Recently I’ve been looking at yield aggregators, and those APY numbers really stand out—especially when you compare them with U.S. Treasury yields. On-chain, you often see double-digit figures all the time. But honestly, every time before I click in, I’ll go through the underlying contract to see what it’s actually doing—what the strategy is, and what it really makes money from.

Some pools have high APY, but when you take a closer look, the underlying logic is basically using capital to mine the new protocol’s early “first blocks,” or running leveraged strategies. This kind of yield is pretty volatile. If that new protocol’s contract has a vulnerability, or there’s a bank run—i.e., a run on the counterparty—the returns can turn negative in minutes. In any case, I’m not really a fan of aggregators that feel like “betting on a new protocol.” I’d rather go with strategies that are clearly defined and have solid core positions—like stablecoin arbitrage or liquidity mining. Even if it’s tokenized RWA U.S. Treasury yield, the annualized return is lower, but at least the risk is more controllable.

To put it simply, returns themselves are a matter of probability, not fate. I’ll read through the contract audit reports a few pages more and walk through the strategy logic—this can filter out a lot of pitfalls. In the end, I’d rather go a bit slower than have everything wiped out to zero because of one unexpected incident.