Crypto savings accounts, without the marketing

A crypto savings account borrows its name from a product it has almost nothing in common with. A bank savings account is a deposit: the bank owes you the money, a prudential regulator supervises whether it can pay, and a government scheme stands behind a slice of the balance if it cannot. A crypto savings account is a claim on a private company that has taken your asset and done something with it. Which something — and whether the company tells you — is the entire subject of this page.

We checked the published terms of every provider named below on 16 September 2026. What follows is not a ranking. It is an attempt to answer four questions for each product in turn: what funds the interest, which part of your balance actually earns the headline rate, what you must do or hold to qualify, and what happens to your money if the company stops trading.

The four things that can be paying you

Money does not appear because a product is called savings. Somebody has to generate it. Across the whole market there are only four sources, and a savings product is a wrapper around one or more of them.

The most common by far is lending demand. Your stablecoins go to a borrower — a margin trader on the same exchange, a retail customer with a bitcoin-backed loan, or an institution — who pays interest, and the platform keeps a spread. Ledn is the clearest example: it states that interest on USDC and USDT Growth Accounts is "entirely generated by lending to Ledn's bitcoin-backed retail loan book, which is overcollateralized", and that the book has no history of loan losses since inception, a statement it dates to June 2026 and qualifies with its own reminder that past performance does not guarantee future results. YouHodler runs the same shape at higher risk: deposits fund its own crypto-backed lending book, priced between 0.5% and 1.5% per month depending on loan-to-value, and the platform keeps the margin. The mechanics of that trade — collateral, utilisation, liquidation — are the subject of ourguide to crypto lending.

The second is real-world interest. Xapo Bank pays 3.35% variable on US dollar savings and says where it comes from: "high-quality liquid assets, including AAA-rated US Treasury bills and money market funds". That is the only rate in this survey you can check against a government yield curve rather than a company's word. The on-chain version of the same idea is covered in tokenised treasuries.

The third is protocol rewards passed through from a proof-of-stake blockchain. Bitpanda's staking products and Revolut's are genuine pass-throughs; so is the staking half of most exchange earn menus. This is a different instrument with a different failure mode, and it belongs on our staking pillar rather than here. The giveaway is the asset: Bitcoin and fiat-backed stablecoins have no native staking, so a rate on either of them is never a protocol reward.

The fourth is the marketing budget. Coinbase's 3.50% on USDC is funded by Coinbase out of the interest earned on USDC reserves, is explicitly variable, and since 15 December 2025 has been restricted to Coinbase One subscribers in nine markets including the US and the UK. Crypto.com's CRO rewards and Bybit's APR boosters sit in the same category. These can be excellent deals. They are customer acquisition costs, and they end when the acquisition target is met.

What the headline rate is attached to

The table below is the shortest honest summary we can write of the retail savings market as it stood on 16 September 2026. Every rate is the provider's own advertised maximum unless noted, and the fourth column is the part the advertising leaves out.

The balance taper, in detail

If you remember one mechanic from this page, make it this one. Two large platforms shrink the advertised rate as your balance grows, and they do it by design rather than by accident. The advertised number is bait for the comparison tables; the tapered number is what the business can afford to pay at scale.

Bybit's version is blunter still. Its flexible USDT product advertises 12.00% APR; that tier ends at 500 USDT. From 500 to 1,000 USDT the rate is 0.70%, and above 1,000 USDT it is 0.28%. A 10,000 USDT balance therefore blends out close to 0.3%, roughly a fortieth of the number on the banner. Neither platform is hiding the tables — both publish them — but no comparison site that quotes "Bybit: 12%" is telling you anything useful. We keep the full set of tiered and conditional rates on the rates page.

Loyalty tiers and the native-token problem

The second mechanic that separates the headline from the outcome is tiering by holdings of the platform's own token. Nexo runs four loyalty tiers set by the share of your portfolio held in NEXO: Base with none, Silver at 1% or more, Gold at 5% and Platinum at 10%. The headline rate is a stack — a base rate, plus the tier uplift, plus up to 2% more for electing to receive interest in NEXO rather than in the asset you deposited, plus 1% for accepting a one-month fixed term. Crypto.com's Level Up programme, SwissBorg's seven membership tiers and Wirex's X-tras plans all work on the same principle, and Wirex's top tier requires locking 7.5 million WXT alongside a paid subscription.

Flexible or fixed, and what you give up

Almost every provider sells both a flexible product you can exit any day and a fixed term that pays more. The premium for locking is smaller than most people expect. Nexo adds 1% for a one-month term and shows fixed rates up to 12.5% on USDT against 9.5% flexible. Crypto.com offers flexible, one-month and three-month terms. Bybit's fixed products carry a 500 USDT minimum on the one-day USDT term against 1 USDT on the flexible equivalent.

The cost of a fixed term is not only illiquidity. Binance's locked products forfeit all accrued rewards on early redemption — you get the principal back, minus the rewards you had already been paid during the term. Crypto.com does the same and goes further: CRO fixed terms cannot be withdrawn early at all. Gate's fixed terms permit early redemption with interest forfeiture. KuCoin's documentation is the bluntest: where early redemption is allowed at all, "the amount returned could be lower than the original principal". Read that sentence twice before choosing a term for a rate difference of one or two percentage points.

