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.
A separate analyst, tomwanhh, independently reported the same structural gap, noting Robinhood’s target-APR design “will hover around 7% APY regardless of vault TVL” up to roughly $2 billion, while Coinbase’s rate “drifts lower as TVL grows.”
Subsidy Math and Campaign Length
The two subsidy mechanics point to different depositor experiences over time. Because Robinhood pays only the delta to its target, a depositor who joins six months in earns the same rate as one who joined on day one, Pink Brains notes. Coinbase’s incentive-plus-market-rate structure instead rewards early depositors more, since $MORPHO incentives dilute as the vault’s TVL grows.
Campaign length also diverges. Robinhood has committed its subsidy to run for a year, betting that organic yield climbs toward 7% as new borrower demand, including institutional credit and margin lending against tokenized stocks, arrives on the platform, Pink Brains reports. Tomwanhh separately put Coinbase’s campaign window at running to mid-September, with an option to extend, an unofficial timeline neither company has confirmed on its own channels.
Both companies are chasing the same underlying float: stablecoin reserve income shared through distribution deals, Circle’s for Coinbase and the Global Dollar Network’s for Robinhood’s $USDG. Whether either rate survives a full year without erosion depends on borrower demand neither company has locked in yet. Both platforms describe their advertised rates as estimates subject to change.
