ayKAT just cleared $50K in TVL First milestone on @katana, and every dollar of it is earning in public. Share price onchain, receipts included. Native base:0xd5390300c5db71f80d46f0fa9983fc72d4d1e3da or avKAT, both welcome. Next stop: $100K. Join us: link.alphayields.ai

A screenshot of an APY could be from any day. A vault’s share price lives onchain. Anyone can check what it was on any day in the past, including the day you deposited. Nobody can edit it later. That’s why we measure everything from it.

Solid picks, but if you'd like to be more "hands-free", we've got that covered.

The APY you saw might be before fees. The share price never is, and this is why. In DeFi, a lot of APY data being quoted are often before the vault takes its cut. Some protocols might leave out costs like gas or slippage from the strategy’s trades. You’d only find out by reading the fine print, if there is any. The share price is quoted after all of that. Fees and costs come out of the vault before the share price is calculated, so what you see is what’s left for depositors. Entry and exit fees are the one exception, so we advise that you check those separately. That makes share price the fairest way to compare two vaults. One might advertise a higher rate and charge more for it. The share price shows who actually came out ahead.

Ask someone what counts as a good yield and their answer will tell you a lot about where they live. In New York, it’s anything that beats T-bills by enough to justify the risk. In Tokyo, after decades near zero, almost any positive number looks good, and a high one looks suspicious. 5% is boring in New York, suspicious in Tokyo and a bonus in Lagos. In Lagos or Buenos Aires, the dollar matters more than the rate. In Istanbul, it’s whatever beats inflation. But every one of those savers wants the same thing from the number itself. They want it to be real, so the yield they’re shown is the yield they get. That’s the crux of our operations. A share price reads the same wherever you live.

Plenty of DAO and company treasuries hold large stablecoin balances that earn nothing. It feels safe, and on the risk side it mostly is. On the macro side it’s a cost. When the risk-free rate is positive, every idle dollar gives up whatever T-bills would have paid. When inflation runs above zero, the balance loses purchasing power too. Over a year, on a large treasury, that adds up to real money nobody voted to spend. There are good reasons to keep some capital idle, like operating runway and the need to move fast. The trouble starts when the idle balance is a default rather than a decision. Treasuries that set a policy, with a reserve held back and the rest allocated to verified yield on a review schedule, tend to end up ahead of the ones that never got around to it.

One number that shows money moving into crypto is the total stablecoin supply, and this metric is often overlooked by a lot of beginner investors. When it grows, new dollars are arriving onchain to trade, lend or invest, and when it shrinks, it means dollars are leaving. For yield, it works both ways. When more dollars are competing for the same strategies, yield can compress. But new money also brings more trading and borrowing, which can push yield up. So, while supply alone won’t tell you where yields are going, what vaults actually paid, read from their share price, tells you where they’ve been.

If everyone’s routing to the same onchain opportunities, allocation stops being the only differentiation. What’s left is whether an LP can verify what actually happened to their capital, and most protocol can’t answer that because they report advertised rates rather than realized ones. We've observed that sophisticated LPs are already asking for the realized number, and we believe that with time, the rest will.

TVL and share price get mixed up a lot, but they measure different things. TVL is how much money sits in a vault. It goes up when people deposit, or when the assets inside rise in price. Share price is how much each share has earned. It only goes up when the vault actually makes money. A vault can double its TVL in a month and barely move its share price. That means lots of new deposits and not much yield. In DeFi, popular and profitable aren’t always the same thing, and only the share price tells you about profit.

APY almost never goes negative on a dashboard. Dashboards are good at showing yield, but they’re not very good at showing losses. A vault can take a hit, from a borrower who doesn’t repay or a stablecoin that loses its peg, and the APY might keep showing a positive number for days, because it’s based on past returns. The share price however, won’t hide it. If the vault lost money, the share price drops, and that drop is public and permanent. That’s a big part of why we trust share price over APY at AlphaYields. It shows the good days and the bad ones the same way. Join us today: link.alphayields.ai

When a protocol pays you yield in its own token, it’s printing money. At first it looks great. People deposit, TVL grows and the APY looks huge. But every new token adds to the supply and unless demand grows just as fast, the price drops. People who sold their rewards early often did fine, while people who held them (diamond hands if you will) often watched the value melt away. DeFi went through all of this between 2020 and 2022. So, if the yield is paid in a token that’s being printed to pay it, you should count the dilution before you count the APY. That's the SAFU thing to do.

