How Circle and Coinbase make money from USDC

You can send USDC anywhere in the world for pennies. You can hold it indefinitely with no account fees. Circle doesn't charge you to mint it or redeem it. So how does a company build a multi-billion dollar business around a token that's free to use?

The answer is one of the most elegant business models in finance — and once you understand it, you'll see USDC very differently.

Every USDC in circulation is backed 1:1 by real dollars. Those dollars sit in a combination of short-dated US Treasury bonds and cash deposits at regulated banks. As of early 2026, there's roughly $55 billion worth of USDC in circulation.

Here's the key: those reserves earn interest. US Treasuries currently yield around 4-5% annually. On $55 billion, that's roughly $2.5 billion per year in interest income — just from holding the reserves that back USDC.

You deposit a dollar to get 1 USDC. Circle takes your dollar, parks it in Treasuries, earns the yield, and gives you a token that's worth exactly $1 but earns you nothing. It's the same model as a bank, except banks at least pretend to pay you interest on your deposits.

When Circle filed for its IPO in 2024, the numbers became public. Reserve income — the interest earned on USDC reserves — accounted for the vast majority of Circle's revenue. In 2023, Circle reported approximately $1.7 billion in revenue, with reserve income making up over 99% of it.

Circle's other revenue streams are small by comparison: transaction fees on the Circle Mint platform (used by institutional clients to mint and redeem large amounts of USDC), and fees from Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) for moving USDC between blockchains. But these are rounding errors next to the reserve income.

Coinbase isn't just a place to buy USDC — it's Circle's most important distribution partner. The two companies co-founded the Centre Consortium, which originally governed USDC, and they have a revenue-sharing agreement on the reserve income.

The split has shifted over time, but based on public filings, Coinbase receives roughly 50% of the interest earned on USDC held through its platform. For Coinbase, this is a massive, low-effort revenue stream — in some quarters, USDC-related revenue has been one of Coinbase's largest income sources outside of trading fees.

This is why Coinbase promotes USDC so aggressively, offers USDC rewards to users, and makes it the default stablecoin on its platform. Every dollar of USDC sitting in a Coinbase account generates revenue for Coinbase without them having to do anything.

Let's make it concrete. Say you hold $10,000 in USDC on Coinbase for a year:

Your USDC: Still worth exactly $10,000. No growth, no yield (unless you opt into Coinbase rewards).

Circle's cut: Your $10,000 in reserves earns roughly $450 in Treasury yield at 4.5%. Circle keeps a portion.

Coinbase's cut: Coinbase takes roughly half of the reserve income on USDC held on its platform — about $225 from your $10,000.

You: Earned $0 by default.

Now multiply that by the billions of dollars in USDC across millions of holders, and you see why this is such a powerful business model. The holders provide the capital, Circle and Coinbase earn the yield.

Not necessarily — it depends on why you hold USDC.

If you use USDC for payments, transfers, or short-term holding, the economics barely matter. You're getting a fast, stable, globally transferable digital dollar. The value is in the utility, not the yield.

But if you're holding USDC as savings — parking $5,000 or $50,000 in USDC for months at a time — you should know that your money is generating significant returns for someone else while earning you nothing by default.

The good news is that you don't have to accept zero yield. There are straightforward ways to earn yield on your USDC, ranging from dead-simple to more advanced. The returns can be meaningful, especially compared to a traditional savings account.

Understanding USDC's economics is the first step. The second step is deciding whether you want to capture some of that yield yourself.

The options range from earning 4-5% just by holding USDC in the right place (literally no extra effort) to more advanced DeFi strategies that can earn higher returns in exchange for more complexity and risk.

We wrote a full guide on this: How to earn yield on your USDC. It covers everything from the easiest option (Coinbase rewards — you turn it on and forget about it) to intermediate DeFi lending on Aave and Compound, to advanced strategies like liquidity provision. Each tier has different risk and reward tradeoffs, and the guide walks through all of them.