Crypto earn platforms, compared on what actually differs

Every list of the best crypto earn platforms sorts by advertised APY. That is the one field that tells you almost nothing, because the number is not a property of the platform — it is a property of a tier, a term, a token holding or a promotion. The useful comparison is narrower and duller: who is paying you, out of what, how much of it they keep, and whether the entity you are contracting with is registered anywhere you could check.

This page holds fifteen providers we read in full on 16 September 2026 — nine exchanges and exchange-adjacent venues, three dedicated savings and lending platforms, three broker or app-first businesses, and one licensed bank. For each we recorded the same eleven fields, and where a provider does not publish something we say so rather than estimating it. "Not disclosed" is a finding. It is frequently the most important one on the page.

The four engines, applied to choosing a platform

There are only four places a crypto yield can come from, and a platform is best understood as a particular mix of them. Reading the mix first collapses most of the choice.

Protocol rewards. The chain issues new tokens to validators and the platform passes some share on. Kraken and Revolut are the clearest cases here; Coinbase, Bitpanda and Uphold also run genuine validator operations. The economics are honest but thin — Ethereum's network APR was 2.46% on 16 September 2026, and the platform's commission comes straight off that. Everything about the mechanism is in crypto staking.

Lending demand. Someone borrows the asset and pays interest; you supply it and take a share. OKX states this outright — Simple Earn assets "will be pooled and loaned to borrowers on our platform (which may include borrowers under our loan programmes or margin traders)". Ledn says the same about its stablecoin book, which is funded entirely by its overcollateralised bitcoin-backed retail loans. YouHodler runs the same shape with a leveraged retail book. This is the engine behind most products labelled "savings", and the mechanism is covered in crypto lending.

Real-world interest. Someone buys short-dated government paper and passes the coupon through. Xapo Bank is explicit that its 3.35% on dollars comes from AAA-rated US Treasury bills and money market funds. KuCoin describes KCUSD returns as supported by US Treasury securities. Since this yield is the risk-free rate minus a fee, it is the one category that cannot surprise you on the upside — see tokenised treasuries for the on-chain version.

Marketing spend. Coinbase's 3.50% on USDC is funded by Coinbase out of USDC reserve interest; it is discretionary, it was cut twice in a year, and from 15 December 2025 it pays only Coinbase One subscribers. Bitpanda's 7% stablecoin rate is a 3% contractual base plus a bonus granted "at Bitpanda's sole discretion" in fourteen-day cycles. Launch promotions, spin wheels and booster vouchers are the same category. These can be excellent deals. They are not a business model that scales with your balance.

The master comparison

The table below is the whole set in one view. Read the third and fourth columns together: the advertised figure is only meaningful net of what the provider keeps, and several of the largest names in this market do not publish that second number at all.

Commission is the biggest single differentiator

Nothing else in this comparison moves the outcome as far. The published range across the broader market runs from zero to ninety per cent of the rewards, and both extremes are real. A fourteen-provider fee survey dated 12 September 2026 found that only five of fourteen staking providers disclosed a specific percentage at all.

The arithmetic is unforgiving because the underlying yields are small. On an Ethereum staking APR of about 2.46%, a 35% commission costs roughly 89 basis points — more than half of the real, inflation-adjusted return once ETH's net issuance is accounted for. A 10% fee costs about 25 basis points on the same base, which is around 15% of the real economic return. The commission is not a rounding error on a 2% product; it is most of the decision.

The disclosure league table

We asked one question of every provider's own consumer pages: does it say where the money comes from? Five answer it clearly. Several of the largest names do not answer it at all. This is the field on which the market divides most sharply, and it is not correlated with size.

Grouped by what the platform actually does

Staking-first: the pass-through businesses

Kraken and Revolut sit here. Both run or contract validators and pay you a share of protocol issuance. The differences are in the commission and in the fine print: Kraken publishes per-asset flexible and bonded rates, but its flexible product stakes only up to 50% of the balance you commit, which halves the effective yield on the advertised number. Revolut states a zero platform commission, shows rates only in-app, and its per-asset figures and unstaking periods are therefore not verifiable from outside. A headline of "up to 22% APY" is high for the assets it lists and almost certainly reflects a single small-cap token.

