Savings Options: Passive Rewards or Staking (10% on USDC with Blockchain?)

I'm looking for safe alternatives to traditional savings accounts at banks. I get that there’s always the risk of "not your keys, not your coins" so I want to stick to well-known exchanges and not some random new ones. I know Coinbase has some interest for holding USDC, but honestly, it's not much better than what I can get from fiat banks. Binance staking seems decent since they keep your coins in their cold wallets. Staking SOL looks pretty solid at around 5% right now, but we all know SOL can be pretty volatile and Binance charges up to 35% in fees. Then I came across this: https://www.blockchain.com/en/earn. They offer a bunch of options, including a tempting 10% for just holding USDC/USDT/Dai. A few things make this pretty attractive: 10% is really high for savings these days. USDC/USDT are stable and not volatile. Blockchain.com has been around for ages, so I doubt they’d just run off with your coins or be the first to get hacked. But I’m curious about where this 10% is coming from and how this whole thing works. Is it similar to how Coinbase gives interest on USDC to help promote its use and attract new users? This Blockchain.com rewards program isn’t clear to me. Does anyone have more info? Are there other similar reward systems from trusted exchanges or companies? Oh, and just to add, with Blockchain.com’s passive rewards, your crypto gets lent out to other investors, and you get 10% while they probably make even more.

there are even bookmakers / casinos that are actually offering passive reward from bitcoin and other cryptos (up to 15% yearly!) - with no bonding period. It's interesting as process and for sure it will become more and more common . I think this can become also the "reason" that will bring new users to bitcoin (normal people)... one of the critic towards bitcoin was related to absence of earning/dividend ... These revenues can come from several sources but these must be explained directly by them. They can just loan your coin...using for trading and so on...

Which sites?

To be honest, having to earn passively is quite a huge risk when APY are high and require a 3rd party involvement either by way of smart contract deployment or using LST/LRTs. Most often, these rates are not realistic and we end up been shortchanged or unstaking period are extended or wrap/slippages are unusually high. But hooking on an exchange for particular staking event within a specific period has been the best play for me. All I need is just lock either BGB and get my tokens with a higher yield (e.g APR) at the end of the unlocking period. It's safer, easier and cheaper.

Staking in USDT involves transferring your money to a centralized platform control by another person. This can be very risky and if you weigh the risk and the potential reward, the risk is far more than the promised reward because if anything happen to the platform, you will lose all your money entirely. This is why I discourage staking or any investment opportunity that involves moving money to a centralized platform.

Those EARN programs have more risks compared to native staking like you would do with solana or any other L1 or L2 tokens. This was the same or similar earn program that some projects did prior to FTX collapse and it turns out some of these projects got blown out after that collapse. The reality in crypto is that if you don't know where the yield is coming from, then you're actually the yield. I prefer a combo of staking via an LST and using the LST to participate in DeFi. It just have additional smart contract risks but it should be fine if you use top protocols as those are usually battle tested compared to some of these earn programs too.