A few days ago in the crypto world fren group chat, someone brought up a rather painful question— the annualized return from storing U on the exchange is surprisingly not as profitable as putting the money in the bank. At first glance, this seems a bit exaggerated, but after calculating the data carefully, there is indeed something to it.

Let's first take a look at the performance of the US dollar over the past year. At the beginning of the year, the US dollar was stable against the Chinese yuan in the range of 7.30-7.35, and even peaked at over 7.34 for the whole year. As a result, now (in late December), it has dropped directly to around 7.03. What does it mean to drop from 7.35 to 7.03? The US dollar has depreciated by 4.35% against the Chinese yuan over the year. In other words, holding 10,000 USDT, just from this exchange rate fluctuation, has directly lost more than 400 in purchasing power.

Looking at the USDT wealth management of the exchange, what's the situation? The flexible staking products of top exchanges have basically fluctuated between 4%-8% this year, and during major promotional events, they can be a bit higher, but the average level is around 6%-7%. The current products of small and medium platforms are even worse, around 2%-6%. To achieve returns of 8%-10%, you basically have to lock in the term or buy structured products.

The data is just laid out like this, calculated at an average annualized rate of 6%. After deducting the 4.3% depreciation of the exchange rate, what is the actual net profit in RMB that one receives? It's about 1.7%. Once this figure comes out, looking at the bank's wealth management products becomes quite interesting.

Demand deposits are indeed not appealing, with rates ranging from 0.2% to 0.35% that hardly anyone pays attention to. But what about fixed deposits for 1 to 3 years? You can easily get rates of 1.5% to 2.5%. Large denomination certificates of deposit or structured deposits are even better, reaching 2% to 3%. Most banks' wealth management products and money market funds also have yields typically stuck between 2% to 3.5%. By this comparison, the actual yield from staking U has indeed been surpassed.

Interestingly, recent data shows that the proportion of RMB settlements in domestic foreign trade has exceeded 30%, indicating that the trend of RMB appreciation is still ongoing.

The question arises - if investors in the crypto world become aware of this, will they start adjusting their USDT holdings? If everyone reduces their U holdings, will market liquidity shrink as a result? How will these chain reactions ultimately affect the ecosystem? These are all worth pondering.