Quote:
Originally Posted by TheMVP
I haven't researched defi at all but it really feels like a fool me once, fool me twice situation looking in from the outside. There's no such thing as free money.
the value of what is farmed is worth more than the carry cost of borrowing the tools (usdt/c/dai) needed to farm it. Simplest ELI5 why when u go to yfi vaults and question how 20-70% apy is possible. There is a ton of middleware involved in the yvaults that are also leveraging farming itself and add to APY, but that's the gist of it. Its a huge machine that abstracts a ton of hand wringing for the end user and most importantly-- offers a huge reduction in gas costs because of how liquid they are.
so, as crazy as it is, the yields are real. Those ppl taking out flash loans at 10% on USDT/C are actually making money because their farmed tokens are worth more than the carry cost, gas cost, slippage, etc. Are the farmed tokens actually "worth" that much? definitely not, but a lot of them have clever mechanisms that continue to support its price like governance and token buybacks.
Long term due to arbitrage, competition and likelihood of ever increasing liquidity flows into these assets, APY will trend down, but you can defeat that by upping TVL/AUM (this is wrt to yfi valuation).