Earn Bitcoin: the yield problem nobody advertises

If you want to earn Bitcoin on Bitcoin you already own, you are asking a narrower question than most guides admit. Ethereum, Solana and every other proof-of-stake network pays stakers out of newly issued tokens. Bitcoin does not. It uses proof of work, miners receive the block subsidy, and no part of the protocol sends anything to someone holding coins in an account. That single design fact removes the entire first engine of crypto yield from the table.

What is left is credit. Every BTC interest rate in this guide exists because somebody borrowed bitcoin and agreed to pay for it — a margin trader, a retail borrower posting collateral, an institution running a basis trade. Your rate is their cost, minus the platform's margin. So the sensible way to read a BTC rate is not "how much can I get" but "who is paying this, and what happens to me if they stop".

Why Bitcoin yield is structurally scarce

Proof-of-stake networks have a budget for paying holders. The protocol mints new tokens and hands them to validators, which is why Ethereum staking can pay a 2.46% network APR without anyone taking on credit risk, and why ourcross-asset staking comparison can quote nominal rates up to 19.6% on smaller chains. Bitcoin has no such budget. The block subsidy goes to miners who spend real electricity, and it halves on a fixed schedule.

That leaves lending, and lending needs borrowers. Here the second structural problem appears: demand to borrow bitcoin is thin, while demand to borrow against bitcoin is strong. Someone who is bullish on BTC wants dollars now without selling, so they post BTC as collateral and borrow stablecoins. Almost nobody wants to be short bitcoin badly enough to pay a meaningful rate to borrow it.

DeFi shows this with unusual clarity, because the rates are set mechanically rather than by a marketing team. Supply APY in a pooled lending market is borrow APY multiplied by utilisation, less the protocol's reserve factor. The numbers below are from Aave v3 on Ethereum, checked 16 September 2026.

What the CeFi Bitcoin rates actually are

Centralised platforms can and do pay more than zero, because they are not passing through a utilisation curve — they are running a balance sheet, and part of what you receive may be marketing spend rather than borrower interest. The table below sets out every BTC rate we could verify, with the condition attached to each.

Two things stand out. First, the providers who explain where the money comes from publish the lowest numbers. Xapo tells you its US dollar savings rate of 3.35% is funded by AAA-rated US Treasury bills and money market funds, and in the same breath tells you BTC pays 0.25%. That is not a worse product; it is a more honest one. Second, the providers with the highest headline BTC numbers — Nexo and Crypto.com — are also the two in this set that do not disclose their yield source at all. The pattern holds acrosscrypto savings accounts generally.

The conditions that shrink a headline BTC rate

Four mechanisms do almost all the work of turning an advertised number into a smaller real one, and BTC products use all four.

Balance tapers. Crypto.com applies its full advertised rate to the first US$3,000 of a fixed-term position, 0.5× to the next US$27,000, and 0.3× of that above US$30,000. On a $100,000 BTC allocation, the headline applies to 3% of the balance.

Partial deployment. Kraken's flexible staking discloses that it "will only stake a portion of your assets" and that you will receive rewards on up to 50% of what you choose to stake. An advertised flexible rate can therefore overstate the effective yield on your full balance by up to a factor of two.

Commission. Kraken takes 30% of rewards on flexible staking and Auto Earn, and 25% at the first bonded tier, falling to 0% above $100m of assets. On a 0.04% gross rate the absolute numbers are trivial, but the proportion is not, and the same commission structure applies across the assets covered in ourinterest rates comparison.

Conditional uplifts. Nexo's best BTC numbers require a loyalty tier — which means holding NEXO at 1%, 5% or 10% of your portfolio — plus taking your interest in NEXO and committing to a fixed term. YouHodler's blog describes raising BTC from 4.8% to 7.2%, but only after you have taken at least one Turbocharge or crypto loan and contacted support with the Loan ID. That is a savings rate conditioned on first taking leveraged risk, which is a materially different product from the one the headline implies.

The 2022 lesson, and why it matters more for BTC than for anything else

Bitcoin interest accounts were the centre of gravity of the last credit cycle, and they were the products that failed. Celsius advertised up to 17–18% and claimed a $750m insurance policy that did not exist; it froze withdrawals on 12 June 2022 and filed for Chapter 11 on 13 July 2022. BlockFi's Interest Account paid up to roughly 8–9% and had already been found unlawful — a $100m settlement with the SEC and 32 states in February 2022 — nine months before it filed. Voyager told customers their deposits were "FDIC-insured"; over $1bn of customer crypto was lost.

The part that is still under-explained is what recovery meant. BlockFi creditors were announced as receiving 100% recovery in September 2024, but that is 100% of a US dollar claim valued at the petition date in 2022. Customers were made whole in dollars at 2022 prices and missed everything that happened to the bitcoin price afterwards. The only cohort in that era who got their coins back in kind were Gemini Earn users, when Gemini announced full in-kind recovery of over $2bn in May 2024. We set out the full sequence onwhat happened to Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager and Genesis.

The relevance to a BTC decision today is direct. If you are holding bitcoin because you think it appreciates, then a counterparty failure does not cost you the 1% or 4% you were earning. It converts your bitcoin into a dollar claim fixed at whatever the price was on the day the lawyers arrived. That asymmetry is the single strongest argument for treating BTC yield as a small, deliberately sized position rather than a default setting — a point developed further on passive income with crypto.

The protocol layer, in one paragraph

There is a second route to BTC yield that does not run through a company balance sheet: protocols that use timelocked bitcoin as slashable security for other chains, and the wrapped tokens built on top of them. Babylon, Lombard, Solv, Core DAO and Stacks all operate in this space, and Kraken's 19 June 2025 Bitcoin staking launch is built on Babylon. It is also a sector that has contracted sharply — Bitcoin DeFi peaked at around $9.1bn in October 2025, Bitcoin layer-2 and sidechain TVL was down 74% from that peak by the first quarter of 2026, and only about 0.46% of circulating BTC is in DeFi at all. Because every one of these products requires giving up native bitcoin for a representation of it, they deserve their own treatment: see Bitcoin yield and BTCfi.

How to decide

There is no recommendation here, but there is a reasonably clear structure to the choice. Readers who hold bitcoin as a long-term position and would be materially hurt by losing it will find the 0.02%–0.25% products the only ones whose risk is proportionate to their return — and may reasonably conclude that 0.25% is not worth introducing a counterparty at all. Readers who want a genuinely higher rate are choosing to become a lender, and should size the position on the assumption that any single venue can go to zero.

Readers who mainly want yield, rather than yield specifically on bitcoin, have better-paid options with clearer sources. Stablecoin products pay 3.57% on Aave v3 and 6.5% to 8.5% at Ledn against a disclosed and overcollateralised loan book; tokenised treasuries pay 3.44% to 3.74% backed by actual government debt. Both are covered onstablecoin yield andtokenised treasuries. Converting BTC to earn those rates is a different decision entirely — it changes what you are exposed to, and price direction has swamped every yield number in this article many times over.

One last observation on where to look. Abra advertises a Bitcoin Yield product at 2.00% APY alongside strategies named like funds, and does not publish the fund structure, minimums, lock-ups or yield source. Abra Earn was itself wound down from June 2023 after peaking at around $600m, and Abra settled with the SEC in August 2024 over unregistered offers and sales. A rate with no documented mechanism behind it is not a rate you can evaluate. That principle is the whole of our venue selection framework.