserve raised rates on September 16, its first hike since July 2023, taking the target range to 3.75% to 4.00% and bumping what it pays banks on their reserve balances to 3.90%. The next meeting is Tuesday and Wednesday, and 16 of 18 officials penciled in at least one more hike before year-end. 📈
So how much of that made it to your savings account? At Chase or Wells Fargo, the standard savings account pays 0.01%. Ten grand earns you a dollar. A year. Bank of America is the big spender at 0.04%.
At that rate your money doubles in about 7,000 years. The FDIC's national average came out Monday at 0.38%, exactly where it sat in August, before the Fed hiked.
Meanwhile crypto apps are paying 2% to 7% on dollar stablecoins, and DeFi lending markets averaged 4.8% on USDC.
Some of you asked for a list and explanation of who offers what for yield and where, well, here it is. 🧶
DEFI
Yield Is The Whole Game Now 🎯
Everybody wants the Fed to go back to ‘Money-Printer-Go-Brrrrrr’, but nobody is betting on cheap money coming back. At least not anytime soon. 💸
Next week's Fed meeting: a 94% chance of a hold, per prediction markets
Another hike before 2027: around 78% odds
The Fed's own dots: the funds rate finishing the year at 4.1%
But that streak doesn't run forever, and the year it stalls, a lot of people are going to decide learning about a thing called yield maybe isn’t a bad idea. Plenty already have: money market fund assets hit a record $7.98 trillion in early September, with stocks ripping.
And crypto has been in the yield business the whole time (MakerDAO's DAI Savings Rate in 2019). I mean, it’s been a shite show at times, but it’s matured from the scamfest that was Terra with Anchor paying close to 20% on UST right up until UST stopped being a dollar. The rates got saner. The business never changed.
What's new is that the banks are scared of it. Treasury's borrowing advisory committee flagged roughly $6.6 trillion in deposits as the money most exposed to migrating into stablecoins, and the American Bankers Association quotes that number every chance it gets.
Their fear is pretty simple. There's are better options than a 0.01% savings account, and it's sitting in the same apps people use to pay for gas and groceries. 🍕
100+ ChatGPT Prompts to Revolutionize Your Day
Supercharge your productivity with HubSpot's comprehensive guide to Chat GPT. This free resource is your fast track to AI mastery:
Industry-Specific Use Cases: 15+ real-world applications across various sectors
Productivity Guide: 21 best practices to 10x your efficiency with AI
Prompt Powerhouse: 100+ ready-to-use prompts for immediate implementation
Challenge Buster: Overcome common AI hurdles with expert strategies
Plus, in-depth sections on email composition, content creation, customer support, and data analysis.
DEFI
The Bank's Cut ✂️
A bank that parks your deposit at the Fed earns 3.90% and pays you 0.01%. That 3.89-point spread is the business model, and nobody at the branch is losing sleep over it. 😴
Here's the rest of the bank menu:
Megabank savings: 0.01% at Chase and Wells Fargo, 0.04% at Bank of America
FDIC national savings average: 0.38%
Average high-yield savings account: 1.62% (Curinos)
FDIC national average 12-month CD: 1.76%
Best no-gimmick online savings: 4.20% to 4.40%, with Pibank at 4.40% and no minimum
3-month T-bill: about 4.2%
Hold onto that 4.40% from the top online banks. It comes with FDIC insurance up to $250,000, and it's the bar every crypto product below has to clear. The banks aren't competing on rate. They're competing on you not bothering to move. 🛋️
STABLECOINS
Where The Crypto Yield Comes From 🔍
A stablecoin on its own pays nothing. $CRCL ( ▼ 0.82% ) and Tether park reserves in Treasury bills and keep the interest, and the GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying holders interest, with full effect by January 18, 2027. 📅
The law says nothing about the exchange you hold the coin on, and the OCC's final rule this week didn't settle it either. So the exchanges pay you "rewards." Coinbase calls its USDC rewards a loyalty program and books them as a marketing expense. These aren't the interest payments you're looking for.
And no, you can't stake a stablecoin. $USDC ( ▲ 0.02% ) doesn't secure a blockchain, so when an app calls it "stablecoin staking," it's lending or a rebate wearing staking's clothes.
Strip away the branding and every dollar of stablecoin yield traces back to one of five places:
Treasury income, passed through. The issuer earns it, the exchange gets a cut, you get a slice of the cut.
Borrowers. Traders post BTC or ETH as collateral and borrow stablecoins to lever up. Hot markets mean higher rates.
The basis trade. Hold crypto, short it with perps and collect the funding leveraged longs pay. Ethena made its name on it.
