Best USDC Yield
The best USDC yield in Harvest's index is 10.48% APY, paid by USDC 40 Acres, which runs on the Base network, as of August 9, 2026. That is the highest rate among strategies holding at least $50K, against a median of 4.45% across all 54 USDC strategies tracked on 5 networks.
Rates last recorded August 9, 2026, and refreshed hourly.
Summary
Every figure below was recorded August 9, 2026.
- The 54 USDC strategies tracked here held $5.3M between them, across 13 venue families.
- The median USDC rate across all 54 tracked strategies was 4.45%, and the average weighted by TVL was 8.02%.
- Rates on the 7 strategies holding at least $50K ran from 5.77% to 10.48%, across Base and Ethereum.
- Base carried more USDC strategies than any other network Harvest tracks, 23 of 54, holding $4.1M, against 16 on Ethereum holding $1.2M.
Live rankingAugust 9, 2026
Top 10 USDC yields by 24-hour APY
The ten highest-paying USDC strategies in this index ran from 6.01% to 10.48%, across Base, Arbitrum and Ethereum.
Sorted on the 24-hour rate with no floor applied: a rate at the top of this table can sit on a few hundred dollars of liquidity. The headline figure above uses a $50K floor for that reason, and 7 of the 54 strategies cleared it. Open any row for its tracked value and history.
CalculatorAugust 9, 2026
USDC Earnings Calculator
Pick an amount and any of the 54 tracked USDC strategies, and the calculator below works out a year of earnings from the rate on record.
Enter an amount, pick a strategy, then calculate.
Educational only. The figures extrapolate one day’s rate across a full year and assume it holds, which no onchain rate does. Rates move with borrower demand, with reward programs that start and stop, and with how much liquidity sits in a strategy at the time. A large enough amount can move the rate it earns. Nothing here is advice, an offer, or a forecast.
Results appear here once you calculate.
Mechanism
Where USDC yield comes from
USDC lending yield is the interest borrowers pay when USDC is supplied to a money market such as Aave or Compound.
Someone is on the other side of every rate here, and on a money market that someone is a borrower posting collateral worth more than the loan. Most of them are taking leverage: borrowing dollars against ETH or BTC to hold a larger position than they could pay for outright. That demand rises and falls with the market, which is why a supply rate is cyclical rather than fixed, and why a double-digit rate on a lending market usually means leverage is expensive at that moment rather than that the venue is generous.
Because the loan is over-collateralised, the lender is protected by liquidation rather than by the borrower’s promise. If the collateral falls far enough, a liquidator repays the loan and takes the collateral at a discount. The rate compensates for the possibility that this fails to happen fast enough, which is where bad debt comes from and why what backs a market matters as much as who runs it.
Autocompounding strategies sit one layer above that. A contract harvests the reward emissions, sells them, and puts the proceeds back into the position on a schedule, which is why their published rate moves more than a plain supply rate and why part of it depends on the price of a token rather than on interest. A smaller group runs delta-neutral, holding USDC against a short leg so the yield comes from funding rather than from borrower demand. A few rows are real-world-asset credit, where the yield traces back to short-dated government paper rather than to anyone onchain, and those rates move with policy rather than with crypto leverage.
Every one of those patterns buys either a higher or a steadier rate by adding smart-contract surface, and the vault page for any row spells out which contracts a position touches.
CompositionAugust 9, 2026
What these rates are made of
Of the 54 USDC strategies tracked here, 18 earn lending interest alone and 36 earn lending interest plus a reward token the strategy harvests and sells.
A strategy earning lending interest alone pays in dollars, and the rate is what it says. A strategy that also earns an emission is holding a token it has to sell, so part of that rate is worth whatever the token fetches on the day the strategy harvests it. The reward tokens across this index were MORPHO on 30, ARB on 6, COMP on 3 and EXTRA on 2 strategies. Median rates sit close together: 5.00% for the interest-only group against 4.44% for the group carrying an emission, so an emission is rarely what makes one strategy pay more than another.
