Let's talk about the most painful question: where do the high yields you chase every day in DeFi really come from?

Honestly, nowadays many projects just hype. They talk about "real returns" and "sustainable development," but what’s the reality? As long as the market is good, they can outperform the index; once a bear market hits, everything reveals its true colors. When asked where their profits come from, they always reply with the same template: "We have professional investment strategies," "We operate across multiple sectors." In other words—I'm making money, but don’t ask how.

Basically, this is no different from the Ponzi schemes of the past. They’ve just swapped the work uniforms for suits, replacing "secret recipes" with "smart contracts" and "algorithmic models." Same old, same old.

So why have I been looking at certain projects recently? Not because they boast about some future big pie, but because they did something particularly "counter-pattern"—they actually tried to clarify the question of "who is putting in the money."

For example, their yield tokens. The most noteworthy thing isn’t how exaggerated their annualized rates are, but that they break down every source of their yields: how much comes from trading platform perpetual contract funding rates, how much from arbitrage between spot and futures. The flow of these funds is completely transparent; the protocol doesn’t participate in profit sharing. Users truly earn what they earn, and lose what they lose.

What does this feel like? It’s like going to a street-side wonton stall. In the past, the chef would say, "This soup is secret recipe, absolutely delicious," and you could only trust that. Now, the vendor opens the soup pot right in front of you: it’s pork bone broth simmered overnight, with local dried shrimp, scallion oil brewed separately, and seasoning kept restrained. You can judge whether this bowl of soup is worth it or not.

In investing, the biggest risk is making money blindly. Visible sources of returns are the only truly reassuring gains that let you sleep well at night.