I used to really think that yield aggregators were just "helping me compound automatically," that the APY I see is what I get to relax with, and at most I’d lose a bit on fees… Now I realize that, frankly, the APY is backed by a bunch of contracts doing arbitrage for you, still moving someone else’s pools: Are the strategy contracts risky, who holds the permissions, if the underlying protocol has issues, you’ll suffer too, and counterparties running away or getting liquidated isn’t impossible.

Recently, I’ve been watching new L1/L2s offering incentives to pull in TVL, and old users complain about “mining and selling,” I can totally empathize: as TVL goes up, once incentives stop, the remaining users are left awkwardly in the pool. Anyway, I’m now taking a more laid-back approach—no matter how attractive the APY is, I first check where the money ultimately ends up, if gas fees are high, I take it as a reminder not to be reckless, just sticking to that for now.