When I first started playing DeFi, to be honest, I felt a bit embarrassed. I still remember during the bull market, holding stablecoin liquidity pools, watching others earn big by investing in yield, while my own returns lagged behind the market pace. I was so anxious but dared not chase high. During the bear market, it was even worse—liquidity pool yields shrank significantly, and liquidity issues often occurred. I had to be very cautious when trying to cash out my yields, and in the end, I could only grit my teeth and hold cash, waiting.

That period was a typical case of missing out on the bull market and getting caught in the bear market. Crossing cycles to make money was simply a luxury. Only later did I realize I hadn’t fully understood the complementary logic between yields and liquidity pools.

Last year, the crypto market was extremely volatile—two bull markets mixed with three corrections, and many people took a tumble. The annualized returns on stablecoin liquidity pools peaked at around 15%. If you didn’t realize gains in time, losing 20% was no big deal. That’s when I finally understood: to survive the bull-bear cycles, chasing yields alone or stubbornly holding cash is a dead end.

So I started adjusting my strategy and reconfiguring my yield portfolio. That included several products in the BNB ecosystem—liquidity staked BNB, derivative yield, and platform tokens—paired with stablecoin liquidity pools to create cross-cycle strategies.

How to put it, staking BNB in a liquidity pool is a shield in a bear market, capable of resisting declines while steadily generating returns; derivative yields are unaffected by bull or bear markets, relying on service fees to supplement income; platform tokens are the trump card in a bull market, allowing for quick excess gains, and in a bear market, dividends can help fill the liquidity pool’s gaps. Stablecoins serve as a buffer—used for arbitrage in bull markets and as a safety net in bear markets.

My practical approach last year was to try a combination of stablecoins plus 100 BNB in yield. The annualized return for a single cycle was about 30%, but after this pairing, it shot up to 75%. The most terrifying part was that the maximum drawdown in the bear market didn’t even exceed 4%. No need to guess the cycle—just watch how the bull and bear signals evolve, and adjust the allocation accordingly.

Now I finally understand this logic: yields and stablecoin liquidity pools are my cross-cycle armor. Each yield plays its role, and liquidity pools provide hedging protection. The alternating bull and bear markets turn from risks into opportunities to widen the profit gap.

From a rookie being led by the market to an active participant who can harvest cycles in DeFi, this progress is quite obvious.