Private credit. Maple-style lenders make loans to trading firms that can't borrow cheaper elsewhere.
Marketing budgets and token rewards. Promo rates, bonus tokens, the top-up that holds Robinhood's rate at 7%. Temporary by design.
If a platform can't tell you which of these is paying you, assume it's you. 👀
EXCHANGES
What Exchanges Offer 📋
Every big app pays something on dollars now. But there’s usually a catch.
Coinbase: 3.75%, Members Only
Rate: 3.75% on USDC, no cap, credited weekly
Who gets it: Coinbase One members only, at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Non-members got cut off entirely on December 15, 2025.
Break-even: about $1,600 in USDC on the monthly plan. Below that you're paying Coinbase for the privilege of lending it your attention.
The second door: USDC lending through Steakhouse-curated $MORPHO ( ▼ 0.64% ) vaults on Base, advertised at up to 7.19%, with variable rates and withdrawals that depend on how much of the vault is lent out.
Kraken: Pick A Door
Kraken runs three different products and they pay three different things.
Stablecoin Rewards: opt in, paid weekly:
USDC: 2%, or 4% with Kraken+
USDG: 2.25%, or 4.50% with Kraken+
AUSD: 3%, or 6% with Kraken+. Higher rate, different issuer - AUSD is Agora's coin, not USDC.
Kraken+ runs $49.99 a year and pays for itself at about $2,500.
DeFi Earn: routes USDC into $AAVE ( ▼ 2.54% ) and Morpho vaults. The top one advertises up to 5.16%, but Kraken keeps 25% of vault earnings, so if that headline is pre-cut you're looking at roughly 3.9%. Kraken says flat out it isn't a regulated financial product.
Fixed Rate Rewards: up to 6% fixed for accredited investors, 3 to 18-month terms, no early exit. A CD with a crypto logo and no FDIC sticker.
Nexo: 5.5%, But Technically 10.5%
Nexo's U.S. site advertises up to 10.5% on USDC and USDT. That rate belongs to somebody holding seven figures of Nexo's own token. CeFiRates fills in the rest of the ladder:
Base: 5.5% on USDC, paid in USDC, no NEXO tokens required. Nothing accrues until your whole portfolio tops $5,000. At $4,999 you earn zero.
Paid in NEXO: up to 7.5%. The extra 2 points arrive if you chose to get your rewards in NEXO’s token instead of USDC. That means you get all of the reward in NEXO, not part of it in USDC and another bit in NEXO.
Signature, the top tier: up to 10.5% flexible, 12.5% locked. Requires 2 million NEXO tokens, about $1.6 million of Nexo's own token, held just to qualify.
So the realistic number for a regular person with five grand or more is 5.5%, or $550 a year on $10,000 with no subscription attached.
Crypto.com: The Priciest Free Lunch
Stablecoin Earn is only open to paid Level Up members: up to 2% on the Plus plan and up to 3% on Pro, which costs $29.99 a month. Run the Pro math. $359.88 a year in fees against 3% means you need about $12,000 parked just to break even. Every dollar of yield below that goes straight back to Crypto.com.
PayPal And Venmo: 4%, No Membership
PayPal pays 4% on PYUSD held in PayPal or Venmo, with a one-dollar minimum and no subscription, though PayPal can change the rate whenever it wants. Venmo has more than 67 million monthly active accounts, every one of them a couple of taps from 4%. If the argument is that crypto is the easiest yield a regular person can get, this is exhibit A.
Gemini: Up To 4% On RLUSD
Gemini's rewards run on Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin and top out at 4% APR.
Robinhood: 7%, Estimated (current 3.6%)
Robinhood Earn launched July 1 with an estimated 7% APY on USDG, lent from a self-custody wallet inside the app. One-dollar minimum, no lockup, no fees.
Where it comes from: Morpho vaults on Robinhood Chain. About 4 points is lending yield.
Risk grade: Staking Rewards graded the vaults CCC to CCC+. On S&P's scale those letters mean "currently vulnerable." Different grader, same alphabet. 🔤
STOCKTWITS
Hey, We Have A Forex Newsletter Now 😱
Written by yours truly. Super data heavy. Right up your alley. 👀
Subscribe!
It’s once a week, on Mondays. Let me know what you think! 👇
DEFI
DeFi: Whoever's Borrowing Sets The Rate 🤝
DeFi doesn't have a marketing department deciding your rate. It has borrowers. When traders want leverage, they borrow stablecoins and the supply rate climbs. When they don't, it sags. 📉
As of today, USDC, across the biggest DeFi lending pools, paid a 4.8% weighted average, about 0.9 points over the Fed funds midpoint. USDT paid about 3.8%.
