YieldScope Rate Report #3: The 10% on Bitget's Front Page Is a Campaign — and Lending Rates Swung 100 Points in a Week

We take a daily snapshot of flexible earn rates across crypto venues, grade every venue A to F on five public safety checks, and keep the full daily history. This is the third issue of the YieldScope Rate Report, covering October 2–9, 2026. Every number below can be checked on the site.

Three stories this week: the headline stablecoin rate on Bitget's front page, a week in which lending markets moved by up to a hundred points, and what USDT actually pays on the safer venues. We close with corrections — including two of our own.

The 10% on Bitget's front page is a campaign

Open Bitget's Simple Earn page and the featured row reads:

● USDT — 10.00%

● USDC — 8.00%

● USDGO — 12.00%

Each is a flat rate on up to 10 million coins. Click the USDT card and you are sent to the login page with source=events in the address — a campaign, not the standing product. Nothing public says who qualifies or for how long.

The ordinary product sits right next to it, and it is a ladder:

● USDT — 7.82% on the first $300, 3.16% on the rest

● USDC — 6.66% on the first $300, 1.95% on the rest

● USDGO — 6.60% up to $100,000, 5.50% up to $1 million, 4.00% above

So a $5,000 USDT deposit earns roughly 3.4% a year — less than a third of the front-page number. We publish 3.16% as Bitget's base and show the $300 step next to it, the same rule we apply everywhere: the headline is not the rate on your money.

The context matters. Bitget lost about $387.5 million from hot and warm wallets on September 24. Withdrawals came back in phases between September 28 and October 2; on October 9 every major coin could be withdrawn except ADA. Bitget says its Protection Fund covered the loss and was refilled to more than $300 million on September 30, and the SlowMist and Mandiant reports trace the breach to compromised third-party security products. The hack costs Bitget the track-record check, so it now grades B — four of five. A campaign rate two weeks after a hack is a deposit drive. It may be generous; it is not the base.

Correction, 11 October 2026: three details above were wrong. The source=events tag proves nothing — on Bitget a logged-out click on any product, ordinary ones included, leads to that login page. Who qualifies is public: Bitget's campaign page calls these "newly launched limited-time flexible products", open to identity-verified main accounts, with first-come quotas and a separate subscription; existing Simple Earn holdings do not get the event rate. Only the end date is missing. And the page does not list the standing product next to the featured one — we read it from Bitget's own product data. The conclusion holds: a limited-time event rate is not the base. Since October 9 the event products have become ladders (USDT and USDC 8% on the first 300,000 coins, then 4%), and the standing product now pays 7.47% on the first $300 and 2.81% on the rest for USDT, 6.66% and 1.56% for USDC. The first point of the short version below should read: a featured rate the venue itself calls limited-time is a campaign. The chart caption above is updated.

Lending markets moved, not promises

We compared 1,708 venue-and-coin pairs with a week of history. 268 moved by half a point or more; 1,051 did not move at all. The biggest moves on top-200 coins, leaving out swings above 100 points:

● MET on OKX — 18.27% → 110.07%

● MET on Bybit — 1.93% → 23.63%

● TRUMP on OKX — 12.31% → 29.40%

● RAY on OKX — 8.51% → 23.34%

● DOT on OKX — 1.00% → 13.41%

And down:

● MANA on OKX — 127.02% → 27.66%

● SAND on Bitget — 100.00% → 15.84%

● SAND on OKX — 147.12% → 91.95%

● AXS on OKX — 34.49% → 9.31%

● POL on OKX — 15.69% → 1.00%

Eight of the ten are OKX, and that is not chaos — it is the product. OKX's flexible rate is a lending market: it follows how much traders want to borrow each coin that day. TRX, the eighth-largest coin, shows the rhythm. On OKX it paid 31.00% on October 2, then 25.67%, 22.95%, 24.85%, 23.08%, 27.05%, 20.21% and 20.19% on October 9. None of those numbers was wrong; none of them was a rate you could plan a year around.

Above 60% the shelf held steady: six live rates, against seven a week earlier. Four are above 100%, and on Bitget each has a ceiling:

● MET on Bitget — 227.03%, on the first 500,000 MET

● RLC on Bitget — 204.17%, on the first 300,000 RLC

● MINA on OKX — 188.85%

● MET on OKX — 110.07%

Our earlier study on how long a high rate lasts still applies: the typical life of a 60%+ rate is about a day.

What USDT pays on the safer venues

Base rates, withdraw anytime, on venues that pass four of five safety checks:

● Kraken — 4.00%

● OKX — 3.50%

● Bitget — 3.16%

● Gate — 2.45%

● WhiteBIT — 1.94%

● BingX — 1.00%

Neither A-grade venue we track — Coinbase and Bitvavo — pays on USDT at all. Every USDT rate above 10% sits on an F-graded venue: Lune.fi at 18.00%, CoinDepo at 17.00%, YouHodler at 12.00%.

Across all 20 venues the median is 2.95%, exactly where the same 20 stood a week ago. Over a month the picture is slightly softer: the 15 venues with thirty days of history moved from 2.63% to 2.51%. The USDT page carries the full list with grades.

Quiet venues repriced

Two venues that rarely move did this week.

● Kraken — on October 3 it repriced most of its staking list; SOL went from 2.32% to 3.39% and has held there since

● Bitvavo — between our snapshots of October 2 and October 9, 385 of the 446 coins listed in both changed. KAIA went from 7.59% to 6.68%, BTC from 0.02% to 0.01%, STORJ from 2.42% to 0.07%. The eye-catching jumps were "up to" ceilings, which we do not publish

The short version

● A featured rate behind a login wall with no published terms is a campaign. Compare it with the product listed next to it

● On flexible products at OKX, read the week's range, not the day's number

● If you want USDT yield on a venue that passes four of five safety checks, the honest range this week was 1–4%

Corrections

We hold ourselves to the same standard we ask of the venues.

● Bitget, October 6–9 — for four days our tables showed USDT at 10% and USDGO at 12%, and USDC at 8% on October 9. Bitget had stopped pinning the campaign products, and our filter only caught pinned ones. It now treats any flat product that pays more than the ordinary ladder's own first step as a campaign; the history for those days has been removed

● Bitget, October 9–11 — after this issue went out, the event products turned into ladders and our filter missed them again: our tables showed USDT and USDC at 4%, USDGO at 5.5%, BTC at 0.6% and ETH at 3%. The filter now treats any newer product that pays more than an older one of the same coin as an event product; those days have been removed from the history (added October 11)

● Rate Report #2 — we listed Kraken and Nexo at 5.50% on USDT. Kraken's flexible rate was 4.00% (5.60% is an 18-month fixed term), and Nexo pays nothing on USDT for an EEA account. The issue now carries a dated correction

● MEME — since July 23 the page was pinned to a different coin with the same ticker; all six venues we list pay on Memecoin. Fixed on October 5

What we change and why is logged on the transparency page.

Rates float; every number here is a snapshot from October 2–9, 2026. Grades measure the venue's safety as a custodian, not the durability of any single rate. This report is not financial advice.