The barrier between "Trading & Earning" is breaking down, and the CEX wealth management paradigm is undergoing a significant change

2025-08-20 19:12:28

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When gods fight, retail investors sip soup.

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Today, a piece of news about "Coinbase updates derivatives rules, offering tiered subsidies on USDC used as collateral for contracts, with annual subsidies reaching up to 12%" has sparked widespread discussion in the community.

KOL benmo.eth from the Chinese community was the first to disclose this update on X, commenting: "This product directly targets funding fee products like BFUSD and USDE. In the current low-fee environment, the rewards have backfired. For example, if you have a margin of 1 million USDC and open a long position worth 2 million BTC, your margin of 1 million USDC naturally brings an annual yield of 8%; if your margin is 10 million USDC and you open a contract worth 20 million, then your 10 million USDC will receive an annual yield of 12%. As competition in derivatives intensifies, Circle, in collaboration with Coinbase, is directly cash-subsidizing the larger market, with the former seeking USDC's position in the derivatives market. This move has significant strategic implications and further drags the entire funding fee market into a red ocean battlefield."

The earliest innovator allowing collateral assets in open contracts to earn interest was actually Backpack, which supported "interest-earning contract trading" and "automatic lending" when it launched public testing in January this year.

As for the BFUSD mentioned by benmo.eth, it is a reward-based margin asset launched by Binance specifically for contract users. Users can continuously earn yields simply by holding BFUSD, while also using this stablecoin as collateral for their contract accounts, achieving "earn while using." As shown in the image below, although the current basic annualized yield of BFUSD is "only" 5.82%, historical data shows it has repeatedly surpassed 10%.

Coincidentally, OKX has recently launched a similar feature that bridges the gap between trading and wealth management, and its model is even more aggressive—covering not only contracts but also spot trading.

On August 15, OKX announced the launch of the "automatic coin earning for trading accounts" feature for VIP users. This feature allows users to automatically lend assets in their trading accounts to earn yields without affecting the use of assets as collateral and trading margins—most importantly, assets used for placing orders or as full-margin collateral can also automatically earn coins. The initial phase of this feature only supports USDT and is applicable to spot, contract, cross-currency margin, portfolio margin, and other account models, with more currencies to be gradually opened in the future.

For a long time, due to the need for risk isolation, major centralized exchanges have generally adopted a partitioned account design—trading accounts and wealth management accounts are independent of each other (even spot trading and contract trading under the trading account are independent). Although there are no obstacles to transferring funds between different accounts, this isolation design prevents users from balancing "trading" and "wealth management." In general scenarios, users can choose to "trade when needed, manage wealth when idle," but when placing orders or opening positions, they must forgo the wealth management yields for the corresponding time period.

In short, this is a "decision-making dilemma" commonly faced by exchange users: should assets be kept in the trading account, ready to seize market opportunities? Or should they be transferred to the wealth management account to earn stable yields? Pursuing yields means that funds cannot be flexibly used for a certain period; while maintaining liquidity inevitably sacrifices potential interest returns.

For many years, this paradigm has been widely accepted by users, but acceptance does not mean perfection, and from a product perspective, there is clearly room for optimization.

With leading exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and OKX successively launching targeted new features, this long-standing paradigm is being completely overturned. From the user's perspective, this means that the aforementioned "decision-making dilemma" will be broken, allowing for higher efficiency and earning capacity of funds; from the exchange's perspective, this may signal the emergence of new product standards, with the boundaries between trading accounts and wealth management accounts becoming increasingly blurred, and in the future, "trading equals wealth management" is expected to become a standard feature of exchanges.

In summary, being able to balance the demands of trading and wealth management in a simpler way is undoubtedly good news for countless exchange users, and all of this is thanks to the competition among exchanges for users and funds—amidst the ongoing competition in the trading arena, those who can better empower users will win their favor. Looking ahead, as cryptocurrency compliance deepens, more new players will enter the market, and the competitive landscape will only become more intense. As an ordinary user, I hope "they can make it even more lively."

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