What has generated you the highest return in defi (excluding token appreciation) in the past year? How risky was it? Have you done it again? I’m curious how successful people have been, however, I do recognize that some strategies carry very high risk.
I played around in DeFi for several years and I don’t think I made much money. If you don’t have a lot of capital or if you aren’t in the inner circle of crypto, it’s much harder to make good returns. If you’re doing anything on ETH you need to account for fees. I spent 10 ETH on fees over the years (some of this was when ETH was worth less than it is now). You can go to other chains but the liquidity isn’t as deep and they aren’t used as much so you can’t earn as much by lending your coins or putting them in a liquidity pool. Sometimes you can if you’re also being incentivized to do so (usually by being issued a token by the project).
I don’t really mind that I didn’t make all that much money because I was more just experimenting.
The other thing is that there is a lot of risk in DeFi. The highest returns are often on new projects but it’s hard to know whether to trust them. The returns on trustworthy protocols like Curve and Aave are pretty low. Personally I think it’s pretty hard to make returns that justify the risk unless you’re in that inner circle of crypto (the people who find out about all the projects in advance and get in really early).
Successful people do not share strategies but buy early on projects that have real world value.
So far, it has been OCEAN weekly DataFarming which rewards for the growth of Data Consume Volume have given me my highest defi return. I earn from a weekly pool of 150k rewards by locking OCEAN and by curating Data. My other staking strategy is single-staking my long-term gems such as ATOM, UTK, and MATIC.
For me its staking, earned pretty decent from a few alts of mine like Matic, SYLO and a few others like XTZ, and so far that has generated the highest return, aside from DCA and waiting for the bulls, right now I’ve got plans on running some nodes program on Sylo, which i believe would fetch me another great yields once its activated.
the most money I ever made in defi was in liquidity pools containing very similar assets. when I did stablecoins I was constantly biting my nails worried that one of the stables would fail. now I only want to do it with pools for liquid staking derivatives and recently the reward is just too low to justify the contract risk.
>…the highest return in defi (excluding token appreciation) in the past year? How risky was it?
The highest return for me excluding token appreciation is the UTK token I placed in the metastaking pool on the former Maiar DEX where I earn 3 different types of staking rewards.
This ETH vault delivers best-in-class ETH yield ~13% right now (disclaimer: I work here). You can learn more in this thread. https://twitter.com/sommfinance/status/1657313539416109058?s=20
APE
I think the most money I’ve made in the past year has been either through staking my existing assets, liquidity pools and investing in unique DeFi projects that show potential based on their features and use cases- some of these platforms included OCEAN, Zebec Protocol and Matic!
If DAOs are considered part of DeFi, then I will add this here. I am a regular participant in the DIA DAO, and we vote on various governance requests on a weekly basis. At the beginning of the year, the team shared DIA tokens with everyone who participated in voting for the previous year, regardless of how many times they voted. I received up to 20% of my holding, and I realized that I probably wouldn’t have received that much if I had staked my tokens in a pool. However, I don’t consider this a strategy, but it’s one of the ways I’ve earned a high return on my holdings.
Farm and dump back into stables or ETH
DCA has been the best strategy that has worked for me and still working. Currently DCA-ing into NXRA and anticipating it’s rewards.