Lending-first: the credit businesses

Nexo, OKX, Ledn and YouHodler are, economically, credit funds with an app on top. They differ enormously in how much they will tell you about the loan book. Ledn names it precisely, states it is overcollateralised and retail, ring-fences accounts in separate SPVs, and stopped paying Bitcoin yield entirely on 1 July 2025 on the reasoning that reusing client assets to create leverage was the thing Bitcoin was built to avoid. OKX names its borrowers as a category. Nexo does not explain how it generates yield at all on its consumer pages, and its own site quotes three mutually inconsistent headline maxima. YouHodler sells leveraged products to the same customers whose deposits fund the book. For the full pattern, including the ways this category failed in 2022, read the CeFi collapses.

Mixed shelves: the large exchanges and app-first brokers

CEX.IO, Coinbase, Binance, Crypto.com, Bybit, KuCoin, SwissBorg and Bitpanda all run several genuinely different products under one "Earn" label. This is where most reader confusion is manufactured. Binance alone runs Simple Earn Flexible, Simple Earn Locked, ETH staking, Launchpool and Dual Investment — and Dual Investment is a sold option, not a savings product, with no principal protection. Crypto.com pairs real staking pass-through with CRO-denominated promotional spend and a balance taper. KuCoin lists structured products beside flexible savings in the same interface. If you take one habit from this page, make it the habit of identifying which product you are in before you look at its rate. Choosing a venue turns that into a checklist.

The bank

Xapo Bank is the only prudentially licensed bank in the set, and it is the only place in this comparison where a balance is covered by a deposit guarantee — US dollars only, up to the equivalent of £120,000 under the Gibraltar scheme, with crypto explicitly excluded. It also pays 0.25% on Bitcoin and says so without embarrassment, which tells you more about the true state of BTC yield than any 7% headline elsewhere. That argument is developed in earn Bitcoin.

What each licence actually means

Licensing claims are the most frequently misread line on any earn product page. Four different things are routinely presented as though they were the same thing, and only one of them has anything to do with your money coming back.

A MiCA authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider is the strongest of the four in this set. It is granted by a named national regulator, it is checkable in a public register, and it brings conduct, disclosure, client-asset segregation and governance obligations. OKX Europe was authorised in January 2025, Crypto.com in Malta in January 2025, Bitpanda by BaFin in January 2025, Bybit EU by Austria's FMA in May 2025, Coinbase Luxembourg by the CSSF in June 2025, Kraken's Payward Europe Solutions by the Central Bank of Ireland in June 2025, KuCoin's EU entity in November 2025 and SwissBorg by France's AMF in March 2026. Binance has none: it withdrew its Greek application in June 2026 and restricted EEA services ahead of the 1 July 2026 end of national transitional regimes.

A UK FCA cryptoasset registration is narrower than it sounds. It is registration under the Money Laundering Regulations, and the FCA's own caveat — quoted by CEX.IO on its legal page — is that it "relates to AML/CTF supervision and does not constitute authorisation, approval or endorsement". There is no Financial Ombudsman or FSCS cover for cryptoasset complaints behind it.

US state money transmitter licences govern the movement of value, not the safety of a yield product. A long list of them, as CEX.IO holds, tells you the firm has cleared bonding and examination requirements in each state. It says nothing about whether an earn product is lawful there — which is why CEX.IO Earn is barred to US residents despite that list.

A banking licence is the only one of the four that comes with a compensation scheme, and Xapo Bank is the only holder here. Note that it covers the dollars and not the coins. Everything else — VQF membership in Switzerland, a CIMA registration in the Cayman Islands, legacy Italian OAM or Spanish VASP registrations — is AML supervision or company registration, not prudential regulation of your balance.

How to use this page

Start with the engine, not the rate. Then find the condition attached to the headline figure — a balance tier, a term, a token holding, a proportion actually deployed. Then look at what the provider keeps. Then check the contracting entity and whether you can find it in a register. Only then is a rate comparable to another rate, and by that point you will usually find the spread between sensible options is a couple of percentage points rather than the ten or twenty the advertising implies. The savings account guideworks through the same exercise for one product category, andstablecoin yield does it for the asset class where the headline numbers are largest.