Last month, the AT token of a popular project was launched for staking on major exchanges and multiple platforms. I saw some liquidity mining pools offering an annualized return of 134%, and my first reaction was that this number was suspicious. So I treated it as an experiment and invested 10,000 AT tokens to test the waters. After observing the situation for over two weeks, there are some details that need to be clarified.

**First, the conclusion: Most of those seemingly exaggerated high annualized yields are promotional discounts during the marketing period, and the actual long-term returns are much lower. Plus, the token itself has significant release pressure, so investing in such projects requires carefully calculating the risk and reward balance.**

I tested the AT staking schemes on three different platforms. One major exchange offers a fixed 18% annualized return for a 30-day lock-up period. At first glance, the yield seems conservative, but the platform’s reputation is stable; another major exchange offers only 4.32% APY for flexible staking, which can be withdrawn at any time but yields are quite modest; the on-chain liquidity mining platform’s AT-USDT pool advertises a 134% APY, but there’s a lot of water in that number.

How is the 134% figure derived? The platform’s incentive structure is as follows: part of the rewards are in AT tokens themselves, and another part is in the platform’s governance tokens. The actual APY for AT is roughly around 40%, while over 90% of the yield comes from the governance tokens. However, these governance tokens are quite volatile. When I entered the pool, they were worth $1.02 each, but now they’ve fallen to $0.97. That 5% drop alone eats up a large portion of the high yield. Plus, over these two weeks, AT’s price dropped from $0.16 to $0.15, which also incurs impermanent loss. In reality, the returns over two weeks are less than 2%, and annualized, it’s about 50%, which is completely different from the advertised 134%.

So, behind the seemingly attractive high annualized yield, there’s often a combination of multi-token rewards, volatility losses, and marketing premiums. Investors need to carefully account for these factors before investing—don’t be blinded by the numbers.