DeFi pools advertise a yield. Nobody keeps a record of what that number does next. We did — every day, for four and a half years, across every pool a major aggregator tracks.
Of 7,853 pools advertising 20% APY or higher at some point since February 2022, the median retained 33.5% of that rate ninety days on. 61.3% lost more than half. Over a quarter kept less than a tenth.
Treated as exponential decay, that is a half-life of roughly 57 days — the advertised number loses half its value about eight weeks after you read it. That figure assumes a constant rate of decay, which real pools do not obey. It is a way to hold the result in your head, not a measurement.
Retention varies by more than an order of magnitude between protocols. A uniswap-v2 pool keeps 6.0% of its advertised rate across 886 pools; an aerodrome-slipstream pool keeps 69.5% across 220. Sample sizes are shown because they are the only thing that makes a row worth reading.
| Protocol | APY kept | TVL left | Pools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holds up best | |||
| gmtrade | 131.7% | 98% | 50 |
| defichain-dex | 71.7% | 74% | 40 |
| euler-v2 | 69.8% | 83% | 60 |
| aerodrome-slipstream | 69.5% | 70% | 220 |
| aave-v3 | 68.9% | 153% | 56 |
| convex-finance | 64.9% | 137% | 150 |
| sushiswap-v3 | 60.9% | 90% | 36 |
| Collapses hardest | |||
| curve-dex | 31.9% | 118% | 329 |
| orca-dex | 30.4% | 100% | 294 |
| raydium-amm | 24.8% | 83% | 699 |
| uniswap-v3 | 24.7% | 89% | 1,210 |
| balancer-v2 | 22.3% | 82% | 60 |
| kamino-liquidity | 19.8% | 110% | 77 |
| uniswap-v4 | 6.8% | 87% | 530 |
| uniswap-v2 | 6.0% | 65% | 886 |
| camelot-v2 | 1.9% | 81% | 35 |
gmtrade above 100% is not an error. Its pools’ advertised yields genuinely rose across the period while total value locked held steady at 98% — growing fee revenue on stable capital, not the arithmetic illusion of a pool being drained. TVL is shown for every row so that distinction is checkable rather than asserted.
A daily snapshot of every pool tracked by DefiLlama, recorded since February 2022 — 7.76 million observations across 16,199 pools. For each pool that ever advertised 20% or more, we take the median advertised rate over the seven days from that first crossing, and the median over the seven days beginning ninety days later. The ratio is what the pool retained.
An earlier version of this analysis compared single days and reported a median retention of 14.9% — less than half the real figure. Picking the first day a noisy series crosses a threshold preferentially selects spikes, and comparing a spike against a normal value later exaggerates the decay. The windowed figure of 33.5% is the correct one. We mention it because the error inflated the finding, and errors that inflate findings are the ones that survive review.
Candor Labs keeps a continuous record of what DeFi pools advertise, and reconstructs what liquidity providers actually received, from on-chain position data. The archive grows every six hours and cannot be rebuilt retroactively by anyone who wasn't recording.
Data access and further reports are in preparation. If you allocate capital to these pools and want the underlying record — or a question answered from it — write and say what you need.
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