Where the reading stops is worth stating, because the obvious next question has no answer in our data. The upstream feed publishes one rate per strategy and the list of tokens that rate involves, and nothing that divides the rate between interest and emission. So this page reports which tokens a strategy earns and declines to publish a base-versus-reward split, which would be a number invented here rather than measured anywhere.
One label needs a caveat. Aave has stopped issuing AAVE emissions on its USDC markets, and the feed has not caught up: three Aave rows still carry an AAVE token label while two identical Aave positions on Ethereum carry none, and all five pay within a point of each other. Those three are counted here as interest-only, which is what they are.
StabilityAugust 9, 2026
How steady each rate has been
Across the 53 USDC strategies with a month of readings behind them, 28 moved by less than a percentage point over the 30 days to August 9, 2026, and the rest moved more.
Among the strategies holding at least $50K, the steadiest over the trailing 30 days was USDC Alpha Core V2 on Ethereum, which held a standard deviation of 1.07 points around a mean of 7.25%. The widest was USDC MORPHO on Base, which ranged from 10.94% to 30.23% over the same window, a standard deviation of 4.23 points.
Deviation is the figure that tells you whether a headline rate is a rate or a spike. A strategy paying more than its own monthly mean on the day you read it has usually just received an emission or seen a jump in borrowing, and neither lasts. A strategy whose deviation is a fraction of a point has been paying roughly the same thing all month, which is the more useful property if the position is meant to sit. Standard deviation describes what a rate did over the window measured. It is not a forecast, and it says nothing about the contract, oracle or peg exposures set out below.
By venueAugust 9, 2026
USDC interest rates by venue
Among the venues in Harvest's USDC index, Morpho paid a median of 4.44% across 27 markets, Autopilot paid a median of 6.09% across 4 markets and Morpho Market paid a median of 4.44% across 4 markets.
- Aave USDC paid a median of 2.77% across 4 markets on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum, within a range of 2.14% to 3.35%.
- Compound V3 USDC paid a median of 3.75% across 2 markets on Base and Arbitrum, within a range of 2.79% to 4.71%.
- Morpho USDC paid a median of 4.44% across 27 markets on Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, HyperEVM and Polygon, within a range of 1.72% to 6.56%.
- Fluid USDC paid a median of 4.93% across 3 markets on Arbitrum, Base and Ethereum, within a range of 4.29% to 5.07%.
- Euler USDC paid a median of 0.52% across 3 markets on Base, Arbitrum and Ethereum, within a range of 0.08% to 5.33%.
What separates these families is the shape of the market underneath, not the brand on the row. Aave and Compound run pooled markets: every supplier of USDC lends into one shared pool, every borrower draws from it, and a single utilisation curve sets one rate for everybody. That design is why their rates cluster within a point or two of each other and move slowly, and it is also why a pooled market can absorb size without the rate collapsing.
Isolated markets work the other way. Morpho runs one market per collateral asset, each with its own loan-to-value ratio, its own oracle and its own interest curve, so a lender picks the exact exposure instead of inheriting the average of a pool. Isolation contains a bad collateral asset to the one market that accepted it, and it fragments liquidity, which is why isolated-market rates spread so much wider than pooled ones across the list above.
A curated vault sits on top of those isolated markets and spreads one balance across several of them. The curator chooses which markets, at what weights, under what caps, and rebalances as rates move. That is where the spread between the bottom and the top of this list mostly comes from: two vaults on the same protocol, holding the same asset, can pay very differently because two different firms picked different markets. It also means the name on the row is the curator, not the venue, and the parameter set can change while a position is open.
RatesAugust 9, 2026
Best USDC staking rates right now
The best USDC rate on a strategy holding at least $50K was 10.48% on USDC 40 Acres on Base, against a median of 4.45% across all 54 strategies tracked here.
What gets searched for as a USDC staking rate is one of the two things ranked on this page: an interest rate paid by borrowers in a lending market, or the yield a vault strategy collects and compounds on a USDC position. Neither one is staking in the protocol sense. The table above sorts on the 24-hour figure, and the 30-day column beside it shows whether that figure is where the strategy has been sitting or a spike on the day.
