Recently, I've seen a bunch of yield aggregators advertising APYs as if they were free money. My first reaction isn't "go for it," but rather to check which parties the contract is trading with and where the yield is coming from. To put it simply, aggregators don't generate yield themselves; they just move your money around: it could be from lending spreads, market-making fees, or subsidies from a certain protocol. The worst part is that if the subsidy is about to be unlocked and exhausted, you'll still be sleeping peacefully inside.

What I pay the most attention to now are the counterparties: does the strategy rely on a single DEX or a single lending pool? Are there permission functions that can change the routing at will? And whether the team’s wallet is secretly eating your slippage... It’s normal for people who’ve been rug-pulled to be more suspicious.

Recently, everyone’s been complaining about validators/MEV and unfair ordering, and I feel some resonance: you think you're getting "stable returns," but in reality, you might just be fueling someone else’s sandwich attack. I trust the data more; intuition is too easy to deceive. On-chain records at least won't pretend to be innocent. Anyway, I’d rather have a lower APY than become a lesson for others again.