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.
Lending is the default way to earn on USDC in DeFi. You supply it to Aave, Morpho, or Compound, borrowers pay interest, and the protocol passes it to you. Optimizers such as Yearn and Giza move your USDC between those markets to chase the best rate.
Deploy Finance is not a lending protocol. Its Income: Funding Rates agent earns from perpetual funding instead of borrower interest, and it keeps your USDC in your own wallet instead of a shared pool. This page compares the main lending options with each other and shows where that difference matters.
How lending protocols compare
| Product | Who pays you | Where your USDC sits | Exit | Fees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deploy Finance (Income: Funding Rates) | Leveraged traders, through perpetual funding | Your own wallet | Revoke the agent, withdraw to your own address | No subscription or management fee; gas and trade fees |
| Aave | Borrowers, at a rate set by a utilization curve | Pooled in Aave's contracts | Up to the pool's unborrowed liquidity | Reserve factor kept from borrower interest |
| Morpho vaults | Borrowers in the markets a curator selects | Pooled in a vault, supplied to isolated markets | Up to the underlying markets' unborrowed liquidity | Curator's performance fee |
| Compound | Borrowers of the market's base asset | Pooled in a Compound market | Up to the market's unborrowed liquidity | Protocol reserves kept from interest |
| Spark | Borrowers on SparkLend; Spark Savings pays the Sky Savings Rate | Pooled in SparkLend, or a Savings vault (sUSDC, sUSDS) | Up to unborrowed liquidity; Savings vaults redeem at the contract | Reserve factor on SparkLend |
| Kamino (Solana) | Borrowers in reserves a curator selects | Pooled in a Kamino market or Earn vault | Up to the reserve's unborrowed liquidity | Curator performance and AUM fees on Earn vaults |
| Fluid | Borrowers drawing on its shared liquidity layer | Pooled as fTokens (ERC-4626) | Automated withdrawal limits that unlock gradually | Set at the protocol level |
| Euler | Borrowers in the vaults a curator assembles | Pooled in an Euler vault or Euler Earn vault | Up to the vault's unborrowed liquidity | Set per vault by its governor or curator |
| Sky Savings (sUSDS) | Sky protocol revenue, at a rate governance sets | The sUSDS savings contract | Redeem sUSDS for USDS anytime | None charged to savers |
| Yearn vaults | Borrowers and other DeFi strategies the vault allocates to | Pooled in a vault | Vault withdrawal | 10% performance fee on factory vaults |
| Giza agent | Borrowers across the markets you allow | Your ERC-4337 smart account | Deactivate; funds return to your smart account | 10% of yield, taken at withdrawal |
What lending protocols have in common
On every lending protocol, your yield is someone else's borrowing cost. Borrowers post crypto collateral and borrow USDC, usually to buy more crypto or to hold leverage. The more of a pool they borrow, the higher the rate climbs.
That creates a pattern worth knowing before you supply:
- The rate follows borrowing demand. When markets are quiet, few people borrow and rates fall.
- High rates and hard exits arrive together. A pool pays most when it is nearly fully borrowed, which is also when there is least USDC left to withdraw.
- You share the pool. Your claim (aUSDC, a vault share, a Compound balance) is a share of everyone's deposits, and bad debt in an isolated market lands on its suppliers.
Optimizers do not change the source. Yearn and Giza move USDC to whichever markets pay more, which can raise your average rate, but the money still comes from borrowers.
The protocols, one by one
Aave
Aave runs on more than a dozen networks. Supplying USDC mints aUSDC, which grows as borrowers pay. A two-slope curve sets the rate, rising gently up to an optimal utilization point and sharply above it. Aave keeps part of borrower interest, the reserve factor, for its treasury.
Morpho
Morpho separates markets from vaults. Each market pairs one loan asset with one collateral asset and fixed risk parameters. Vaults take USDC and spread it across markets a curator whitelists, with caps per market and a performance fee set by the curator.
Compound
Compound organizes each market around one borrowable base asset, such as USDC. Suppliers of that asset earn interest from borrowers, and the collateral assets in the market do not earn interest. Rates float with utilization.
Spark
Spark is the lending arm of the Sky ecosystem. SparkLend is a fork of Aave V3 that draws on USDS liquidity, so supplying works like Aave. Spark Savings is the simpler product: deposit USDC and receive sUSDC, which earns the Sky Savings Rate and grows in value rather than rebasing. sUSDC runs on Ethereum, Base, and Arbitrum.
Kamino
Kamino is a lending market on Solana. Since its V2 upgrade it separates markets, where curators set assets, oracles, caps, and rate curves, from Earn vaults, where a named curator such as Steakhouse, Re7, or Gauntlet decides which reserves your deposit is lent into. Curators charge a performance fee and an annual fee, set per vault.
Fluid
Fluid, built by the Instadapp team, puts lending and its DEX on one shared liquidity layer. You supply USDC and receive fTokens, ERC-4626 receipts that grow with interest. Large exits are throttled by automated withdrawal limits, which unlock a set share of supply over time to prevent sudden drains.
Euler
Euler V2 is modular infrastructure rather than one market. Anyone can create a lending vault with its own asset, collateral rules, oracle, rate model, and caps. Euler Earn vaults sit on top and spread one deposit across markets a curator selects.
Sky Savings
Sky Savings pays the Sky Savings Rate to holders of sUSDS. Governance votes the rate, funded by stability fees and reserve yield. It is a savings rate rather than a lending market, but it competes for the same idle dollars.
Yearn and Giza, the optimizers
Yearn pools deposits in ERC-4626 vaults whose strategies allocate across lending and other DeFi yield, with a 10% performance fee on factory-deployed vaults. Giza runs an agent in your own ERC-4337 smart account that moves stablecoins between lending markets on Base, Arbitrum, and Plasma, for 10% of the yield. On Base, Giza tops up yield toward a 15% APR target with protocol incentive tokens.
Where Deploy Finance differs
Deploy changes both the source and the structure.
The source is funding, not interest. 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 side every hour. Both lending interest and funding come from demand for leverage, but through different instruments, so they do not have to move together. When funding turns negative, the agent rebalances or closes positions rather than paying.
The structure is your wallet, not a pool. Deploy creates a self-custodial wallet when you sign in with email or Google. The agent's session key can trade but cannot transfer or withdraw. No other user's borrowing decides how much you can take out.
Against Giza, the closest structural match, the difference is narrower. Both run an agent inside a wallet you control with a scoped key. Giza lends; Deploy trades funding. Giza takes 10% of yield; Deploy takes no cut.
Deploy also has a directional agent, Superstar, which goes long or short under a defined strategy. Lending protocols offer nothing comparable.
When one of them fits better
- Aave if you want the most established lending market and a liquid aToken you can use elsewhere.
- Morpho if you want a curator's market selection and have checked their caps and fee.
- Compound if you prefer its single-base-asset market design.
- Spark if you want the Sky Savings Rate on USDC without converting to USDS first.
- Kamino if your USDC is on Solana and you want a named curator choosing reserves.
- Fluid if you want an fToken whose exits are protected by gradual withdrawal limits.
- Euler if you want to choose among curator-built vaults with their own risk settings.
- Sky Savings if you want a simple, governance-set rate on a stablecoin you already hold.
- Yearn or Giza if you want lending yield without choosing markets yourself.
Learn more
- Income: Funding Rates overview
- Best USDC yields in DeFi
- How to earn yield on USDC without giving up custody
- Deploy Finance vs Aave
- Deploy Finance vs Morpho
- Deploy Finance vs Giza
Start with Deploy Finance
Create a self-custodial Deploy Finance wallet and review the live agents.