Robinhood rolls out 7% stablecoin yield to 27.7 million customers
DeFi & Yields ·
The brokerage's new Earn product routes USDG deposits into Morpho and Steakhouse vaults, with Lloyd's of London and Relm insuring against smart contract failure.
Robinhood has launched Earn, a feature built into its main investing app that lets customers buy the USDG stablecoin in a few taps and deposit it into vaults targeting roughly 7% yield. The product reaches 27.7 million customers, according to Johann Kerbrat, the company's SVP of Crypto, who detailed the mechanics in an interview. The vaults are built with Morpho and Steakhouse, and the yield is funded by market makers and liquidity providers who need USDG liquidity to run spot and perpetuals trading elsewhere.
That structure means depositor funds effectively finance other traders' leveraged positions, some reaching 20x to 50x leverage, with the yield acting as compensation for supplying that liquidity. Kerbrat's account frames this as the return, but he also notes the underlying condition: the arrangement only works if depositors get paid back, a risk DeFi has not always managed cleanly given past hacks and smart contract failures.
To address that, Robinhood has paired Earn with an insurance program underwritten by Lloyd's of London and Relm, covering smart contract and vault failure. Kerbrat describes it as one of the largest such programs built for a crypto product, an attempt to make vault-based yield feel retail-grade rather than experimental.
Earn was one of 12 announcements Robinhood made alongside the yield product. The company also introduced stock tokens available in more than 120 countries, backed 1:1 by real equities, which can be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet and posted as collateral, extending a borrowing capability once reserved for private banking clients into a smart contract. Separately, Robinhood Chain moved to public mainnet after processing 200 million transactions on testnet, and the company rolled out perpetuals on stocks, crypto, and commodities at leverage ranging from 20x to 50x.
Coverage of the launch, including the interview with Kerbrat, was highlighted by commentary framing the moves as folding DeFi mechanics into a mainstream consumer product, with vaults, stablecoins, and collateral compressed into single-tap actions, a shift one account describing the infrastructure implications tied to the broader push toward regulated vault infrastructure underpinning such products.
What remains unclear is how the 7% target yield will hold up as market conditions shift, since the rate is tied to demand from leveraged traders rather than a fixed rate. Also unresolved is how the insurance program's coverage limits and claims process would function in an actual failure event, details not addressed in the available material.