Coinbase began offering a High Yield tier on its USDC lending product, paying around 7.02% APY, about 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 a total value of $7.11 billion, and both are managed by Steakhouse Financial. But the two interest rates are structured differently, according to an analysis by analyst account Pink Brains.
Robinhood’s main number combines several elements: the borrower’s interest rate, his reserve yield $USDG stablecoin’s T-bill support, zero vault fees, and a top-up campaign through Merkl that bridges the gap between organic yield and a fixed 7% target. Pink Brains says comparable Steakhouse-managed vaults have printed an organic yield of “mid 3%,” meaning about half of Robinhood’s advertised rate is subsidy rather than out-of-pocket returns.
Coinbase’s design works differently. Depositors’ funds will be pegged to Ethena’s USDe stablecoin up to the edge of the perpetual futures funding rates, and then topped up with $MORPHO token rewards instead of a fixed-purpose subsidy, according to Pink Brains.
That means Coinbase’s organic revenue moves with the funding markets instead of being capped, but also isn’t propped up at a guaranteed level. Pink Brains says the blended rate “now drops to 4.44%, including increased pay $MORPHO,” lower than the headline of 7%.
A separate analyst, tomwanhh, independently reported the same structural difference, noting that Robinhood’s target APR design “will hover around 7% APY regardless of vault TVL” up to around $2 billion, while Coinbase’s rate “gets lower as TVL grows.”
Subsidy math and campaign duration
The two subsidy mechanisms point to different experiences of savers over time. Because Robinhood only pays the delta to its target, a depositor who signs up for six months earns the same rate as someone who joined on day one, Pink Brains notes. Coinbase’s incentive-plus-market rate structure has rewarded early savers more since then $MORPHO incentives dilute as the vault’s TVL grows.
The length of the campaign also varies. Robinhood has pledged that the subsidy will last for a year, betting that organic returns will climb toward 7% as demand from new borrowers, including institutional credit and margin lending against tokenized stocks, arrives on the platform, Pink Brains reports. Tomwanhh separately set Coinbase’s campaign period for mid-September, with an option to extend, an unofficial timeline that neither company has confirmed on its own channels.
Both companies are chasing the same underlying float: stablecoin reserve revenue shared through distribution agreements, Circle’s for Coinbase and the Global Dollar Network’s for Robinhood’s $USDG. Whether either interest rate survives a full year without erosion depends on borrower demand, which neither company has yet captured. Both platforms describe their advertised rates as estimates that are subject to change.