Being "high APY" lures me in for the third time, then I quietly open the contract page... Yield aggregators, simply put, are just packaging a bunch of strategies for you, but what you buy isn't just the returns, there's also a string of permissions: who can modify the strategy, who can withdraw funds, and who takes the blame if something goes wrong. Some look like "auto-compounding," but in reality, they add in lending, cross-pool operations, or even whitelist routing, giving counterparties an extra point of failure, increasing the risk of a crash.

Recently, AI Agents and automated trading systems have also been quite popular, with narratives that sound overly elaborate, but I'm more concerned about what permissions they actually take from you, whether they can be paused or exited, and who presses the emergency button if bugs occur. Anyway, I now prioritize risk boundaries when choosing aggregators: can I withdraw at any time, are permissions well-controlled, is the audit just for show... survive first, then talk about returns.