Definitions
How USDC yield and staking rewards differ
Staking rewards are newly issued network tokens paid to validators for securing a chain, and USDC yield is interest paid by a borrower or a strategy for the use of dollars.
The distinction matters for what the number is exposed to. A staking reward is denominated in the network token, so its dollar value moves with that token's price. A USDC rate is denominated in dollars already, so the headline figure is what the position earns in dollar terms. Some strategies on this page do pay part of their yield in a reward token, and where the upstream protocol publishes that split the vault page shows it separately from the base rate.
DistributionAugust 9, 2026
Where the yield lives, by network
USDC yield in this index sat on 5 networks, led by Base with 23 strategies and Ethereum with 16.
Full breakdown by network: Base (23 strategies, top APY 10.48%), Ethereum (16 strategies, top APY 6.03%), Arbitrum (11 strategies, top APY 6.56%), HyperEVM (3 strategies, top APY 5.89%) and Polygon (1 strategy, top APY 1.72%).
USDC liquidity concentrates on Ethereum and on the rollups with the deepest stablecoin markets, which is where the larger strategies sit. Rollups matter here for a specific reason: settling on a chain where a transaction costs cents rather than dollars makes frequent harvesting economic, so the same autocompounding design pays more on Base than it can on mainnet at the same underlying rate. Networks come and go from this list as products ship and retire, and any network pill at the foot of the page cuts the same ranking down to one chain.
VenuesAugust 9, 2026
Protocol families on the leaderboard
The largest venue families in this index were Morpho (27), Autopilot (4), Morpho Market (4), Aave (4) and Fluid (3).
Most rows are either a single-asset money market such as Aave or Morpho, or an autocompounder wrapping one of those markets. A smaller slice is real-world-asset credit and structured strategies. Curated Morpho vaults are named for their curator rather than for the protocol, so a row reading Gauntlet or Steakhouse is a Morpho market whose parameters that curator sets.
RiskAugust 9, 2026
Risk surfaces on every USDC strategy
Every rate on this page is compensation for a specific set of exposures, and eight of them apply across the index: contract, layered contract, collateral, curator, oracle, liquidity, peg and governance risk.
- Smart-contract risk sits on the vault contract and on the protocol contract underneath it. Either can hold a bug that no audit caught, and a position is exposed to both for as long as it stays open. Euler, a venue in this index, lost $197 million in March 2023, and the uncomfortable detail is where the hole came from: a function added while fixing an earlier bug.
- Layered contract risk compounds that. A position in a curated vault passes through the vault itself, the curator's parameter set, the underlying market it lends into and the collateral backing that market: four surfaces, any one of which can fail alone, with one published rate compensating for all of them at once. The rows carrying the fewest layers are the plain money markets, where the position lends directly. Balancer showed how far a single layer reaches in November 2025, when a rounding error cost $128 million and the same flaw drained protocols that had done nothing but reuse the code.
- Collateral risk decides what a lending position is really exposed to. 31 of the 54 strategies tracked here lend into Morpho, where USDC is supplied against a named collateral asset rather than into a general pool. Where this page tracks a market directly, the collateral is in the row name: WETH, cbBTC, cbETH and wstETH on Base, which are wrapped BTC and staked-ether forms rather than the plain assets. Where the row is a curated vault, the collateral is a basket the curator picks and can change, so the exposure moves with their decisions rather than staying fixed at the point a position opens. When Stream Finance's xUSD lost most of its value in November 2025, analysts traced roughly $285 million of loans secured against Stream assets across Euler, Morpho and Silo.
- Curator risk follows from that, and curators are not interchangeable. A row reading Gauntlet, Steakhouse or Clearstar names the firm setting the loan-to-value ratios, the oracle choices and the collateral list for that vault, not the protocol underneath, so two vaults on the same protocol can carry very different exposure because two different firms set them up. The same Stream episode put numbers on it: one curator held $123.64 million of loans backed by Stream assets, two others held $68 million and $25.42 million, and the choice of what to accept was theirs rather than the protocol’s.
