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

Why is the share price calculation method better than an APY-based estimate? Well, a lot of DeFi vaults work the same way. You deposit an asset, like USDC, and get vault shares back. Each share is worth a certain amount of USDC. That amount is the share price. When the vault earns, the share price goes up. When it loses money, it goes down. So the share price is the most direct answer to the question you actually care about: "did this vault make me money?" APY tries to predict the answer. The share price simply tells you.

"Just rebalance your position” is the “just learn to code” of DeFi, and this is why: Recently, a user asked us this question: "What does rebalancing mean as a layman just starting DeFi and how do I go about it?" This question is a valid ask, and people who’ve been in crypto for years forget how much work that is. For someone new, it’s often the reason money sits in a wallet earning nothing. Which is why one of our core offerings as a company is the removal of complexity for our customers and users. A share price that can be easily determined, a strategy engine that churns thousands of strategies to determine the optimal route, a low barrier to entry in terms of token type (The Yield Layer thesis); all of these are designed to make it easier for anyone to gain access to superior yield without having to become a full time analyst. If you’re new to DeFi and want your assets working without complexity, join us: link.alphayields.ai

In Lagos, nobody asks about APY first. When you pitch a yield product in Lagos and the first question usually isn’t about APY. It’s about withdrawals. That makes sense. The naira lost more than half its value against the dollar in 2023 and 2024. Some people who moved their savings into dollar stablecoins did it to protect what they had. The bottom line is; while yield is welcome, it isn’t the only reason why they came. So the things that usually matter most to a Nigerian are: Can I withdraw when I need to? Is the number I was shown the number I’ll get? Those are great questions in every market. Lagos just asks them first. Join us today: link.alphayields.ai

40% interest can still make you poorer. Just ask a Turkish saver. In recent years, Turkish banks have offered lira deposit rates above 40%. In most countries that would be unheard of. But for long stretches, inflation in Turkey ran even higher. A saver earning 40% while prices rose 60% was still losing purchasing power, just more slowly. That’s why many Turkish savers moved into dollars, gold and crypto. This isn't because they were simply chasing a bigger number, it's just the necessity of wanting a better return that actually beat inflation. This is a lesson that travels well, and is applicable everywhere. Always ask what a yield is worth after inflation, in the currency you actually spend.

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.