Spreading money across several DeFi protocols is smart. It just protects you less than you’d think in a crash. Generally speaking, DeFi yield depends on the same two things: crypto prices and how much traders want to borrow. When the market drops hard, both get hit at once, and yields fall everywhere together. Spreading out protects you from a bug in one protocol, but it doesn’t protect you from the whole market falling. For that, mixing yield sources that work differently, like lending, funding carry and tokenized T-bills is actually the smart thing to do. They don’t all move together, which is the point. And that's exactly what we offer at AlphaYields minus the complexity. Join us today: link.alphayields.ai

In New York, 5% on stablecoins is a nice bonus. In Lagos or Buenos Aires, holding dollars already protects your savings. The yield is extra. For a lot of people, stablecoins are a savings account, when they could be so much more.

Your USDC earns nothing for you. It earns T-bill interest for the issuer. In the US, stablecoin issuers aren’t allowed to pass that interest on to holders. So if you want yield on stablecoins, it has to come from what you do with them. Think about that.

"Why don't you make high APYs an Integral part of your marketing vocab?" Because we know that APYs are simply a forecast which can go either ways. So, we'll rather be the source that people can run to when in doubt. Also, if anything seems unclear, we want to be the source that people go to for clarity.

"How do I check what $ayKAT has earned?" Two ways. You can log on to the AlphaYields ayKAT dashboard, and check. OR You can directly read the share price at two dates and compare them. To get the yield in KAT, multiply the share price by the avKAT → KAT rate (avKAT's convertToAssets rate, read on the avKAT contract 0x7231dbaCdFc968E07656D12389AB20De82FbfCeB): KAT value = share_price × avKAT_rate APY in KAT = (KAT value at end / KAT value at start) ^ (365 / days held) − 1 Here's an illustration: Share price 1.0000 → 1.0200 and avKAT rate 1.100 → 1.105 over 90 days. KAT value goes 1.1000 → 1.1271, so APY ≈ 10.4% in KAT (vs 8.4% if you only use the share price). Equivalent form: (1 + v)(1 + a) − 1, where v is the share-price return and a is the avKAT → KAT rate return over the same window. NOTE: Short windows are noisy, so the longer the window, the truer the read.

You've got idle $KAT tokens that's earning nothing? Or you're looking for boosted yield on your staked autocompounding-voting-kat:native ? $ayKAT is exactly the product you need. Join us today: link.alphayields.ai

𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝟏 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. Congrats to @flow_blockchain and everyone building on it. 𝘚𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘦: 𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴. 😇😇😎 A year building on @flow_blockchain with ayFLOW: • TVL from 1,000 FLOW → 61.76M FLOW • $247,913 in yield generated • 1.3% max drawdown 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧 = 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐬.

A T-bill's return is known the day you buy it. "A fund of short-term Treasuries" is a description every allocator already understands. And decades of rate data sit behind SOFR and the yield curve, so there's always something to compare against. That's why funds like BlackRock's BUIDL could arrive onchain and look institutional from day one. They didn't have to build a measurement layer. They brought TradFi's with them. The approach works for T-bills. It stops working the moment the yield source is native to DeFi, like a funding carry or a curated vault strategy, because there's no off-chain framework to borrow. Most of the interesting yield onchain falls in that second group, and its framework has to be built from scratch. That's the part we've taken on.

A vault that advertises 11% and delivers 11% is telling you its number means something. A vault that advertises 16% and keeps delivering 10% is telling you something too, usually that rewards are decaying or the strategy has compressed and the dashboard hasn't caught up. Two vaults can land on the same realized yield with very different risk underneath. The one with the persistent gap owes you an explanation. Checking costs nothing. Put the advertised number next to the share price and see whether they agree. Start paying attention.