- Oracle risk sits on the price feeds those contracts trust. A liquidation only fires if the feed reports the collateral falling, and a feed that lags, freezes or is manipulated turns an over-collateralised loan into bad debt without anyone touching the vault. Mango Markets is the textbook case: in October 2022 a trader spent about $10 million pushing the price of the collateral token up several times over, then borrowed roughly $116 million against the inflated figure and left the protocol insolvent.
- Liquidity risk is the one a supplier feels first, and it does not need the vault to fail. Lending markets keep only the unborrowed share available to withdraw, so when borrowing spikes toward the ceiling the exit closes for everyone at once. The KelpDAO exploit of April 18, 2026 showed the full sequence: a bridge flaw let an attacker mint rsETH with nothing behind it, that unbacked token was supplied as collateral on Aave to borrow real assets against it, and the resulting bad debt ran to roughly $200M to $246M. Money left the protocol fast enough to take billions off its tracked value inside two days, stablecoin pools including USDC ran near full utilisation, and ordinary suppliers could not withdraw. An emergency coalition raised more than $300M to restore the backing, and Aave tightened its collateral standards afterwards. Nothing in that chain required the USDC side to break.
- Depeg risk sits on USDC itself in tail scenarios, and it is the one exposure no strategy on this page can diversify away. USDC traded as low as 87 cents in March 2023 after Circle confirmed that $3.3 billion of the reserves behind it, about 8% of the backing, sat at Silicon Valley Bank. The peg held once the bank was resolved, and the point stands: the risk lives with the issuer and the banks it uses, not with the yield.
- Governance risk sits on every parameter an operator can change after a position is open, and the change itself can be the failure. A single-letter mistake in a Compound governance upgrade handed out tens of millions of dollars of COMP by accident in September 2021, and the timelock that makes governance safe also meant the fix could not ship for days while the error kept running.
Bridge, operator and economic risk get their own treatment, alongside the tiers and the exclusions, on the risk framework page. Which of these surfaces a given row carries depends on how many layers it has, and the vault page for any row names the contracts a position touches.
QuestionsAugust 9, 2026
USDC yield questions, answered
What is the best USDC yield right now?
10.48% APY, on USDC 40 Acres on Base, as of August 9, 2026. That is the highest 24-hour rate among the 54 USDC strategies Harvest tracks once a $50K liquidity floor is applied. The floor is there because smaller vaults print higher figures on a few hundred dollars, so the unfiltered top of the ranking is usually not a rate anyone is earning at size.
What is the current USDC interest rate?
The median USDC interest rate across the 54 strategies in this index was 4.45% as of August 9, 2026, within a range of 0.08% to 10.48%. A money-market interest rate such as Aave or Compound tracks what borrowers pay for USDC liquidity, which is why it usually sits nearer the middle of that range than the top.
Is USDC staking the same as lending?
USDC cannot be staked in the proof-of-stake sense, because USDC is not a network token and has no validator set. What is commonly called USDC staking is either lending, where borrowers pay interest, or a vault position, where a strategy earns yield and compounds it. Both of those are what this page ranks.
Does USDC earn interest by itself?
USDC has no native yield. Circle holds the reserves backing USDC and pays nothing to holders, so a USDC balance sitting in a wallet earns zero. Every rate on this page comes from lending USDC to a borrower or supplying it to a strategy that does.
How do you earn interest on USDC safely?
Safety here is a question of what a given rate depends on. A rate from a large lending market with a long onchain history sits on different ground from a rate on a young vault whose yield leans on reward emissions that can stop. The tiers and the exclusions are set out on the risk framework page.
How much can you earn on 10,000 USDC?
At the median rate of 4.45% as of August 9, 2026, a 10,000 USDC position would earn about $445 over a year, before any rate change. At the top rate of 10.48%, among strategies holding at least $50K, the same position would earn about $1,048. Rates move daily, so neither figure is a forecast.
What is a good APY for USDC?
The useful reference point is the median of whatever cohort you are comparing against. Across the 54 USDC strategies on this page the median was 4.45% as of August 9, 2026, and half the index sat below it. A rate above the median is usually paying for something, most often reward emissions that can stop, a contract with a shorter track record, or a pool small enough that its rate has not been tested by size.
