What Is DeFi Yield Farming?

Yield farming allows users to earn cryptocurrency rewards for locking up their assets in yield-bearing pools. There are various opportunities to yield farm, including liquidity pools, staking, and lending protocols. What they all have in common is that they generate a return for the user in exchange for putting this user’s fund to work. It's common for yield farmers to use protocols that maximize their returns, known as yield optimizers. Yield farmers will also move their funds around, looking for the best returns available in the market.

As DeFi grew more popular, many protocols began offering higher rewards as incentives for stakers. This, however, often resulted in unnaturally high and unsustainable APYs, some even over 1000%. Once these APYs dropped as a result of the project's treasuries dwindling, token prices would often plummet as users rushed to sell off the farmed token. Demand for such tokens, it turned out, was supported by emissions rather than their utility.

With high APYs abundant in the DeFi space, how does one estimate the true value of projects and their interest-generating potential? One option is to look at a project's crypto real yield.

Real and Sustainable Yield vs Dilutionary Emissions
When we describe yield as being “real,” what we are talking about is its sustainability. If the project’s revenues cover the amount of tokens distributed to stakers, its own funds aren’t being drained. Theoretically, the project could maintain the same APY in real terms indefinitely if the revenues remain the same.

However, it’s also common to see dilutionary emissions – a scenario when a project distributes APY in a way that is unsustainable in the long run, most commonly by depleting its treasury. Should the project’s revenue not increase, it will be impossible to maintain the same level of APY. Such APY is often distributed in the project’s native token, as a large supply of it is readily available.

Stakers might also be farming these tokens and selling them on the open market, thus reducing their price. This can cause a vicious circle where more native tokens have to be given out to offer the same APY, which depletes the treasury even quicker.

Note that while “real yield” is preferably given out in blue-chip tokens, a project distributing its native token could also do so in a sustainable way.#ContentStar