Recently, many people have been asking me where the returns from LST/re-staking come from... Basically, it's taking money from both ends: one end is the basic rewards from staking, and the other is renting out the "security/validation services" to collect service fees. But money doesn't appear out of thin air; the more it looks like "compound returns," the easier it is to stack up risks as well: contract/relay issues, penalty mechanisms (slashing) transmission, liquidity panics—those moments where the payout speed can never keep up with the panic speed.

Developers are quite excited about narratives like modularity and the DAO layer, but ordinary users are often confused, which I can understand, because in the end, it all boils down to a bunch of authorizations and signatures in your wallet: who do you really trust as the "trusted intermediary"? My own habit is: no matter how high the annualized rate, I first look at the exit path, who bears the worst-case loss, and whether the authorization can be minimized. Otherwise, the seemingly attractive returns can ruin your sleep quality first. Long-term, it's really not about talent, but about not clicking on things randomly.