Recently, I saw someone showcase the APY of a yield aggregator again, the numbers look pretty attractive, but my instinct as an old miner is to first think: where exactly does this yield come from, and who is passing it along? To put it simply, an aggregator is just throwing your money into a series of contracts that keep transferring back and forth, which might include lending pools, liquidity pools, reward tokens, and then selling them... The more layers there are, the higher the contract risk, the more counterparties involved, and sometimes there are also variables like admin privileges and "human" factors.

Now the community is arguing about privacy coins, mixing services, and the boundaries of compliance. I think it’s quite similar to the issue of yields: you might think it’s "automated on-chain," but in reality, many steps rely on trust and rules. Anyway, when I look at APY, I first check whether the contract is open source and audited, how permissions are managed, and whether the yield is sustained by subsidies. I prefer lower yields if it means sleeping better at night.