Best USDC Yield

Why USDC sits at the centre of DeFi yield

Most onchain lending markets and yield products denominate in USDC. The strategies on this ranking are the supply side of that economy: deposit USDC, earn whatever borrowers and incentive programs are paying for it. Yield moves with utilisation, reward gauges, and onchain demand. Scope is the strategies we currently track.

The cohort, in numbers

Right now we track 55 USDC strategies across 5 networks, holding $5.3M in deposits. 24-hour APYs run from 0.08% to 13.66%. Median 4.07%, mean 4.57%. None of this represents the wider USDC market, only what we follow.

Where the yield lives, by network

Base (22 vaults, top APY 13.66%), Ethereum (18 vaults, top APY 11.38%), Arbitrum (11 vaults, top APY 4.70%), HyperEVM (3 vaults, top APY 5.36%), and Polygon (1 vault, top APY 1.91%). USDC liquidity concentrates on Ethereum, Base, and the major EVM rollups. We add networks as new strategies ship and remove them when products retire.

Protocol families on the leaderboard

Top families: Morpho (29), Autopilot (4), Morpho Market (4), Aave (4), and Fluid (3). Most rows are either a single-asset money market like Aave or Morpho, or an autocompounder wrapping one. A smaller slice is real-world-asset credit and structured strategies.

Lending vs. autocompounding vs. delta-neutral

Three flavours cover almost everything on the list. Lending: deposit USDC, earn the supply rate. Autocompounding: same plus a contract that re-invests reward emissions for you. Delta-neutral: pair USDC with a short leg to capture funding or basis spread. Each trades complexity for smoother or higher yield.

Reading the APY columns

24-hour APY: today's annualised rate. 30-day APY: trailing mean across the last month. Stablecoin yields move less than wrapped-asset yields, but they still move every day with utilisation cycles and reward gauges. Past APY does not promise future APY.

Reading the TVL column

TVL is the USD value of USDC sitting in the vault contract. The 55 vaults on this page hold $5.3M between them. Higher TVL usually means the strategy has been live longer and absorbed more capital without breaking. Lower TVL is either young, niche, or compensating poorly for its risk.

Risk surfaces on every USDC strategy

Smart-contract risk on the vault and the protocol underneath. Oracle risk on the price feeds. Depeg risk on USDC itself in tail scenarios. Governance risk on every parameter operators can change. Tiers and what we leave out, on the risk framework page.

What this page is, and what it is not

A curated USDC index. Not the entire USDC yield market. We add strategies as we vet and integrate them; we drop them when products retire or fail our framework. Every comparison here is within our set; the rules behind that set are on the methodology page.

Frequently asked questions

Why is USDC yield variable?

Lending APY follows borrower demand and utilisation. Reward APY follows incentive programs that turn on and off. Both move daily.

Do these numbers include rewards?

Yes, when the underlying protocol bakes them into the rate it reports. The vault detail page splits the figure into base and rewards where the upstream publishes that breakdown.

Are there USDC yield strategies not listed here?

Many. The page is the set we have indexed and verified against our framework, not an exhaustive list.