Tip:
Circle has spent the last year quietly retreating from a model where USDC reserve yield reached retail wallets. The treasury bills still earn what they earn. The interest still accrues somewhere. It just does not accrue to you.
You can read this two ways. The cynical read: stablecoin issuers are banks that do not pay savings rates. The structural read: regulators in several jurisdictions made yield-bearing dollars look like a security, and the easiest way around that for Circle was to stop offering yield at all. Both are partly true.
The interesting question is what fills the gap. There is a long bench of stablecoin alternatives that route yield to holders by design. Some do it through tokenized treasuries. Some do it through Mento-style algorithmic baskets. Some, like cUSD on Celo, do not promise yield but make the unit usable for the things stablecoins were originally pitched to do: cheap, fast, day-to-day payment, denominated in something boring.
What you pick depends on what you want the dollar for. If you are holding to spend, the yield decision is a distraction. If you are holding to save, USDC is no longer the obvious move it was two years ago. The rest of the stack will figure it out faster than the headlines suggest.