Alternatives

Deploy Finance, a self-custodial alternative to Compound

Compare supplying USDC to a Compound III market, where borrowers pay interest, with Deploy Finance's self-custodial agents, which earn perpetual funding.

Benjamin

October 27, 2026

min read

Deploy Finance, a self-custodial alternative to Compound

Disclosure: Deploy Finance publishes this page and offers a competing product that appears in it.

Not financial advice. Crypto, DeFi and perpetual-futures strategies can lose money, including your whole deposit. Yields are variable, and past or backtested results do not predict future returns. Read the risk disclosure.

Compound and Deploy Finance both let you earn on USDC without a custodian. Compound is a lending protocol: you supply USDC to a market, borrowers draw it against their collateral, and you receive their interest. Deploy Finance runs autonomous agents that trade from a wallet you own, one of which collects funding on a hedged perpetual position.

The overlap is non-custodial USDC yield. The asymmetry is the payer and the pool. On Compound, borrowers pay you from a shared market, and your exit depends on how much of it is lent out. On Deploy, leveraged perpetual traders pay funding to a position held in your own wallet.

Compare Compound and Deploy Finance

	Compound	Deploy Finance
Product model	Lending markets, each built around one borrowable base asset such as USDC	Curated autonomous agents trading from a self-custodial wallet
User action	Supply the base asset to a market	Fund a wallet, select an agent and allocation, approve scoped trading access
Who pays you	Borrowers of the base asset	Leveraged perpetual traders, through funding
Where your USDC sits	Pooled in the Compound market	Your own wallet
Rate	Floats with how much of the market is borrowed	Floats with Hyperliquid funding
Extras	A rewards contract can distribute tokens such as COMP	None
Exit	Up to the market's unborrowed liquidity	Revoke the agent, exit the strategy, withdraw to your own address
Directional option	None	Superstar

What is Compound?

Compound is one of the earliest DeFi lending protocols. Its current version, Compound III, organizes each market around a single base asset. Its first deployment, on Ethereum, used USDC.

How Compound III works

You supply the base asset (USDC) and earn interest from borrowers.
Borrowers post other crypto assets as collateral to borrow the base asset. That collateral does not earn interest.
The rate floats with utilization: the more of the market's USDC is borrowed, the higher the rate.
A rewards contract can hold tokens such as COMP and let users claim them on top of interest.
Your USDC is pooled with every other supplier's. Withdrawals come from whatever the market has not lent out.

The single-base-asset design keeps each market simple: one thing to borrow, a set of collateral types, one rate. It also ties your yield to one source of demand, borrowing that base asset, and makes your exit depend on everyone else's borrowing.

Deploy Finance: funding instead of interest, your wallet instead of a pool

Deploy Finance runs two live agents, both funded and settled in USDC.

Income: Funding Rates holds roughly 75% of capital as the spot asset and uses 25% to back a 3x perpetual short of matching notional on Hyperliquid. Leveraged longs pay funding to the short every hour. The agent rebalances automatically and closes positions rather than paying when funding turns negative.
Superstar takes long or short positions on perpetual markets under a defined strategy.

You sign in with email or Google, and Deploy creates a self-custodial wallet on Privy's embedded-wallet infrastructure. You fund it with USDC and approve a session key that can trade but cannot transfer or withdraw.

Both Compound interest and perpetual funding are paid by people who want leverage. On Compound they borrow USDC against collateral. On Hyperliquid they hold leveraged longs and pay funding to the short side. Different instruments mean the two rates do not have to move together, and the structure differs too: Compound pools your USDC with every supplier, while Deploy's agent trades a position held for you alone.

When should you choose Deploy Finance or Compound?

Choose Deploy Finance when:

You want your USDC held individually rather than pooled in a lending market.
You want a return source other than borrower interest.
You want an exit that does not depend on other users' borrowing.
You want a directional agent available from the same wallet.

Choose Compound when:

You want plain lending yield from a long-running protocol.
You want the single-base-asset market design, where collateral never earns or lends.
You want COMP rewards on top of interest when a market distributes them.
You want a position you can manage directly onchain without any agent.

Lending market or trading agent: Compound pools your USDC and lends it to borrowers. Deploy Finance runs a funding position in your own wallet. No integration between the products is implied.

Learn more

Start with Deploy Finance

Create a self-custodial Deploy Finance wallet and review the live agents.

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