Just now I felt itchy and opened another yield aggregator. The APY on the homepage is shining so bright it looks like neon lights… My first instinct was: go for it. My second thought was: where does this yield actually come from?

Basically, it’s a whole chain of contracts helping you “move bricks,” and the more layers there are, the more “possible points of things going wrong” you stack up: strategy contracts, permissions, routing, and then the counterparties too (lending pools, market-making pools, cross-chain bridges)—if any of them goes sour, you’ll have to brace and shake along with it.

And there’s that kind of setup that says “auto-compound”—but really, you’re handing over your permissions. If something really goes wrong, don’t expect a stop-loss to save you; even the “withdraw” button might get stuck.

Recently, the NFT royalty debates have been intense too, and it feels pretty similar: creators want to earn more, the secondary market wants things to run more smoothly, and in the end the pressure gets shifted onto liquidity… Anyway, when I see a high APY now, I look over the contract permissions and where the funds are going first. Sure, impulsiveness is impulsiveness—but at least I won’t charge into a pit I can’t even understand.