Lending Markets: Borrowers Pay You
$AAVE ( ▼ 2.54% ): the biggest lender in the space. 3.81% on USDC on Ethereum across $2.4 billion supplied, and 3.36% on USDT across $2.9 billion.
$COMP ( ▼ 1.11% ): 5.86% on USDC. Older and smaller than Aave, with a similar risk profile.
$MORPHO ( ▼ 0.64% ): the’re the DeFi behind Coinbase's lending and Robinhood Earn, and, last I checked, they’re the biggest USDC lending out there now since passing Aave in July.
$FLUID ( ▲ 2.26% ): 6.15% on USDC today. The best base rate among pools holding more than $20 million belongs to Jupiter Lend on Solana, at 6.48%.
Credit, Strategies And Leverage: Somebody's Trade Pays You
If you want some examples of how sophisticated the yield game is getting in crypto, here you go:
$MPL ( 0.0% ) (syrupUSDC): 5.13% across $2.8 billion, the biggest single USDC pool in DeFi. The money goes to institutional borrowers Maple vets off-chain, which is a lot like Lumon telling you the work is mysterious and important. Withdrawals can queue for up to 30 days, and U.S. residents can't use it.
$ENA ( ▲ 0.18% ) (sUSDe): averaged 4.95% over the last 30 days, after running double digits in early 2025 when funding was hot. Up to a seven-day cooldown to get out, and not available to U.S. persons.
$PENDLE ( ▼ 1.76% ) : buy a principal token at a discount and hold it to maturity, the closest thing DeFi has to a CD. It's also where the leverage crowd lives: Pendle's own newsletter advertised looped positions at up to 55.5% in August. That's not a savings rate. That's a dare.
DEFI
Here’s Some Fine Print 📜
None of this is FDIC insured. Not Coinbase's 3.75%, and not $HOOD ( ▼ 1.56% )’s 7% either. A stablecoin balance is covered by the company's balance sheet and whatever the smart contract does when things go sideways. ⚠️
And how often do things go sideways? Often enough to fill a memorial wall.
2022: Celsius, Voyager and BlockFi went bankrupt and depositors became creditors. Gemini Earn customers waited about 18 months to get their money back after Genesis froze.
November 2025: Stream Finance's xUSD collapse stuck some Morpho vault depositors with bad debt.
September 24, 2026: Bitget lost about $388 million to hackers and suspended withdrawals.
The rates also move whenever the platform feels like it. Coinbase paid up to 4.1% on USDC in mid-2025, cut it to 3.5% behind a paywall, then nudged it back to 3.75%. None of that required a Fed meeting.
Taxes are mostly a wash: the IRS treats crypto rewards as ordinary income, same as bank interest. 🧮
Get In Touch 📬
Email me, Jonathan Morgan, feedback; I’d love to hear from you. 📧
Follow me on Stocktwits 🫂 And Sponsor this newsletter 😎
|
Get the app Real-time alerts, live earnings calls, your personalised feed - the best experience is on mobile.
|
Terms & Conditions 📝
Securities Disclaimer: STOCKTWITS IS NOT A TAX ADVISOR, BROKER, FINANCIAL ADVISOR OR INVESTMENT ADVISOR. THE SERVICE IS NOT INTENDED TO PROVIDE TAX, LEGAL, FINANCIAL OR INVESTMENT ADVICE, AND NOTHING ON THE SERVICE SHOULD BE CONSTRUED AS AN OFFER TO SELL, A SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY, OR A RECOMMENDATION FOR ANY SECURITY. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. You should only invest risk capital, and not capital required for other purposes. You alone are solely responsible for determining whether any investment, security or strategy, or any other product or service, is appropriate or suitable for you based on your investment objectives and personal and financial situation. You should also consult an attorney or tax professional regarding your specific legal or tax situation. The Content is to be used for informational and entertainment purposes only and the Service does not provide investment advice for any individual. Stocktwits, its affiliates and partners specifically disclaim any and all liability or loss arising out of any action taken in reliance on Content, including but not limited to market value or other loss on the sale or purchase of any company, property, product, service, security, instrument, or any other matter. You understand that an investment in any security is subject to a number of risks, and that discussions of any security published on the Service will not contain a list or description of relevant risk factors. In addition, please note that some of the stocks about which Content is published on the Service have a low market capitalization and/or insufficient public float. Such stocks are subject to more risk than stocks of larger companies, including greater volatility, lower liquidity and less publicly available information. Read the full terms & conditions here. 🔍
Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLD, NEAR, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