Designing the Earn Center: one home for everything your crypto can earn
TL;DR: In addition to trading, people coming to Coinbase could utilize three ways to put their assets to work: staking, lending, and cash rewards. Each had grown up in its own part of the app. We brought them into a single place, Earn Center, where you can see what you are earning, compare your options, and act in a few taps. This is the story of how we built it and what we learned.
Many ways to earn, one place to see them
Coinbase moves fast. Over the years we shipped a lot of genuinely good ways to put crypto to work: staking, lending, and cash rewards. Each was built quickly, and each earned its own audience.
That speed had a side effect: the products grew up in different places. They each used their own language, had their own entry points, and rarely pointed to each other. If you held some ETH, some SOL, and some cash, there was no single screen that pulled it together to show what you were earning, what you could be earning, and where to start. The opportunity was not to fix the products. It was to connect them.
Underneath the discovery question sat a comprehension one. Yield can be genuinely hard to reason about, for everyone.
A reward shown only as a future gain is easy to ignore. "4% on idle ETH" reads as someone else's math, not a decision you need to make today.
"Up to X% APY" trains people to distrust the number, because the rate they actually earn is usually lower than the one they were shown.
Crypto yield asks you to hold two ideas at once: the reward rate on your asset, and the price of that asset in dollars. We started calling this the two-hop problem. Most people do not want to do that math, so they round it down to "I don't really get it" and move on.
So the job was not only to gather the products. It was to make earning legible.
What we built
Earn Center is a single surface, placed at the top of Home, that brings staking, lending, and cash rewards together.
In one view you can see what you are currently earning, see what each product offers, and move into any of them without learning a new flow. We deliberately kept the first version about clarity and control. You decide what to do with each asset. We focused on making that decision easy to understand and simple to act on.
Pulling this together also meant fixing gaps we had lived with for a while. Staking, for example, presented an opportunity for a more robust detail screen, so part of the work was building that surface before the products could sit together cleanly. A unified front door is only as good as the rooms behind it.
What we heard from customers
Before we settled the design, we spent real time listening to customers, and what they told us shaped the decisions that followed.
The clearest example was a single label. We tested a screen that summarized your "Earning balance," and people read it in completely different ways. Some thought it meant everything they had ever earned. Others thought it meant what they were missing out on. When one phrase produces two opposite mental models, the phrase is the problem. We reworked how we name and frame that number so it says one thing.
Lend drew the most curiosity because of its rates, but it was also the heaviest to learn inside the new surface. That told us discovery and education are not the same job, and a single screen cannot carry both at full weight.
When we asked what people actually wanted from a place like this, two motivations came back again and again: discovering how they could earn more, and keeping an eye on what they were already earning. Discover and monitor became the two jobs we designed around.
The principles that guided it
What we heard pointed to a small set of principles, which we wrote down before we drew screens. Each one came from real customer frustration.
Show what's at stake, not just what's possible. Idle assets are easy to ignore when the upside feels abstract. Framing earning around what sits unused gave people a reason to act now, which is what they told us they wanted: "I want to see ways I can optimize my rewards."
Speak in one currency. To take apart the two-hop problem, we anchored on a common denominator, dollars, so people could understand how far their money goes without converting in their heads.
Give people a frame of reference. An APY in isolation means nothing. Shown next to something familiar, it suddenly reads as a good deal or a bad one. Context is what makes a rate decision-ready.
Leave room for delight, carefully. We wanted the surface to feel rewarding to use, not purely transactional. On a product that handles people's money, that bar is high. Delight can never come at the cost of trust, and getting that balance right is ongoing work that we’ll continue to prioritize.
What we've seen
Since launch, the pattern we hoped for has shown up. Staking has roughly doubled year over year, and Earn Center was recognized as part of the cross-team effort behind that growth. Zooming in on the launch itself, bringing earning into one place grew the number of people earning by more than 10% across staking and lending, and lifted earning volume by more than 30%, and it did so without pulling anyone away from trading. People also brought more of their assets to Coinbase and started using more than one earning product.
The takeaway for us is simple. A lot of value was already sitting in the app. People just needed a clear door to walk through.
Living with it also showed us where it can continue to improve. A front door has to be worth revisiting, so getting people to discover Earn Center is one thing and giving them a reason to come back is another. Reward clarity also gets harder as the ways to earn stack up, which makes keeping a single, honest rate across every screen real, ongoing work.
What's next
Two things are guiding where we take the design of Earn Center next: making the surface worth returning to, not just found once, and keeping rewards clear and trustworthy as more ways to earn come online.
