Recently, I've been looking at the APY displays of a few yield aggregators again. To put it simply, that number is just the result, not the cause. Clicking into each layer of the contract: first, you transfer your tokens into the vault, then authorize the strategy contract, and then maybe borrow, provide liquidity, or stake again... Any change in implementation or counterpart in the middle completely alters the risk profile. Especially with "auto-compounding," the transaction construction becomes complex, nonce/packing order gets messy, and if there's congestion or a front-run, the returns don't increase much, but the friction costs go up first.

Some projects also tie APY with "social mining/fan tokens," claiming to attract attention as a form of mining. I get a bit confused: is the attention really mining profits, or is it just more counterparties and more opaque pathways... Anyway, when I look at aggregators now, I first check where the strategy is sending the money, then look at permissions and upgradeability, and only finally consider APY. Even if it takes longer, I accept that.