“How do I make money by using DeFiLoops?”
The second most common question people type, and one where a straight answer beats an enthusiastic one. It does not make money. It executes strategies.
People ask this within their first three messages, phrased almost identically every time. It deserves a direct answer, so here it is:
It does not make you money. It executes a strategy you chose, faster and more cheaply than you could by hand, and it tells you what that strategy would have done before you commit to it.
If the strategy is bad, this executes a bad strategy very reliably. That is not a disclaimer, it is the actual shape of the product, and knowing it up front saves you a disappointing month.
What is actually available to earn on
- Lending
- Supply an asset to Aave v3, Aave v4 or Morpho and collect interest. The plainest thing here, and where most people start.
- Providing liquidity
- Uniswap v3 and v4. You collect trading fees — and you take on impermanent loss, which is the part that bites.
- Leveraged positions
- Borrow against a position to enlarge it. The largest group of operations, and the one that magnifies losses as well as gains.
- Property rent
- Buy tokenized property shares and collect rent. Base only.
- Tokenized shares
- Coinbase's tokenized equities, on Base.
The number that is easiest to find is usually the wrong one
This is the most valuable thing on this page.
A pool advertises a rate. That rate is the last 24 hours, across the whole pool. Your money does not sit across the whole pool — it sits in a price range, and it earns nothing on any day the price leaves that range.
That position did exactly what it was supposed to do. It collected an enormous amount in fees. It still lost money, because impermanent loss is not a footnote on an advertised APY — it is frequently larger than the APY.
The advertised rate told you the first number. Nothing told you the second one until it had already happened.
So ask first. It is free.
Of the agent’s fifty-two tools, five spend money. The other forty-seven only read.
- What would this range actually have collected?
Day by day, across every network and fee tier at once — not the advertised rate, the real one, for the band you are considering.
- How would seventeen ways of managing it have done?
Over real history, including impermanent loss, and compared against simply holding.
- What does protection cost, and is that dear?
Nine option structures priced today, and at every roll since 2021, so “expensive” has a reference rather than a feeling.
- What does a leveraged position pay to stay open?
Perpetual funding across venues, plus who is being liquidated and at what level.
None of that signs anything or moves anything. It reads market history recorded on a schedule, so asking the same question twice gives the same answer.
What it costs when you do act
Three fees, and it matters which of your money each one comes out of.
- Swap fee — 0.1%
- Taken from the swap's output.
- Crossing fee — 0.1%
- Taken from the amount you send between networks.
- Platform fee — 30% on Ethereum, 100% elsewhere
- A markup on the network fee, charged in credits. It is NOT a cut of the money a step moves.
That third row reads alarmingly if you skim it. It is a markup on the gas bill, not on your position. Network fees themselves are paid by a key of ours and reimbursed, which is why you never have to hold the native coin of a network you have not used before.
Where the real saving is
Not in the fees. In the things that are impossible by hand.
To repay the old loan you need your collateral back. To get your collateral back you have to repay the loan.
That is a deadlock. Your only way through is to find the entire loan amount somewhere else first.
The money that breaks the deadlock is borrowed and repaid inside the same transaction.
Either the whole thing happens or none of it does, and your account never holds the borrowed amount.
Two more of the same kind:
- Steps that can share a transaction are merged. “Approve, then supply” as one transaction means the approval cannot outlive a supply that failed and sit there afterwards. On a real plan, three transactions became two and the fee fell with them.
- A step can spend exactly what the step before produced. Nobody knows how much a swap returns until it runs. By hand you wait, read the number, and type it into the next transaction. Here the next step reads it directly.
And then it keeps going
The thing that actually stops people earning is not choosing wrong. It is stopping.
A strategy you run by hand is one you run when you remember, at a price you did not choose, and abandon the month you are busy. A schedule, a price trigger, or another workflow finishing can start one here without you present.
Nothing is agreed in advance. Each time it fires, the plan is rebuilt and re-priced against the market at that moment — a schedule set up in March does not carry March’s prices into June.
The honest summary
This will not find you a strategy. It will let you check one against real history in an afternoon, execute it at a cost that is legible before you start, and keep executing it after you have stopped paying attention.
If the number you are optimising is an advertised APY, start with the research tools instead. They are free, and they will probably change your mind.