# “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.

- Source: https://defiloops.com/blog/how-do-i-make-money-with-this
- Published: 2026-08-04
- Category: Strategy
- Tags: getting-started, fees, honest-answers, yield
- Author: DeFiLoops

---
People ask this within their first three messages, phrased almost identically every time.
It deserves a direct answer, so here it is:

<Quote>
  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.
</Quote>

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

<Spec title="Things that pay, today" rows={[
  ['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."],
]} />

<Callout type="warn" title="Leverage magnifies losses as well as gains">
  The largest group of operations here uses borrowed money to enlarge a position.
  Understand that before using it rather than after.
</Callout>

## 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.

<StatRow>
  <Stat value="57.9%" label="fees collected" note="Over one year, on one real position." />
  <Stat value="−6.4%" label="finished down" accent note="The two assets it held moved apart underneath it." />
</StatRow>

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.

<Steps>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
  <Step title="How would seventeen ways of managing it have done?">
    Over real history, including impermanent loss, and compared against simply holding.
  </Step>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
  <Step title="What does a leveraged position pay to stay open?">
    Perpetual funding across venues, plus who is being liquidated and at what level.
  </Step>
</Steps>

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.

<Callout type="note" title="This is the half people skip">
  The execution is the half that demos well. The research half is the one that changes what
  you decide to execute, and it costs nothing to use.
</Callout>

## What it costs when you do act

Three fees, and it matters which of your money each one comes out of.

<Spec rows={[
  ['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.

<Compare left="Moving a loan to a cheaper lender, by hand" right="The same thing, as one instruction" verdict>
  <Fragment slot="left">
    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.
  </Fragment>
  <Fragment slot="right">
    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.
  </Fragment>
</Compare>

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.

<Callout type="warn" title="Saving a schedule is not switching it on">
  A schedule can be saved and left off, and one left off is unfinished setup rather than a
  job that is running. Switching it on is its own deliberate press, because from that
  moment it spends without asking you again.
</Callout>

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.