Reports
Published: Oct 23, 2025
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By MoreMarkets
This report by MoreMarkets provides data-driven insights into the current state of the retail crypto yield landscape. It examines why a significant portion of investors earn no yield on their digital asset holdings, and why those who do overwhelmingly favor centralized platforms over decentralized finance.
Understand the barriers, preferences, and messaging required to capture the retail market in 2025.
The Crypto Yield 2025 report details the significant disparity between centralized and decentralized yield participation and identifies the exact factors holding retail users back from earning yield.
Topics Covered Include:
CEX vs. DeFi Yield Adoption Rates: Analyzing the adoption gap in earn products: 20 million users earning yield via CEXs vs. 0.5 million earning yield via DeFi.
Barriers to Yield Adoption: A breakdown of the primary deterrents for retail investors engaging with earn products:
Liquidity concerns (68%)
Security skepticism (45%)
Complexity and lack of understanding (28%)
Key Adoption Drivers: Identifying what makes yield products "irresistible" to retail users. The data shows that flexible, no-lockup withdrawals (46.5%) and guarantees of asset safety (40.6%) drive adoption more than higher APY (33.7%).
Messaging and UX: How terminology (e.g., "earning interest" vs. "yield farming") impacts trust and adoption among mainstream audiences.
The insights are grounded in real data, based on a fresh survey of 150 U.S. retail crypto investors, supplemented with onchain analysis, survey data, platform disclosures, market benchmarks, and MoreMarkets' internal data.
Essential reading for Web3 market professionals, including DeFi builders, exchange strategists, institutional investors, hedge funds, VCs, researchers, journalists, financial analysts, and organizations evaluating expansion into the retail crypto sector.