Fixed terms also interact badly with a variable market. Binance states that its locked APR is "not fixed" and is "subject to change on a daily basis, unless otherwise stated", which makes "fixed term" a description of your liquidity rather than of your rate. The only fixed thing is the lock.

Disclosure, not adjectives

Four providers tell you where the money comes from

Ledn names its loan book. Xapo names the instruments. Bitpanda says in its own product terms that the stablecoin product is a loan to Bitpanda GmbH in Vienna, that ownership of the assets passes to Bitpanda for the term, and that it is "an unregulated product" with no deposit protection and exposure to counterparty, insolvency and de-pegging risk.

SwissBorg goes furthest in one respect and least far in another: it names the venue behind each strategy — Lido for ETH, Morpho for USDC, Maple, Kyros for SOL — and rates each low, medium or high risk. The trade is that you now carry smart-contract risk on top of platform risk, and a protocol exploit is a direct loss rather than an insured event.

Nexo, Crypto.com and Wirex do not tell you. Wirex at least says the category — conversion to DAI and deployment into a DeFi protocol — without naming the protocol. That is not enough information to price anything. Read the individual write-ups inour Ledn review and our Nexo reviewfor how differently two platforms in the same category can behave.

Minimums, accrual and how often you are actually paid

The mechanical terms vary more than the rates do, and they change the real return. Nexo requires a $5,000 portfolio balance before you earn interest at all, plus an explicit opt-in. Crypto.com sets per-asset minimums — 0.005 BTC, 0.15 ETH, 250 USDC or USDT. Ledn has no minimum and no lock-up: you opt in and out by moving assets between a Growth Account and a non-interest-bearing Transaction Account. Coinbase's USDC rewards start at $1. CEX.IO's savings product has no minimum and no maximum, publishes its accrual formula as the reward rate multiplied by the amount and divided by 365, and pays into a separate savings wallet daily.

Payment frequency follows no pattern. Ledn accrues daily and pays monthly, in kind, typically on the first of the following month. Crypto.com pays every seven days. Bitpanda credits weekly and restakes automatically. Bybit accrues from T+1, distributes from T+2 and pays daily at 00:30 UTC into the funding account. Nexo compounds flexible interest daily and pays fixed-term interest once, at the end. There is one small trap worth knowing: CEX.IO's savings terms state that redeeming on a given day forfeits that day's reward, so a same-day in-and-out earns nothing.

Compounding deserves a note of its own. A daily-compounding 9.5% is genuinely better than a simple 9.5%, but only if the rate survives the year. Because these rates are discretionary and move without notice — Coinbase cut its US USDC rate from 4% to 3.5% in October 2025 and applied two separate 0.25% cuts in the UK during the same year — a compounded twelve-month projection describes a scenario rather than a return. Treat it as an illustration of arithmetic, not a forecast.

The deposit guarantee question, answered properly

This is where the analogy with banking collapses entirely. In the US, UK and EU a bank deposit is covered by a statutory scheme and the bank is supervised for solvency. Across the ten providers in the table above, exactly one balance type is covered by anything comparable: Xapo Bank's US dollar balances, protected by the Gibraltar Deposit Guarantee Scheme up to the equivalent of £120,000. Xapo Bank Limited is licensed in Gibraltar under the Financial Services Act 2019. Xapo states directly that crypto asset deposits are not covered.

Everywhere else you are an unsecured creditor. Custody insurance does not change that. Nexo holds assets with BitGo, Ledger Vault and Fireblocks, is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and carries insurance underwritten through Lloyd's of London, Marsh and Arch — but that cover responds to a custodian being hacked, not to the platform becoming insolvent or its loan book going bad, and Nexo does not state the coverage amount on its own insurance page. YouHodler uses Ledger Vault cold storage with claimed segregation and has no public proof-of-reserves audit. Ledn takes a structural approach instead, ring-fencing account types through separate Cayman special-purpose vehicles, UC SA I Company and UT SA I Company; that is better practice than a single balance sheet, and it has never been tested in an insolvency.

What insolvency actually looks like is documented. BlockFi creditors achieved a widely reported 100% recovery — of their US dollar claim valued at the July 2022 petition date, which meant being made whole at 2022 prices while missing everything that happened to crypto afterwards. Celsius claims were fixed the same way, in dollars, as of 13 July 2022. Gemini Earn users were the exception that proves the rule: they got their actual coins back, in kind. The full account is in what happened to the CeFi lenders.

What to ask before you deposit

None of this makes crypto savings products unusable. It makes the diligence different from choosing a bank. The following five questions can be answered from a provider's own pages in about ten minutes, and if any of them cannot be, that is itself the answer.

Where a savings product fits, and where it does not

A crypto savings account is a reasonable instrument for one specific job: earning something on stablecoins you intend to hold anyway, at a venue whose funding model you can describe out loud, in a size you could lose without changing your plans. It is a poor instrument for the job most of its marketing implies, which is replacing a bank deposit. The 3.97% available from a three-month Treasury bill on 15 September 2026 is the number every one of these products has to beat after risk, and several of them do not beat it before risk.

For anyone holding a proof-of-stake asset rather than a stablecoin, the comparison is different again, because a protocol will pay you directly without a company in the middle — that is the argument set out in staking versus savings. For anyone willing to hold their own keys, the same lending demand is available without a balance sheet in the way, at rates you can verify on-chain; stablecoin yield covers what those rates are and why regulation is reshaping them. And if you would rather start from the provider than the product, the platform reviews take each one apart in turn.