The rate advertised on a stablecoin is almost never the only rate on offer. On most platforms the same coin sits in several products at once, each paying differently depending on how much risk it takes and how quickly you can get your money back. The number that reaches the comparison tables is the top one, which is usually the slowest and the riskiest.
EarnPark publishes up to 15% APY on USDT, up to 10% on USDC and up to 7% on DAI as of September 2026. APY simply means the return over a full year, including the effect of earnings themselves earning. Reaching those published rates does not require holding PARK, the platform's own token, which matters because several platforms below do reserve their best rates for customers who hold theirs.
Updated 20 September 2026
The same coin pays several different rates
Each row below is a separate USDT product, not a description of one account. You pick one, and the rate you get is the rate of the row you picked.
| Annual rate (APY) | Risk level | When you can withdraw | Withdrawal fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15% | High | Only on scheduled monthly dates | No fee |
| 10% | Medium | Any time, no waiting period | 0.30% plus about 3.20 USD |
| 10% | Low | 30 days after you ask, cancellable in the first 24 hours | About 2 USD |
| 5% | Low | Any time, no waiting period | About 2 USD |
USDC runs a similar set topping out at 10%, and DAI has a single low risk product paying up to 7% with the same 30 day withdrawal wait.
The 15% is real and so is the 5%. They are different products. If you want money you can withdraw on any day at the lowest risk level, the rate is 5%. If you will accept high risk and withdrawals only on monthly dates, it is 15%. A comparison table that prints one number for this platform is printing the 15%.
Two things worth noticing in that table. The fastest low risk option pays least, which is the ordinary trade. And the medium risk rung charges a percentage fee on withdrawal rather than a flat one, which matters more on a small balance than the rate difference does.
We can only lay this out in full for one platform because the others do not publish their products in a form that allows it. That gap is itself information, and it is the reason the next table looks thinner than this one.
Where the rates are across platforms
Sorted by advertised rate. These are gross rates, meaning before any fee the platform takes out, and the conditions column is what stands between the headline and you.
| Platform | Advertised top rate | What that rate requires | Rate at low risk with fast withdrawal |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouHodler | Up to 20% | A loyalty level, earned through trading activity on the platform rather than by holding a token | Not published as a separate rung, though its Yield page states no lock period |
| EarnPark | Up to 15% USDT, 10% USDC, 7% DAI | No PARK holding. The top figure is its monthly settling product | 5% on USDT and USDC |
| Nexo | Up to 13% | A loyalty tier set by holding NEXO as a share of your portfolio, plus a 5,000 USD minimum to enter the programme | Not published as a separate rung |
| Ledn | 5% to 8.5% on USDC | Stablecoins only. Its own pages differ on the tiers | Not published as a separate rung |
| Coinbase | 3.50% on USDC | A paid membership | Not published as a separate rung |
| OKX | 3.41% on USDC | Its flexible product, meaning no fixed term, with 15% of returns taken as a service fee | The flexible rate is the withdrawable one, quoted before that fee |
A loyalty tier, in the two cases above, means the platform sorts customers into levels and pays the advertised rate only at the top one. How you climb differs. Nexo's levels depend on holding its token, so improving your rate means taking on that token's price risk alongside the yield. YouHodler's depend on using its trading products, which carry their own costs.
Ledn is worth knowing about for a reason unrelated to its rate. It closed its Bitcoin and Ethereum interest accounts, with a final interest payment on 1 July 2025 per its own help centre, and now runs stablecoin accounts only. It also publishes an independent accountant's check of assets and liabilities every six months, which is a more specific commitment than most of this list makes.
OKX's 3.41% shows the fee problem most clearly. Its own documentation states it takes 15% of accrued returns on the flexible product, so what arrives is meaningfully below what is advertised.
For live rates across both centralised platforms and DeFi protocols, DefiLlama tracks them continuously and is a better reference than any article, since these move daily.
What actually moves stablecoin yields
Platforms pay what they can earn, not what they choose to. Deposits are generally lent to traders who want to borrow, used to support trading on exchanges, or run in strategies that capture small price differences. All three depend on how active the market is.
When trading is busy and borrowing demand is high, rates rise. When it is quiet, they fall. That is why a rate quoted in an article is a snapshot, and why the same platform can pay noticeably differently six months apart.
It also explains some of the gap between platforms, though not all of it. Where one platform pays 3.41% and another advertises 13%, the difference is usually that they are doing different things with the money, or that the higher number carries a condition. The table above names the condition in each case rather than assuming one exists. Our explainer on why large APY figures mislead covers the arithmetic behind the more extreme claims.
The three coins carry different risks
All three aim to hold a value of one dollar and they get there differently. Taken on the same terms, issuer, backing, disclosure and a concrete stress event each:
USDC is issued by Circle and backed by cash and short dated instruments, with regular attestations, meaning an accountant's check of reported reserves on a stated date rather than a continuing guarantee. Its stress event was March 2023, when Circle disclosed 3.3 billion dollars of reserves held at Silicon Valley Bank and the coin briefly traded below a dollar, recovering once US authorities backstopped the bank's depositors. The design held. What the episode showed is that full backing still carries the risk of wherever the backing sits.
USDT is issued by Tether and is the largest stablecoin by a wide margin, which is why it appears in the most trading pairs and generally carries the largest lending volumes in absolute terms. Its disclosure history is the most contested of the three. Tether was fined 41 million dollars by the CFTC in 2021 over claims that USDT was fully backed when it was not, and settled with the New York Attorney General the same year. Its stress events have been about disclosure rather than a design failure. That record changed materially in August 2026, when Tether completed its first full audit by a Big Four firm with an unqualified opinion, which is the single largest improvement in its transparency to date and recent enough that older comparisons do not reflect it.
