Spark is moving its Spark Savings product into BitGo, giving users holding USDC or USDT a way to earn yield on idle stablecoins without leaving qualified custody. Sam MacPherson said the change matters because parking $100 million in USDC without access to the treasury rate is costly, amounting to about $3.6 million a year in lost yield at 3.6%.
The integration lands as BitGo has become one of the biggest names in institutional custody, and as more treasurers look for ways to put cash-like assets to work without breaking compliance rules. BitGo went public on the NYSE in January after filing that it held about $104 billion in assets for more than 1,500 institutional clients, a scale that helps explain why a product like Spark Savings is being pushed into its platform now.
MacPherson framed the offering as a way to bring decentralized finance returns to users who have been excluded from them by custody and compliance constraints. He said BitGo users holding USDC or USDT will be able to earn yield on idle capital, but he also acknowledged the barrier that has kept many large allocators on the sidelines: moving money from a regulated custodian into a smart contract is still a headache for treasury teams.
Spark is a sub-DAO of Sky, the protocol formerly known as MakerDAO, and has spent the past two years building products that look more like institutional finance than a typical crypto app. Sky was restructured and rebranded in 2022, Spark launched SparkLend under the new structure, and in February it added Spark Prime, a prime brokerage for basis trades used by crypto hedge funds to manufacture yield. By the end of May, Spark said its Savings product held about $6.4 billion and SparkLend had $3.4 billion.
That yield is not coming from one source. MacPherson said it is drawn from Treasury-bill exposure on stablecoin reserves, onchain crypto-backed loans and an off-chain desk run with Anchorage Digital Bank, the federally chartered crypto custodian. He also said Spark Savings is built so depositors can withdraw with no notice at any time, describing Sky as maintaining more on the order of fifty, sixty percent in reserves and saying a depositor could put in $500 million and pull it out three days later without warning.
The pitch is straightforward: make stablecoin balances earn something while keeping them inside a regulated wrapper. The unresolved piece is rollout. Spark has disclosed the BitGo integration, but it has not said when it will go live or exactly which BitGo accounts will qualify, leaving the timing of the move as the next detail institutions will watch.
