Staking vs. Yield Farming

Staking is simple. It usually involves holding cryptocurrency in an account and letting it collect interest and fees as those funds are committed to blockchain validators. When blockchain validators facilitate transactions, the fees generated go, in part, to stakeholders.

This type of hold-for-interest has become so popular that mainstream crypto dealers like Coinbase offer it. Some tokens, such as the very stable USDC (pegged to the US dollar), offer about .15 percent annual interest rates (not too different from putting your money in a bank in a low-interest checking account), while other digital currencies might earn you 5 or 6 percent a year. Some services require staking to lock up funds for a certain period of time (meaning you can’t deposit and withdraw whenever you want) and may require a minimum amount to draw interest.

Yield farming is a little more complicated, but not that different. Yield farmers add funds to liquidity pools, often by pairing more than one type of token at a time. For instance, a liquidity pool that pairs the Raydium token with USDC might create a combined token that can yield a 54 percent APR (annual percentage rate). That seems absurdly high, and it gets stranger: Some newer, extremely volatile tokens might be part of yield farms that offer hundreds of percent APR and 10,000 to 20,000 APY (APY is like APR but takes into account compounding).

The rewards, which add up 24/7, are usually paid out as crypto tokens that can be harvested. Those harvested coins can be invested back into the liquidity pool and added to the yield farm for bigger and faster rewards, or can be withdrawn and converted to cash.

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If it sounds too good to be true, you’re not wrong. Yield farming is riskier than staking. The tokens that are offering such high interest rates and fee yields are also the ones most likely to take a huge slide if the underlying token suddenly loses a lot of value. There’s a term for that: “impermanent loss

.” What you put into a yield farm might end up being worth less when you withdraw based on the market value of the token, even if you made a bundle on fees.

Some DeFi services offer leveraged investing, which is even riskier. By adding a 2X, 3X or higher multiplier to your yield farming investment, you’re basically borrowing one type of token to pair with another and paying a collateral you hope will be recovered by a high APY. Bet wrong, though, and the entire holding can be liquidated, resulting in only a percentage back to you of what you originally invested.