Many people comparing DeFi leverage products only focus on two numbers:

“What’s the maximum leverage?”
“How much are the fees?”

But what really affects long-term costs is another issue that’s easier to overlook — whether your collateral itself generates yield.

Take stETH, for example. It inherently carries ETH staking rewards; even just sitting there, it continues to create value.

So in @protocol_fx’s design, this natural yield can flow into protocol revenue, and then be used for the system’s income distribution and balance.

But WBTC is completely different.

BTC does not generate yield on its own, so when using leverage, the system must compensate for that missing value source through additional fees.

In other words, even though both BTC and ETH are used for leverage on the surface, the underlying economic models are entirely different frameworks.

I increasingly feel that evaluating a DeFi protocol shouldn’t just look at fee levels.

What matters more is understanding:

Why does this fee exist?
Where does it ultimately flow?
Who is it creating value for?

A truly good protocol is often not the one with the lowest fees, but the one where every fee has a clear economic explanation.