Four things that surprise people
The best-paying products are the ones you can't buy yourself
Every Asian participating-savings policy, every US MYGA, every offshore wrapper is agent-gated. The genuinely one-click routes cluster at the bottom of the yield range. That gap is the structural opening for a self-serve product.
High local USD rates are compensation for redenomination risk
Egyptian banks pay ~6% on dollar CDs because they need dollars. Argentina pesified deposits in 2001; Lebanon's pre-2019 balances are still frozen six years on. A "USD" deposit can be converted, capped or frozen.
Pendle is a market, not a yield source
It splits someone else's yield-bearing token into principal and yield legs. A PT's "fixed APY" is a price traders set. Buy PT-sUSDe and you hold Ethena's solvency risk plus Pendle's contract risk — not Pendle's credit.
No DeFi protocol offers a guaranteed floor
Hong Kong par plans guarantee up to 4.40%. US MYGAs guarantee 5–6.3%. Nothing on-chain guarantees anything, because there's no balance sheet behind the promise. Every DeFi rate here is best-efforts.
The five ways a dollar can be out of reach
Colour on this page does one job: it encodes how gated a route is. Rate tells you what you'd earn; the access code tells you whether you can get there at all.
What the yield bar means
Each bar plots the route's yield on a shared scale, with the vertical rule marking the 3.59% risk-free benchmark. Bars are compressed above 10% so outliers stay readable — that tail is not linear. Bars turn orange above 8%, the point past which nearly every figure is leveraged, incentivised, or paid for real convertibility risk.
A solid baris a rate somebody is contractually obliged to pay. A hatched baris not promised — it is an illustration, a projection, or a rate that simply floats. Only 12 of the 50 disclosed yields here are solid.
This is the difference between Egypt's 6.00% certificate of deposit, which is a contract, and AIA GlobalFlexi's 6.50%, which is a projected internal rate of return thirty years out. Plotted as bare numbers they are indistinguishable, and the projection is the higher of the two. The same treatment marks every DeFi rate on the page, because nothing on-chain is promised by anyone.
Where a rate is genuinely unknowable from public sources — offshore wrappers whose return depends entirely on the underlying, Plume vaults that don't publish live APYs — the field reads not disclosed rather than carrying an invented number.
What the safety score means
A yield on its own can't tell you whether you're being paid enough. The score sits beside it as a second axis, out of 12, where higher is safer, so the two can be read together. Open any row to see the full derivation.
It scores the instrument's structure, not our opinion of the provider. Five facts are recorded for every route — what stands behind the dollars, whether any of the return is contractually promised, who is able to change the rate, whether dollars can leave the jurisdiction, and what it costs to get out — and the total is arithmetic over those five. Nobody assigns a row a number. If you think a score is wrong, one of the five lines in the breakdown is the thing to argue with, and it is a fact that can be checked and corrected.
Two rules shape the rest. Convertibility caps everything at 4: a strong balance sheet is no comfort in a jurisdiction that has frozen or redenominated dollars before, so the other axes cannot compensate. And leverage is flagged, not scored, because a leveraged return is not a rate and comparing it to one is a category error.
Three rows carry no score at all. They describe a route to instruments — a Brazilian brokerage, a South African allowance, a Chinese quota — rather than a single instrument, so the inputs cannot be pinned down. They read unscored rather than taking a middling guess, on the same principle that leaves 13 yields at "not disclosed".
A high score is not a recommendation and a low one is not a warning: several low-scoring routes are the only dollar savings their holders can reach, which is the point the access colours make. This is an editorial framework for comparison, not a credit rating, and it is not investment advice.