Coinbase began offering a High Yield tier on its USDC lending product paying about 7.02% APY, roughly double the 3.63% APY on its standard Core tier, days after Robinhood Earn launched a competing 7% campaign.
Both products route deposits through Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol with $7.11 billion in total value locked, and both are curated by Steakhouse Financial. But the two rates are built differently, according to a breakdown from analyst account Pink Brains.
Robinhood's headline number blends several pieces: borrower interest, reserve yield from its USDG stablecoin's T-bill backing, zero vault fees and a top-up campaign run through Merkl that pays the gap between organic yield and a fixed 7% target. Pink Brains says comparable Steakhouse-curated vaults have been printing "mid 3%" organic yield, meaning roughly half of Robinhood's advertised rate is subsidy rather than native return.
Coinbase's design works differently. Depositors' funds are looped against Ethena's USDe stablecoin up to the edge of perpetual futures funding rates, then topped up with MORPHO token rewards rather than a fixed-target subsidy, per Pink Brains.
That means Coinbase's organic yield floats with funding markets instead of sitting under a ceiling, but it also isn't propped up to a guaranteed number. Pink Brains says the blended rate "now drops to 4.44% including boosted reward in $MORPHO," down from the 7% headline.
