If you want to learn more about What is DeFi Yield, please visit our blog post to understand more about where DeFi yield comes from.

In traditional finance, Yield refers to the earnings generated and realized on an investment over a particular period of time. It's usually expressed as a percentage based on the invested amount. In a nutshell...

In DeFi however, Yield is mostly computed on an annual basis, which is why you will frequently encounter both APR (Annual Percentage Rate) for the rate of return on an investment earned from simple interest, and APY (Annual Percentage Yield) for the rate of return earned on an investment taking into account the effect of compounding interest.

Across exponential.fi, you can compare the performance of every pool according to their 30D Yield which refers to the average annual yield for that specific pool for the last 30 days, or...

Some opportunities have highly volatile yields with considerable changes up or down every day. In order to take out some of that volatility when you are comparing different opportunities, you can look at the last 30-day Yield. However, you can always click into each individual Pool page and scroll down to the details page to understand how much yield has changed each day over the last 90 days.

In the example below, you can see that this Uniswap ETH-OP Market Making pool generated a 137.56% yield on Sep 9th, but dropped to 19.88% on Sep 25th.

The Base yield refers to the main source of yield that is generated by the core functionality and design of a pool within a specific protocol. Much like traditional finance, there are different types of core job types that generate yield in DeFi like market-making, lending/borrowing, staking, option selling, futures trading, etc. (visit our blog post to understand more about where DeFi yield comes from).

Base yield fluctuates based on market supply and demand and is generally paid out in the same underlying assets deposited.

The Reward yield is a secondary source of yield that is used by some protocols to incentivize user deposits into a particular pool. Reward yield fluctuates based on asset emissions (i.e. the distribution of the protocol's asset to a particular pool) and is generally paid out in a protocol’s native asset.
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DeFi Protocols have recurring emission schedules (e.g. weekly, biweekly, etc.) to designate a portion of their incentives to each pool. Protocols have different mechanisms to designate which pools they award emissions to, which usually include protocol asset-holders (i.e. users) voting through decentralized governance systems.

Displaying accurate data for every pool is a top priority for Exponential. We use a mix of (a) third-party data aggregators, (b) protocol APIs, and (c) our custom Dune Analytics queries to estimate daily yield (APY) and total value locked (TVL). We constantly review and update data sources to ensure you can trust the data you see.

Disclaimer: Please note that each protocol has its own methodology for estimating APY and recalculating metrics they show on their own website. In most cases, these differences in the calculation process will not result in different metrics between the protocols' websites and ours, however, we make no warranties of any kind in relation to the accuracy and up-to-dateness of APY data procured from third-party sources.

If you find an error in our data, please reach out via in-app chat, Twitter, Discord, or send us an email to [email protected]. We will be happy to address it!