DAI comes from the Maker ecosystem and is backed by crypto assets held in smart contracts rather than dollars in a bank, a genuinely different model. It is often called the decentralised option, which needs checking rather than assuming. Its collateral has repeatedly included large amounts of other stablecoins, with USDC alone above 40% of backing at points, so its risk has at times been substantially the risk of the coins backing it. Its stress moment was the same March 2023 depeg, transmitted through that USDC exposure.
Our stablecoin explainer goes further into the mechanics, and a separate piece compares USDC and USDT directly.
Platform safety is a separate question from coin safety
Holding a well backed stablecoin on a platform that fails does not protect you. These are two different risks.
When you deposit into most yield products you are lending the coins to the company rather than keeping ownership of specific ones. In practice that means if the company fails you have to seek recovery through an insolvency process alongside its other creditors, rather than simply withdrawing the same coins. There is no deposit insurance equivalent in this market, and any platform implying otherwise is describing something that does not exist.
What can be checked is narrower. An attestation tells you what a company reported on a stated date. Whether it covers liabilities as well as assets varies and is worth looking for, because assets alone show what a company says it holds while liabilities show what it owes customers, and you need both to judge whether one covers the other. Audits are bounded by whatever was submitted for audit. Custody arrangements describe how keys are held. None of these establish solvency on an ongoing basis.
EarnPark's own position is a company registration rather than a financial licence. EarnPark Platform LLP is registered in the UK as a limited liability partnership and the group also operates a BVI entity. Custody runs through Fireblocks, it publishes proof of reserves and holds a CertiK audit, and it sets out where the yield comes from rather than leaving it implied. Each covers what it covers. There is also a public record of incidents and what changed afterwards, which is a more revealing document than any trust page.
Risk labelling across this market is inconsistent enough that comparing risk between platforms is genuinely hard, which our analysis of risk categorisation examines in more detail.
How to evaluate a stablecoin platform
Start with the rung, not the headline. Decide what risk level and withdrawal speed you actually want, then find that rate. It will usually be well below the advertised number, and it is the rate you should compare across platforms.
Then find the condition. Loyalty tiers, token holdings, minimum balances, fixed terms and paid memberships all appear above, and each decides whether the headline applies to you.
Then look for a fee taken out of the rewards rather than charged at withdrawal, because it reduces your rate directly and is the easiest to miss.
Then separate two dates that are easy to confuse. One is when yield is paid to you. The other is when your original stablecoins can actually leave the product. On several platforms these are weeks apart.
Then read what the platform says about where the yield comes from. An unexplained return is one important warning sign among several, alongside the legal entity you are contracting with, the custody arrangement, and what happens to your claim if the company fails.
Finally, run the numbers on your own balance rather than on the percentage, since flat fees take a much larger share of a small deposit. Our calculator does that, a wider comparison covers platforms paying interest on crypto beyond stablecoins, and our CeFi platform comparison applies the same questions to seven companies.
Frequently asked questions
Which stablecoin pays the highest yield in 2026? USDT usually carries the largest lending volumes and often the highest rates, with USDC close behind and DAI generally lower. The difference between platforms is far larger than the difference between coins, so which platform and which product rung you choose matters more than which stablecoin you hold.
Is USDC completely safe? No stablecoin is completely safe. USDC is backed by cash and short dated instruments with regular attestations, which is a strong design, but in March 2023 it briefly traded below a dollar after Circle disclosed 3.3 billion dollars of reserves at Silicon Valley Bank. Full backing still carries the risk of wherever the backing is held.
Is USDT riskier than USDC? They carry different risks. USDT is larger and more liquid, which helps in a stressed market, and its disclosure history is the more contested of the two, including a 41 million dollar CFTC penalty in 2021. That changed materially in August 2026 when Tether completed its first full Big Four audit with an unqualified opinion.
Why do stablecoin yields vary so much between platforms? Because platforms do different things with deposits, and because many headline rates carry a condition such as a loyalty tier, a token holding, a minimum balance or a fixed term. Some also take a percentage of the rewards before paying them out.
Can I withdraw stablecoins at any time while earning yield? It depends on the product, not the platform. Within a single platform some products allow withdrawal on any day, some start a waiting period of several weeks, and some process withdrawals only on scheduled monthly dates. Check the specific product's terms.
What happens to my stablecoins if the platform fails? In most cases you have lent the coins rather than kept ownership of specific ones, so recovery goes through an insolvency process and depends on what can be recovered. This is why the legal entity, the custody arrangement and reserve reporting deserve more attention than a percentage point of yield.
Start earning
The EarnPark app shows the current rate for each stablecoin alongside its risk level, withdrawal terms and fees, so the ladder above can be checked against live numbers before you deposit anything.
Sources used
Competitor figures were read in September 2026 from each platform's own published pages. House policy is not to link to competitor sites, so the specific document is named instead.
- YouHodler Yield account guide, loyalty programme help article and Yield product page, checked September 2026
- Nexo earn page and loyalty programme support article, checked September 2026
- Ledn savings and USDC Growth Account pages, Growth Account sunsetting help article and proof of reserves page, checked September 2026
- Coinbase earn page, and OKX Earn page and Simple Earn flexible documentation, checked September 2026
- Reuters on Circle's Silicon Valley Bank exposure and the March 2023 depeg
- CFTC on the 2021 Tether penalty, and CoinDesk on Tether's August 2026 Big Four audit
- EarnPark asset pages linked above and the help centre fee documentation, verified 20 September 2026
- DefiLlama, linked above, for live cross market yield data