Yield rankings guide

How to read the DeFi yield rankings table — and what's already filtered out

① What is the yield ranking?

A table of places where you can park coins and earn interest, sorted by interest (the compounded annual return = APY) — highest first. Think of it like a bank deposit comparison sheet. The data comes from DefiLlama, a leading DeFi data site.

② How is this different from buying and selling?

Trading only pays off when the price goes up — but the entries in this table keep accruing interest just by being held, even if the price doesn't move. Whether the price stays flat or falls, the interest portion keeps adding up.

💡 Analogy: Trading is like betting on a property's resale price. Earning yield is like renting that same property out — the rent keeps coming in even when the resale price stays flat.

③ Safety filters

High interest alone doesn't mean safe. Only pools that pass all four of these conditions appear in the table.

🛡️ No structures with loss risk — Pools that pair two different coins can lose value when the two move differently (this is called impermanent loss, or IL). The table excludes these and keeps only pools with no such risk.
📌 Single-coin deposits only — You only deposit one kind of coin. No need to worry about pair ratios — simpler for beginners.
💰 Only large, well-tested places — Pools with total funds (TVL, Total Value Locked) of $10 million or more. A large pool means many users have already trusted it; small or brand-new pools with unknown risks are filtered out.
🚫 Unrealistically high interest is removed — Temporarily inflated APYs are auto-flagged as outliers by DefiLlama and removed from the table.

④ What you'll typically see

These are the categories that most often pass the safety filter and appear in the table. For full definitions of each, see the "DeFi complete intro guide" on the home page.

Stablecoin lending — Dollar-pegged coins (stablecoins) like USDC, USDT, or DAI deposited into lending protocols such as Aave, Compound, or Morpho earn interest. Almost no price movement — the most stable option.
BTC and ETH lending — Interest earned by depositing single major coins like BTC or ETH.
Staking receipt tokens (LST, Liquid Staking Token) — Receipt tokens that represent staked coins, such as mSOL, JitoSOL, or stETH. Staking rewards accrue into the token's value just by holding it.

📌 LP farming is not in this table. Pools like Uniswap ETH-USDC LP or Curve LP involve a coin pair plus loss risk, so they fail the safety filter (§ 3). Any LP positions you hold appear separately in the Asset Search (/app) view.

APY shown is a point-in-time snapshot and changes over time. Tap the ↗ icon on any row to see the latest state on its DefiLlama pool page.

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