Where does USDC yield come from?
USDC lending yield is the interest borrowers pay when USDC is supplied to a money market such as Aave or Compound. Autocompounding strategies add a contract that harvests reward emissions and puts them back into the position, which is why their published rate blends two sources. A smaller group runs delta-neutral, pairing a USDC position against a short leg to capture funding rather than borrower demand.
Is the APY paid in USDC or in reward tokens?
Most of these rates are a blend of both. 18 of the 54 tracked strategies earned lending interest alone as of August 9, 2026, and 36 earned lending interest plus a reward token such as MORPHO that the strategy harvests and sells. Our feed publishes one rate per strategy and the tokens beside it, not a split between the interest and the emission, so this page reports which tokens a strategy earns rather than inventing a decomposition it cannot measure.
Is USDC yield safe?
No USDC yield is risk-free. Every strategy ranked here carries smart-contract exposure on the vault and on the protocol underneath it, oracle exposure on the price feeds those contracts trust, and depeg exposure on USDC itself in tail scenarios. USDC has held its dollar peg in normal conditions, though it traded as low as $0.87 in March 2023 when part of the reserve sat at Silicon Valley Bank. Size is a further signal: 47 of the 54 strategies tracked held under $50K as of August 9, 2026, so their published rates have not been tested by much liquidity.
Why is USDC yield variable?
Lending APY follows borrower demand and utilisation. Reward APY follows incentive programs that switch on and off. Both move daily, which is why this page carries a 24-hour rate and a 30-day mean side by side.
Are there USDC yield strategies not listed here?
Many. The page is the set Harvest has indexed and verified against its framework, not a census of the USDC market. Adding venues is an ongoing job and the inclusion rules live on the methodology page.
Full indexAugust 9, 2026
Full USDC index: all 54 strategies
All 54 USDC strategies tracked here are listed below, sorted by 24-hour APY as descending. The network and protocol filters narrow rows already in the page.
USDC 40 Acres (Base)10.48%40 Acres
2USDC Lend (Base)9.13%Arcadia3USDC Base USDC Lending Optimizer (Base)7.09%IPOR4USDC Autopilot (Base)7.04%Autopilot5USDC Lend (Base)6.85%ExtraFi6USDC Gauntlet Balanced V2 (Arbitrum)6.56%Morpho
7USDC Autopilot (Arbitrum)6.41%Autopilot8USDC Gauntlet Frontier V2 (Base)6.07%Morpho9USDC Alpha Prime V2 (Ethereum)6.03%Morpho
10USDC Gauntlet Frontier V2 (Ethereum)6.01%Morpho11USDC Alpha Core V2 (Ethereum)6.01%Morpho12USDC Api3 dCOMP V2 (Ethereum)5.99%Morpho13USDC Yearn OG V2 (Base)5.92%Morpho14USDC Felix (HyperEVM)5.89%Morpho
15USDC MORPHO (Base)5.77%Autopilot16USDC Clearstar Yield V2 (Base)5.74%Morpho17USDC KPK Yield V2 (Ethereum)5.71%Morpho18USDC Autopilot (Ethereum)5.61%Autopilot19USDC Steakhouse High Yield V2 (Base)5.46%Morpho20USDC Euler Base (Base)5.33%Euler21USDC Yearn OG V2 (Ethereum)5.23%Morpho22USDC Fluid (Arbitrum)5.07%Fluid23USDC Fluid (Base)4.93%Fluid24USDC Compound V3 (Base)4.71%Compound V325USDC Clearstar Core V2 (Ethereum)4.63%Morpho26USDC cbBTC (Base)4.45%Morpho Market27USDC cbETH (Base)4.45%Morpho Market28USDC Hyperithm Apex V2 (Ethereum)4.44%Morpho29USDC wstETH (Base)4.43%Morpho Market30USDC WETH (Base)4.31%Morpho Market31USDC Fluid (Ethereum)4.29%Fluid32USDC StakeDAO V2 (Ethereum)4.27%Morpho33USDC Steakhouse High Yield V2 (Ethereum)4.16%Morpho34USDC Alpha Prime V2 (Base)4.15%Morpho35USDC Steakhouse Prime V2 (Base)4.14%Morpho36USDC Gauntlet Prime V2 (Base)4.14%Morpho37USDC Gauntlet (HyperEVM)3.96%Morpho38USDC Dolomite (Arbitrum)3.91%Dolomite39USDC Moonwell Flagship V2 (Base)3.52%Morpho40USDC Aave (Ethereum)3.35%Aave41USDC Lend Pool #2 (Base)3.21%ExtraFi42USDC Hyperithm (Arbitrum)3.17%Morpho43USDC Aave (Base)3.16%Aave44USDC Steakhouse High Yield V2 (Arbitrum)3.11%Morpho45USDC Gauntlet Prime V2 (Arbitrum)3.07%Morpho46USDC KPK Prime V2 (Ethereum)3.02%Morpho47USDC Compound V3 (Arbitrum)2.79%Compound V348USDC Clearstar Reactor (Arbitrum)2.61%Morpho49USDC Prime (Ethereum)2.38%Aave50USDC Aave (Arbitrum)2.14%Aave51USDC Compound (Polygon)1.72%Morpho
