DeFi yield aggregators are amazing. They democratize access to wealth creating DeFi strategies.
One of beauties of crypto is that anyone, anywhere now has ways to earn money onchain with opportunities tailored to their preferences.
Yield aggregators make this easy by casting a wide net overboard and bringing in all available yield opportunities - in most cases, for free! DeFiLlama has a yield dashboard that tracks over 11,000 pools.
But with so many yield opportunities, which one is best? How do you know if a strategy will actually make you money? Yields change all the time and become more or less effective. Strategies work, until they don’t.
And what’s the best way to understand the risks?
Don’t forget, all DeFi strategies involve smart contract risk. And smart contract risk is very real. Protocols get hacked. If you use a yield aggregator, congrats 🎉 that’s another level of smart contract risk.
But there are precautions you can take to minimize your risk, while still leaving opportunities for gains.
There are also many types of DeFi strategies - liquidity provision, staking, restaking, borrowing/lending, looping and more. (this is a good thing, if you know what you’re looking for)
We’ve put together something simple that will help to cut through the noise.
Stop Mindlessly Aping, Start Earning
When evaluating yield strategies, I focus on these essential factors:
First, the foundational principle: your strategy should involve tokens that you actually want to hold. This isn't about chasing absurd yields in random food tokens (though I am nostalgic for those days!).
If you only want to hold ETH and BTC, you should focus on finding strategies that give you the best risk-adjusted returns for ETH and BTC.
What you do NOT want to do is ape into some other token because it has 500% APR with the goal of swapping back later—this rarely works out the way you plan.
Solving this issue alone helps to protect you from price risk.
Building on that foundation, I look for:
Growing chains and killer apps
Sustainable yield (we want to know the source of the yield)
Airdrop opportunities (tokenless protocols, especially those with a points program)
Trusted teams & protocols
Protocols with audits and bug bounties
Each week I share one strategy that fits my criteria in the weekly Dynamo DeFi newsletter. I periodically share others on the Dynamo DeFi YouTube as well.
Today, I want to share a tool I made that compiles all of these as well as other strategies I like.
My team carefully selected my favorite DeFi strategies and airdrop opportunities and put them in an interactive dashboard. Out of the thousands of strategies out there, these are our favorites.
This will built to save hours of research and explain the risks of different pools before you put your hard-earned money in them. You’ll be able to zoom into the strategy that works best for you, with an understanding of what it does and how it works.
Only audited protocols are on the dashboard. Most of them have confirmed or potential airdrops. Many are not heavily farmed.
Each strategy has a detailed risk profile and even tells you the source of the yield (so you know you’re not the yield).
The strategies include protocols on Solana, Base, Bitcoin, Sui & Sei.
You can sort & filter strategies that don’t fit your preferences.
All you need to do is ask:
Which tokens do you want to earn yield on?
Do you want to earn yield or airdrop points? (both is an acceptable answer)
