How Does Deel's Stablecoin Earn Product Work?

What Is Deel's Stablecoin Earn Product?

Deel's stablecoin Earn product lets payroll recipients deposit their payout into a yield-bearing vault instead of cashing out immediately. Built on Tempo using Deel's own DLUSD stablecoin, it launched with early access for contractors in Argentina in June 2026 and expanded to 80 markets across Latin America, APAC, the Middle East, and Africa.

The DLUSD wallet is the base layer: contractors and freelancers who get paid through Deel can hold their earnings in DLUSD rather than converting straight to local currency. Earn is the feature layered on top, giving those same recipients a way to put idle DLUSD to work instead of just holding it.

The Engagement Numbers Behind Deel's Earn Product

For a product barely out of pilot, the early usage numbers are striking. Deel shared figures on the episode showing that a large majority of eligible payout recipients are choosing to opt into Earn rather than withdraw immediately, and that they're sticking with it once they do.

“They've given us some statistics here, where 74% of payout recipients deposited into earn with an 85% 30-day retention rate of those deposits, and about 60% of eligible users are now actively earning.”

— Simon Taylor, Host, Tokenized

How the Yield Is Generated: Inside the Morpho Vault

The mechanism behind Deel Earn routes deposited DLUSD into a Morpho vault on Tempo. Borrowers post cbBTC, Coinbase's wrapped Bitcoin, as collateral to borrow against, and the vault itself is curated by Centaura. The yield paid to Deel's users comes from the interest those borrowers pay on their cbBTC-backed loans.

“It feels like a lot of the early iteration of what's behind these earn products and vault products, it's basically CBBTC. It's Coinbase's Bitcoin as collateral.”

— Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa

That single-collateral design is exactly what worried Cuy Sheffield when the story came up on the show. Vaults like this are new enough that the underlying mechanics still need translating for a mainstream audience, and right now the collateral pool behind most of them is narrow.

Why Payroll Companies Are Building Earn Products

Deel isn't building this feature just to keep users happy. Payroll and payout platforms already have the distribution — millions of contractors and freelancers whose earnings pass through their rails — and an Earn product turns that distribution into a new revenue line.

“So all of a sudden, you have you know one or two additional revenue lines for those users that are coming to you as a payroll provider, but now there is a float involved.”

— Ryan Bozarth, Co-founder & CEO of Dakota

Ryan Bozarth, whose company Dakota builds payout infrastructure for marketplaces and payroll platforms, framed it as part of a broader shift: companies that already move money for their users are finding ways to monetize the float sitting in those accounts, the same way card programs earn on interchange.

The Risk Luca Prosperi Sees in Vault Products

Not everyone on the episode was comfortable with what's happening under the hood. Luca Prosperi, who writes the Dirt Roads newsletter on lending markets and vaults, argued that the risk-reward on cbBTC-collateralized vaults doesn't actually stack up once you look at what depositors are being paid versus the risk they're taking on.

“If you look at the vaults that are Coinbase Bitcoin backed, so to say, they yield less than risk free.”

— Luca Prosperi, Co-Founder & CEO of M0

His core point: an over-collateralized loan against Bitcoin is, structurally, a conservative trade. But the vaults built on top of it aren't priced like one.

Who Should Be Regulating Vault Curators?

Prosperi's sharper concern was about what happens when the collateral pool grows beyond blue-chip crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum into less liquid, real-world credit. He pointed to what happened when a major DeFi lending protocol was exposed to structured credit that soured: depositors who thought they were earning safe, low-risk yield found out otherwise when the market turned.

“Everybody runs for the door, and the depositors get screwed.”

— Luca Prosperi, Co-Founder & CEO of M0

For Prosperi, that risk maps directly onto a regulatory question. A curator that's just checking a protocol's parameters is doing something very different from a curator actively assessing credit risk and rebalancing a portfolio — and the second one, he argued, is functionally running a fund and should be regulated like one.

The Three Ways Stablecoin Wallets Can Pay Yield

Zooming out from Deel specifically, Cuy Sheffield laid out a framework for how any stablecoin wallet ends up paying its users yield. The first route is revenue share passed down from the stablecoin issuer, through a distributor, to the end customer. The second is exactly what Deel is doing: a vault-based earn product where the stablecoin itself gets lent out against collateral. The third is converting the stablecoin into a tokenized money market fund or treasury product entirely.

“You actually convert the stablecoin into a tokenized money market fund or a tokenized treasury, and so you're going from receiving and holding a stablecoin to actually holding government debt or a fund that then pays yield.”

— Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa

Each route carries a different regulatory and product profile. Vault-based earn products are, in Sheffield's telling, the least regulated of the three today and the easiest to roll out globally — which is part of why a payroll platform serving 80 markets went that route first.

• 74% opt-in rate. 74% of Deel payout recipients with access to Earn deposited into it, discussed on Episode 96.
• 85% 30-day retention. Of those who deposited into Earn, 85% still had funds in the product 30 days later, per Episode 96.
• 60% actively earning. About 60% of eligible Deel users are now actively earning yield on their DLUSD balances, per Episode 96.
• 80 markets, up from one. Deel's DLUSD wallet launched with early access for contractors in Argentina in June 2026 before expanding to 80 markets across Latin America, APAC, the Middle East, and Africa.