To play safe in DeFi

  1. Bear in mind - high return means high risk

    • If you cannot figure out where do rewards come from, most likely you are the reward itself

    • Generally unreasonable rewards are not sustainable and 99% people eventually suffer a loss

      • High APY yield farming: - buying farm token or pairing farm token to other assets is most dangerous - the price of farm token is mostly not sustainable - the fall of farm token either bring your original deposit to zero - or drain your LP pair that exchange all your other paired token to farm token

      • X-to-Earn: - mostly you need initial investments to start to earn - if there's no external income, the economy is purely supported by the later comers - shortage of new comers drags down the demand and price - lower price becomes less attractive to the whole communities - whenever players leave and no longer support the demand - dead spiral as a result causes continuously sell off

  2. Be award of soft & hard rug pull

    • Soft rug pull: team may reserve a large amount of tokens in a cheap price, dump when the token launches, so to drain the liquidity by selling their token to get valuable token paired

    • Hard rug pull: team may directly remove liquidity from the pool to make token unsellable

    • Insider hack: team may hide loopholes in coding and pretend being hacked to steal funds

  3. How to avoid them

    • always identify what source of economy supports the APY before joining the pool

    • time can prove platforms’ reputability, those have been running for 2 years+ is safer

    • platforms with 3rd party audit check on smart contracts reduce vulnerability of hacking

    • more technically, keep an eye on teams’ token allocation & pooled liquidity lock period

    • revoke contract approval from each chains' explorer, stop giving spender right to contracts

    • ALWAYS distribute your funds on multiple platforms to avoid total loss

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