52USDC Hypurr (HyperEVM)1.33%Hypurr53USDC Theo Frontier (Arbitrum)0.52%Euler54USDC OpenEden (Ethereum)0.08%EulerHow to read thisAugust 9, 2026
How to read every column in the tables
Both tables carry the same seven columns, and the useful judgements come from reading them against one another rather than from the rate alone.
- #
- Gives the row’s position once the table is sorted, which is by 24-hour APY descending until the header is clicked. Position is not a ranking of quality and it applies no liquidity floor, so row one is whatever printed the highest daily rate.
- Vault
- Names the product with its network in brackets. The bracket is the part that makes a row unique: the same product name runs on several networks at different rates, and without it four rows read identically.
- 24h APY
- Takes the most recent daily rate and annualises it. One day of yield projected across a year, which makes it the most current figure on the page and the one most easily distorted by a single unusual day.
- Strategy
- Names the venue the position lends into, such as Aave, Morpho or Compound. On a curated vault this reads as the curator rather than the protocol, so the parameters behind the rate belong to that firm.
- Network
- Shows the chain the vault contract is deployed on, as an icon. The same strategy on a different network is a different contract with different liquidity and usually a different rate.
- 30d APY trend
- Plots the daily rate across the last month as a sparkline, and it is the column that tells you whether the 24-hour figure means anything. A flat line means the strategy has been paying roughly that rate all month. A line with one spike means the headline is a moment, not a level. Rising or falling shape says the rate is moving, and the direction is what the 24-hour figure alone cannot show. Exact daily readings and the 30-day mean sit on the vault page for each row.
- Link
- Opens the strategy in the Harvest app in a new tab, on the top-ten table only. Row names everywhere link through to the vault page instead, which carries the tracked value, the fee position, the contract addresses and the full rate history.
Tracked value is deliberately not a column here, and it is the reading that decides whether a rate is real. The 54 strategies on this page held $5.3M between them and only 7 cleared $50K, so a rate at the top of an unfiltered sort can be sitting on a few hundred dollars, where the arithmetic still works and nobody is earning it at size. Open any row to see what it holds before reading its rate as an opportunity.
The network and protocol filters above each table narrow rows that are already rendered on the page rather than fetching new ones, so nothing enters or leaves the underlying index when a filter is applied.
ScopeAugust 9, 2026
What this page is, and what it is not
This page is a curated index of USDC yield strategies, not a census of the USDC yield market.
Strategies are added as they are vetted and integrated, and dropped when the upstream product retires or fails the risk framework. Every comparison here is a comparison within that set, and the rules behind the set are on the methodology page. Plenty of USDC yield exists outside it.
Data reflected on this page is an aggregation of historical data and sorted by best (e.g. highest historical performance), and is not a promise of continued performance or guaranteed results.