Deel, a global payroll and HR platform, lets contractors earn "rewards" on their pay, while the product underneath routes opted-in balances into a Bitcoin-backed DeFi lending vault.
The global payroll company expanded its stablecoin wallet last week from Argentina to more than 80 countries across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, the company said in an Aug. 17 blog post.
- Contractors can move their earnings into DLUSD, Deel's dollar-denominated digital balance designed to track the U.S. dollar one-for-one.
- From there, they can opt into Earn, where Deel says rewards start accruing immediately and the balance can still be withdrawn at any time without a lock-up or penalty.
For users, that is basically where the explanation ends. But The Coinformer found that what happens behind Earn is a little more complicated.
Bitcoin backs the lending underneath
Deel's Earn service relies on Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol, through a vault curated by DeFi risk manager Sentora.
- According to a technical breakdown from blockchain oracle provider RedStone, DLUSD deposited into Earn is routed into the vault as pathUSD, another dollar-linked asset on the Tempo blockchain.
- That money can then be lent to borrowers who put up cbBTC, Coinbase's tokenized version of Bitcoin, as collateral.
RedStone provides the price feeds used to value the assets and help determine when borrowers' collateral needs to be liquidated.
But the product generating rewards on their opted-in balances relies, at least in part, on a lending market where Bitcoin backs the loans.
The cbBTC-backed lending market had grown to roughly $10.2 million as of Aug. 23, up from just over $2 million when RedStone described the setup in June, according to Morpho.
There is also an interesting difference in how Deel talks about the product.
In its disclaimer, Deel calls the rewards "promotional incentives" and says they "do not constitute yield, interest, or investment returns." It also makes clear that DLUSD isn't a bank deposit and isn't protected by the FDIC, FSCS or an equivalent government insurance scheme.
Yet in another Deel article published in July, the company described Earn as a way for contractors to "earn returns on idle balances through a yield feature powered by Morpho."
Deel hasn't said that contractor principal is guaranteed if the underlying lending strategy takes a loss.
Contractors are already using it
And the feature appears to have caught on quickly.
Tempo, the Stripe and Paradigm-backed blockchain used by the wallet, said in an X post on Aug. 17 that 74% of payout recipients in the initial Argentina rollout deposited funds into Earn.
It also said 85% of Earn users still held a balance after 30 days, while total Earn balances had grown 72% over that period, mostly because users added more money.
• 74% of payout recipients deposited into Earn
• 85% of Earn users still held a balance after 30 days
• Earn balances grew 72% after 30 days, largely from net deposits https://t.co/eLkI7P30Mm— Tempo (@tempo) August 17, 2026
Deel crypto head Thierry Edde then said roughly 3,500 contractors in Argentina were using the wallet before the company expanded it to more than 80 countries.
That adoption has also raised some questions about how much users understand about what happens after they tap Earn.
Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto, said on the Tokenized podcast that there is clearly demand for products that let people move payroll directly into something that earns a return. Still, he questioned how well consumers understand the collateral and risks behind products like these.
Luca Prosperi, co-founder and CEO of stablecoin infrastructure company M0, was more skeptical.
"I'm not very relaxed when I see this phenomenon," Prosperi said, arguing that lending against cbBTC may offer an unattractive risk-reward tradeoff compared with simpler alternatives.
For Deel users, though, most of that complexity stays out of sight.