Where yield comes from
Every honest return is somebody paying for something. If you cannot name who pays and what for, you are looking at the other kind.
Numbers get advertised without their source, and the number on its own is meaningless. Four per cent from one mechanism and four per cent from another can carry completely different risks, and a headline figure hides which you are taking.
So before the individual pages, the question that organises all of them.
Who is paying, and what are they paying for?
Every honest return has an answer in one sentence. If the answer is missing, vague, or turns out to be "people who joined after you", the arithmetic has one ending.
The four real sources
- Securing a networkProof-of-stake networks pay people who lock coins to help produce and validate blocks. The money comes from newly issued coins and transaction fees. This is staking, and it is the most straightforward source there is.
- Lending to a borrowerSomebody wants to borrow and pays interest. Your return is their cost. Whether you get paid depends entirely on whether they can repay — and on who decides what happens if they cannot.
- Providing liquidityYou supply two assets to a pool that others trade against, and collect a share of trading fees. The fees are real; so is a mechanical cost that most explanations skip.
- Being paid to show up earlyAirdrops, points, incentive programmes. A project spends its own tokens to attract users. Real, sometimes large, and entirely dependent on that token being worth something later.
That is the complete list. Anything presented as a fifth source is usually one of these four wearing a costume, or it is not a source at all.
Why the headline number lies
A percentage tells you nothing on its own, because it says nothing about three things that decide whether you keep it.
What it is paid in. Eight per cent paid in a project's own token is not eight per cent. If the token halves, you are down. Returns paid in the asset you deposited are a different product from returns paid in something the platform issues.
How long it lasts. Incentive programmes advertise the opening rate. It falls as more people join, and it is designed to.
What you gave up to get it. Locked for three months? Then the number is not comparable to something you can leave at any moment. Illiquidity is a cost even when nothing goes wrong.
A fixed percentage per day is not a return
None of the four sources produce a fixed daily number, because none of the underlying activities are fixed. A guaranteed daily rate is a payout schedule, and a payout schedule funded by deposits ends the same way every time.
The trade nobody states out loud
Yield is compensation for risk. Not a reward for being clever, not a bonus for using the right platform. If you are paid more, you are carrying more of something — the risk that a borrower defaults, that a contract has a flaw, that a token collapses, that a company keeps your deposit.
That does not make it a bad idea. It makes the comparison a different one than most people run: not "which pays most" but "which risk am I being paid to take, and do I actually want it".
Three questions before any of it
Can I lose the deposit itself? Not the return — the principal. For most of what follows, yes, and the ways differ per mechanism.
Who is holding it while it earns? A contract, a company, or the network itself. This changes what "gone" looks like when something breaks.
How do I get out, and how quickly? Unbonding periods, notice periods, withdrawal queues. The answer matters most on the day everyone else wants out too, which is exactly when these limits bite.
The rest of this section takes the four sources one at a time. None of it is a recommendation to use any of them — we do not do recommendations — and all of it assumes the coins you are risking are coins you could lose.